Outpost 2 REVIEWER/Ty Brewer PUBLISHER/ Sierra Studios DEVELOPER/In-house

A New Beginning

Outpost was first released by Sierra over two years ago, reaching consumers just as the transition from floppy disks to CDs was reaching critical mass. The large capacity of CDs enabled Sierra to produce a game with stunning visuals and looked like a sure-fire winner. The game box was covered with quotes from such publications as Popular Science and Omni , the now-defunct futurist magazine. Ah yes, I remember that winter, taking my precious Christmas cash to the electronics store to purchase just one computer game. Outpost was it. It had great pictures, testimonials about the realism and gameplay, and the look of a sure-fire hit. Fresh from months of SimCity, I fully expected "SimCity in Space."

I have never been so disappointed.

The stunning visuals were sparse - most of the visuals were what you saw on the box. The "screen shots" were completely misleading - most of the shots weren't really taken from the game. Worse, the gameplay and manuals were pitiful. I don't mean just bad - it was a pain to play this game. Forget the hyped expectations the game had set for itself on the box, forget the stunning testimonials, the game was just plain bad...and boring.

Let me digress a little. Sierra has long held a policy that "if you don't like the game, you can return it for a refund, but you must tell us why." Well, I exercised this option once before on a game my wife was unable to play - the interface was just too cumbersome. I guess that same design team came up with the Outpost interface. The game was work just to play. If any game was a candidate for a return, Outpost was it. But I didn't return it. There was something about the game's devotion to hard, real science that appealed to me. Perhaps I hadn't given it enough time? I played on. I played and played and played. The game got worse. Before I knew it, I was playing this game just to prove that it could be played and to show that I was not going to be beaten by this sorry piece of digital hell.

What was so wrong with the game? I'll sum it up in one brief description of a portion of the game. At some point your orbiter arrives at a planet and you must launch your equipment to the surface. A screen comes up with something like 8 buttons. 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!" It was this apparent disregard for gameplay elements that doomed Outpost. Oh, I'll never forget this handy keyboard setup: Ctrl-1 thru 3 for underground levels 1 thru 3. Too bad it was Ctrl-0 for the surface. What that meant was you couldn't cycle through the levels of with one hand - to see the surface level, you had to use your right hand. What would have been so hard about Ctrl-1 being the surface and 2 thru 4 being the underground levels? Oh yeah, that might make you spend more time playing the game and you would realize the game was plain awful.

Get on with your review

By now you are probably wondering whether this is a review of Outpost 1 or Outpost 2... This is a review of Outpost 2, but you must understand where I am coming from. Have you ever wished that one day you could fire the bully who beat you up in 7th grade? This is what I call Justice. When this game passed through Games Domain, there was no way anybody was going to review it but me. It was personal now. How many gamers have ever bought a game and been severely disappointed? How many times have the bugs in a game rendered the game unplayable? How often have you thought about blowing up the building of a certain game design company because you spent your hard earned money on their piece of junk? Well, I represent you now. Believe me, I wasn't going to let Outpost 2 out the door without telling you what it was worth.

The main menu

And Now, the Review

I have a vivid idea of what happened with Outpost 2 - at least the way I wanted it to work: Sierra, realizing the game designers behind Outpost 1 were completely out of touch with the concept of fun, wanted to fire the lot of them. Unfortunately, they discovered that the designers were really all accountants and couldn't fire them for fear of financial repercusions (of course, the accountant mentality explained the distinct lack of gameplay). Hoping to ruin these designers and punish them for their sins against the public, they sent them to work in the "OS/2 Games" division. With that sordid element removed from their corporate culture, they set out to make things right. "Let's get some of our game designers who know how to make fun games and give them a shot at the Outpost franchise. They can't make it any worse." Given that charge, a couple of industrious workers at Sierra took the challenge to heart and started anew.

Enemy tanks assaulting my base (800x600 - 48k)

Wierd Science

Outpost 1 was basically a spreadsheet with formulas. If you make a change to one variable it cascaded changes into all other variables - some changes were slight, others were large. Outpost 2 is not that structured (thankfully) but still takes cues from its predecessor: the game mimics a complex system - the key word is system. For success you must balance production goals with limited resources, as well as manage the happiness of your subjects. Other games pretend that human happiness is important, but in this game, morale is paramount.

The focus of the game is the happiness and survival of the colonists - the last remaining survivors of an Earth catastrophe. These survivors were smart enough to abandon the doomed Earth and tended to be scientists - the most evolved form of life on our planet. Their mission is to re-build the human species. Of course we all know scientists are a flakey bunch, sometimes being out of touch with the same reality the public subscribes to. For some reason these scientists are only happy doing research or teaching. Imagine that. Somewhere along these lines the scientists realized they must have someone around to empty the garbage (at least until funding is approved for researching "Garbage Removal: A Cross-Sectional Study of Phase-Change Disposal Mechanisms in Longitudinal Grouping.") That, represents the focus of the game: keep the scientists happy so they can research new technologies to make the workers happy - after all, they need their pink fuzzy dice to hang from their Ford Explorers - Planetary Edition.

