Outpost

The Good
Outpost does display remarkably good graphics for the time of its release. These 3-D Studio rendered graphics are an impressive feature, and they have an air of realism about them. Industrial factories continue to be an eyesore even on a barren planet devoid of life.

The game is littered with interesting features that add to the realism of the game. The sewage recycling plants that convert crap into multi-purpose goo that’s used in almost every task possible is one of my favourite examples of this! Further realism is that because of the inhospitable nature of the planet everyone lives underground and giant underground caverns must be excavated before the building can begin.

The game has some original building that can be built, who would have ever thought that building red light districts would have proved to be so beneficial for the populace, well one half of it maybe...

The Bad
I’ve got to say that this game has some extremely unusual features within it, playing it you’ve got to wonder about the developers sense of humour and their sanity.

Take for example the production of “luxury goods” for those invisible colonists to enjoy. After building my factory especially designed for producing these goods I clicked on the menu of items that the place could mass-produce for the luxury starved colony. I was expecting classy things, but what had the place to offer? Fuzzy dice! Maybe it’s just me, but fuzzy dice ain’t my idea of anything luxurious. If it was a joke it just succeeded in pissing me off.

Another unusual feature of this game is the fact that you can take multiple turns. Now with turn based strategy games - well, good ones - or any turn based games for that matter, there is never enough time or money available in one turn to get everything you possibly want done, done. Outpost allows you to take huge turn jumps. Why bother waiting five turns to see if the game gets interesting? Nah, just throw in 500 hundred on the old turn counter and wait a couple of loading hours to discover that, despite their being enough food and air for millions of colonists, the small number of them upped and died anyway. Maybe I just didn't make them feel loved…

Looking through the contents of the outpost cd there is an absolutely huge amount of data. Original Dialogue from the Apollo missions (even the infamous "Houston we have a problem" Apollo 13 dialogue) and other dialogue that appears to be from the game are hidden in the cd. I say hidden because it is, all this data just doesn't seem to be part of the game. I've changed the sound setting but got nothing new. To be honest I got the impression that the game wasn't really finished when at the time of its release. How else can you explain the large amount of extras on the cd, extras I might add that are not mentioned anywhere in that pathetic manual.

The Bottom Line
Two words: hideously flawed. Outpost promises much but fails to deliver due to bad design, bad planning and most of all bad gameplay. I just can't help but to compare it to another recent - and heartbreaking- disaster, Master of Orion 3. Both games had great potential and could have been complete successes if only the developers had spent a little more time and a lot more effort on making something worthwhile.