Outpost

The Good
You know, when I first saw this game I really wanted it to work out. It was a SimCity type of building game - which I liked - set in a sci-fi world during man's first steps into the universe - which I liked. Better yet it boasted realistic resource management, power, resources, etc., which provided physical limits to your expansion in addition to money. Let's call it SciCity.

The Bad
Everything.

No really, everything about this game is bad. In fact, I still have no idea how to play it.

The game starts with you in the new spaceship, looking at a star map. Ostensibly the purpose of this is to select a star to travel to in an attempt to find a good planet for your colony. Of course our ability to see planets is poorly developed, so you don't actually see if there are good planets there, but instead just the probability that there is a good planet there. That's fine with me I suppose, but in a painful example of design peeking out from behind the covers, the ones with higher probabilities are, of course, farther away and thus harder to get to.

This doesn't sound too bad though, right? Well it is. Just getting to this spot took lots of menu gymnastics and several slowwwwly loading movies. But what's really annoying is that I don't think the map actually does anything at all. I never arrived at a star without a planet, and they all looked pretty much identical. In fact I think there is only one planet, that would save some coding right? I think the whole map is a hoax, but it's too painful to actually test this theory.

Now you choose what to take along with you, given the limited space and weight available on the spacecraft. More people? More auto-factories? A weather sat? Hmmm, which is better? Good question, the manual certainly doesn't seem to suggest an answer. And just like the starmap, once again I couldn't find any difference in the outcome based on what I took with me, because the outcome was always the same regardless (see below).

Well now you're ready to go. You're treated to some movies of the ship heading off into space. And then arriving over your chosen planet. And then landing on it. Well sort of. The author decided to turn this into a "game" at this point, and the disaster it is illustrates the whole game perfectly. What happens is that a menu appears with the various things you have to do to land - drop any sats, land factories, etc. So you click on one and then hit OK, and watch it happen. And then the next. And the next. As Underdogs put it:

You must click the buttons from the top to the bottom, then press "OK". Well, that's it. That's what passed for "fun" in Outpost. I just can't imagine someone at Sierra thinking that pressing 8 buttons from top to bottom somehow added to the gameplay - "Doh, I forgot to press the first button! This game rocks!"

Heh.

Well now the stuff is down there on the surface, and at last the game actually starts. The screen changes to a 3D isomorphic view (very similar to SimCity 2000, as opposed to the original SimCity) and you start to build things.

Building is pretty much what you'd expect, although there are a few twists. One is that the planet has no (or bad?) atmosphere so you have to connect them all with tunnels. Terrain makes this difficult, but you can level it off if you want to. Another twist is that a lot of the construction goes on below ground, and you can flip between ground and underground views. Interesting I suppose, but while I would agree that it adds realism I didn't think it added anything to the game itself - except confusion as I didn't even discover this until a few plays in.

There are a wide variety of buildings and what I would call "support structures". They're built using the SimCity UI: select building, click placement. There's a lot of them though, located under a variety of annoying slow to react menus.

Now exactly what you should build, where, and how, I never figured out. In 100% of the times I tried (about four) all my colonists died off. I have no idea why. They didn't complain or anything, you could just see the population counter going down and down, and then they were all dead. So back to the start you go, another 10 minutes of setup to watch them all die again!

Of course it was probably something stupidly simple, but like all of the other mysteries, the manual didn't say anything. Nothing of significance was explained in the manual, unless you think "this is how to click" is significant.

I remember in the original SimCity manual started with an excellent description of all of the various things to build, and why. For instance, power plants produce polution, and that will drive down property value so you should put industry there. But it went further, they then went on to describe (in "detail lite") how the engine went about doing this, and creating things like traffic. Excellent!

Nothing like that in Outpost. Nope, the game was left utterly unexplained at all levels. The funny thing is that you could still figure out SimCity without the manual, but like I said, this game is completely indecipherable.

One day, a year or two after giving up on this heap, I came across the official strategy guide in a used book pile for $1, so I got it. You know what? It was EVEN WORSE. 250+ pages of fluff.

What makes all of this even more frustrating is all the boasting. Everyone talked about this game, it's graphics, it's realism, etc. As it was written by a bonna-fide rocket scientist, all the tech mags jumped all over it. The only thing I saw that looked right was the movie showing your rocket, so I guess that part worked.

So several years and two books later, I still have no idea how to play this game. Maybe someone figured it out, if so, I'd love to hear from you. It's the same sort of "love" that makes me pick at scabs.

The Bottom Line
A festering wound on the body of game design, don't even think about this game.