But not all is well in paradise. A splinter group has formed that disagrees with the direction of the colony's future. Now two colonies compete for resources - both human and natural. Game players can take the side of either Eden or Plymouth, with slight distinctions in technology and intent. This isn't life in a fishbowl, there are sharks out there who will gladly take what you do not protect. All games come with a "storyline" that attempts to explain why you are at the point you are now. Outpost 2 keeps telling the story as you play. Each new mission includes a lengthy "novella" with characters and events which helps to explain your current scenario. While the writing style is a bit melodramatic, the story does add to the game.

Harvest, Build, Keep-em Happy

In free-form play, the goal is to build a colony, keep the colonists happy and alive, and keep doing this until you get bored. A fatal flaw of Outpost 1 was the ease of achieving this homeostatic system. I found that I never lost a game. Not so with Outpost 2. The game play is fun for the most part but I found it eventually tiresome. The units move very slowly - so slowly that the game still feels turn-based instead of real-time. Even on the fastest settings with all extra graphics turned off, the game crawled on my P133. I don’t expect to have things race on this old machine, but I do expect things to be a little more snappy. If you want a game that plays any faster, I strongly recommend a Pentium 200 or faster. Let me be clear on this point: it plays like Warcraft would play on a 386. The game just plods along.

Mission objectives (800x600 - 56k)

Playing the Scenarios

The missions are well thought out and follow a very linear storyline. Playing the missions is like playing out the role in a movie - you know what happens in the end (good guys always win), but you still don’t know the details in the middle. If you choose to play this game primarily from scenario to scenario, you will have a very enjoyable experience. The missions aren’t too difficult and some must be replayed multiple times to get it right. I found that the storyline was too linear: if you achieved all the goals of a mission, except perhaps harvesting 6000 metals, you failed the mission. Wouldn’t it be better to start the next mission with only 4000 metals instead of replaying the whole scenario? If they had only included primary objectives (must be met) and secondary objectives (you benefit by meeting these goals) then the game would indeed play more like an interactive real-time story.

The downside to this is the plodding pace of the game (again). If you end up re-playing a scenario from the middle (hope you save often), you must do a lot of sitting while your units take a Sunday Drive across the barren planet surface. I played one scenario for 3 hours and failed to fulfill 2 objectives. I replayed the scenario from the start and it took another 2 hours before I realized I would fail again. I started again and played for 3 hours before failing (yet again). This time, however, I had figured it out and was able to play the last 2 hours again to complete the scenario. I can’t say that the failure to complete the goals was frustrating - that’s part of the game. What was frustrating was knowing the final result, knowing how to get there, and having to wait because I couldn’t speed up the game any more.

Buildings/Units/Combat

Outpost 2 succeeds marvelously at creating a believable world with realistic buildings and systems. Where’s the "Farm" in Command & Conquer? No detail is too small to be included in this game - and I see that as good. As I stated earlier, this isn’t Warcraft or Command & Conquer, it is a game in its own right. I bought into the world they created.

But then a funny thing happened. I don’t know why but they must have felt pressure to appease the Command & Conquer types out there. For some reason they added combat units to the game, almost as an afterthought. While combat does fit into the storyline, it still seems a little "bolted on" during gameplay. Worse, the units are lacking in execution. Basically, all combat units are "civilian" chassis retrofitted with armaments. This stands to reason - the first tank was an artillery gun mounted on a car. Where they screwed up was the way they pulled it off. The units lack polish and completeness. The weapons have an "early beta" look and sound quality. When the tank shoots at a building at an angle of 60 degrees, the laser shoots at 60 degrees, but the tank sprite is pointing at 45 degrees. Worse, the laser looks stupid - a series of dashed lines heading for the target. The whole combat thing in general looks amateur. No neato sound effects. No neato explosions. No smooth rotating sprites that actually look like they are pointing at their target.

Notice the amateur laser and the slightly off angle?

If you are looking for "SimCity" in space, or Command & Conquer with more resource management, look elsewhere. This game is rightly in its own category, but there will be no followers in this brave new world.

IMPORTANT NOTE (first published on the News Page by Orchun Kolcu): You might have seen the ads of Outpost 2 by Sierra in print. They happen to contain a quote attributed to Games Domain (which can also be found on the packaging) that reads "...an incredibly fun and challenging gaming experience." To prevent any possible confusion, we thought it's worth clarifying that the only place you can find opinionated reviews on Games Domain is the Games Domain Review. However, the above quote has been taken from Games Domain's demo section - as is common practice, the blurb from Sierra's promotional material has been used as the description for the demo file and this is what appears in the print ad and on the packaging. It is not a quote from this review or any other form of endorsement for the product. This review is the only place you can see what the Games Domain Review thinks of Outpost 2. We hope this does not prove misleading for any of our readers.