"Outpost was a good idea that didn't deliver"

I loved Outpost in the beginning, but the longer I played the more frustrated I became. Sierra claimed to have a NASA expert involved in the design, and it showed, but the game was essentially never finished.

They delivered patches to fix a few things, but the most critical problems were never addressed (maybe the sales didn't warrant it, I don't know). For example, you had roads and monorails and you could ship things by truck, but you never saw the trucks and therefore couldn't tell whether they were nearing their destination or not. Quite often, the shipped materials never arrived.

Another major issue was warehouses. You could build lots of warehouses and store lots of things, but there was no way to catalog what was where. When I needed a certain material I had to inspect each warehouse to see what it contained. I don't remember if you could selectiely specify what each warehouse could hold, but I do recall lots of problems with warehousing.

The game started with pressure tubes connecting the structures. This was because most planets had no atmosphere. Then they introduced the terraforming buildings, and eventually you saw this graphic of a hang glider sailing through the air. But you still needed the pressure tubes, so having an atmosphere offered no advantage. There were lots of problems like that, which spoke of a poor or incomplete design.

There were also lots of good things about the game. It was new and imaginative and innovative, but at some point you just got tired of playing it because of all the design flaws. One nice thing about it was the ability to build both above and below ground. You could build several settlements and connect them by tube or rail, and the idea of robodozers was really cool. I enjoyed the technology research; every time you finished researching things there were new buildings or units available. As population grew, it became harder to house everybody, so you spent a lot of time underground constructing housing, and everything had to be done with minerals mined from mines that kept running dry. You had to keep an eye on your hot labs and Tokamaks because they were likely to explode on you, and if you lost power people started to die. It was always a challenge to restore life support before the colony died, and sometimes it was just too late.

Another problem was the rebel settlement -- eventually they would surrender and you had to take over them as well, but it never worked out correctly. To make things work you needed to connect their colony to yours, but somehow it just didn't work. And the rail gun? I never figured out how to use it, or even what it was for.

All in all, a love-hate relationship. Many good things, yes, but too many bad things.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/26/08

Game Release: Outpost (US, 1994)