Outpost

The Good
Outpost provides a great deal of realism when it comes down to what it would be like to build and develop a colony on an alien world.

The Bad
The multitude of broken and missing features.

The Bottom Line
OUTPOST is another great game that train-wrecked with all of history's other bad games. Not because the design was lacking. Not because the idea was bad. Because the game was released way too soon. It's an obvious fact that the manual for OUTPOST was written before the game was even finished so, naturally, it described many aspects of the game that didn't exist in the first release (e.g. roads, monorails, etc.). There were patches released that fixed all of these but, as is always the case, they were too late. The reviews were in, the towels were thrown and OUTPOST was forever marked as 'bad'.

But there are many things that made the game enjoyable. First, it was a great challenge for challenge seekers. You could never build your colony too fast or you would very quickly run out of resources leaving your colonists with nothing to operate their facilities.

There was the 'city building' simulation, great for the SimCity fans.

And there was the turn-based strategy component like Civilization.

OUTPOST was and still is a classic game in my mind. Both a classic catastrophe and a revolutionary game. As I am still a fan, I have recently uncovered a project to revive OUTPOST and bring it to the level that it should have been. Visit the Links section for more information.