Outpost 2: Divided Destiny

The Good
Sierra made a fairly bold move with Outpost 2: take a game that was by almost all accounts horrible, and make a sequel to it that would offer a more accessible, more complete, more functional, and more exciting experience. It might have worked, had it not been for a few major flaws.

The manual was good—attractive and fairly detailed. A professional sci-fi author was brought on board for the purpose of giving Outpost 2 an actual plot and providing gamers with some interesting backstory. I think the folks at Sierra wanted to redeem themselves with this title, and their effort did shine through in some respects.

The Bad
The graphics and sound were both sub-par. Worse was the fact that the game moved at a very sluggish pace, even at the fastest speed. I have never been a big fan of the tank rush-RTS game, but if Sierra had to make one, they could at least have delivered on the rushing part!

Combat was weak—not that you’d even necessarily notice. The single-player campaign had your planet dying on you, which rather bizarrely shifted the focus of the game away from fighting to a kind of Monty Python approach (“Run away!”) instead. Different from the RTS norm, to be sure, but still not much fun.

The Bottom Line
A mediocre blend of elements from Command & Conquer and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Outpost 2 failed to remove the bad taste from gamers’ mouths left by the first Outpost game. The RTS approach was an interesting idea, but it just wasn’t implemented well enough to save the franchise from extinction.

The Good
After six years you would think I would have either given up or mastered this one, but it just isn't the case. The interface with its logged events, "savant series" computer announcing my impending doom, and easy keyboard shortcuts make this an easy game to navigate around and I seldom find myself cursing at the actual interface; just my own stupidity as a ballet of lava, blight, and enemy units pummel me in a painful slow-motion ballet.

I know there's got to be some trick to mastery but I still haven't found it, and since it seems easy enough yet continues to kick my ass, I'll continue playing it.

The Bad
This game is an early example of real-time-strategy, and there's no queuing method for unit creation or building functions, which means you're forced to keep on top of what's going on. The logged events definitely helps in this regard, but it's not quite as smooth as more recent titles like "Age of Mythology."

The Bottom Line
A primitive "Age of Mythology" in space.

The Good
Outpost is one of the worst games ever written. No really. Read any gamer's review of it, they'll say the same thing. I don't even think it was a game, I think it was a CIA mind control experiment in cognitive dissonance. You could tell the game bit the first time you fired it up, but you kept playing over and over in a vain attempt to find SOMETHING in there because it was "all about" hard science.

So why the heck did I buy this one? I guess those CIA mind control drugs were still working.

Luckily I was in for a treat, because Outpost 2 is utterly unlike Outpost. Not only is it a completely different game in concept (RTS as opposed to SimCity), it's also a fun, rewarding, fast, easy to use, and really draws you into the story.

The game starts a few years after Outpost ends. The colonies (yours and "the other guys") have prospered, and everything looks great. Sadly the nerds in the high tech colony Eden have been fooling around with genetically altering some native life forms in an effort to make a terraforming microbe, and from this has sprung The Blight.

The game starts with The Blight literally eating the buildings of your colony, and your first mission is to build enough transporters (trucks) to ship out enough inhabitants and supplies to build another colony somewhere else on the planet. And this is really cool, because as you rush to collect everything, you can see the blight eating the buildings one by one and accelerating as it goes. If you don't park your trucks far enough away it'll get them too, and simply building them fast enough is tough. It's really hard, and FUN.

The rest of the game follows the attempts to build up a new colony. Many times these are simple temporary ones to give everyone a rest and gather up more supplies before moving on. Other times you need to stop and do some research. But the blight is always right behind you so everything needs to happen really fast. In fact it can be kinda scary, you're working away building stuff and then one of the squares in the corner "goes blight", and your heart starts racing - seriously!

This keeps the game moving. Much more so than things like Starcraft or Red Alert where you can run out of resources and it just sort of peters out with both of you exhausted. No, here there's always an end to the mission for sure -- when the blight arrives and eats everything. It also adds to the storyline, with each mission you move further from its last position, so in a completely natural fashion the later colonies are much bigger and better developed than the early ones -- you have longer to work on them.

As the game progresses you start learning more about the blight - both via in-game messages as well as the included novella. You also discover that it's not just eating the buildings, but the entire planet's core! As a result it's causing massive tectonic problems and volcanos are spewing lava all over -- so now it's not only the blight but rivers of lava threatening to do you in.

Moving isn't going to work, you need to get off the planet entirely. So now you have to start building research facilities as well, and launching parts of a new spaceship into orbit piece by piece, mission by mission.This is fairly well done, after a while you can even build a re-usable spacecraft which makes things cheaper. It will land wherever you are as soon as you build a spaceport in the new mission.

To add even more flavor, the other colony is pretty upset about all of this. They also don't have the tech to get themselves offworld, so they're going to steal yours. As you move into the second half of the mission set, you start getting into some serious slug-fests between you and your enemy, making it all the more hectic.

What's neat about this is that both of you are using improvised weapons, various tools mounted on mining vehicles. So you have a lightening gun and lasers, they have glue guns and microwave dishes. The weapons can be exchanged among chassis designs, so for instance you can put a huge gun on a light and fast frame, although this will get picked off pretty quickly. You can also mount the same weapons on pillboxes and use them for defense.

There is also a multiplayer option, but I never had a chance to test this out.

The Bad
One problem was that the graphics simply weren't very good. No maybe worse than that, they used bright colors, high contrast, everything a good graphic designer knows you're not supposed to do. In addition the scale seems, I don't know, off. The vehicles are tiny so the whole thing seems muted.

The other, and more serious, problem was the combat. We've all seen games with bad combat - tanks driving around in circles and such, but that's not it here. I don't know, it just seemed like an afterthought (likely the case actually) and didn't find it to be too interesting.

In most cases the pillboxes was all you needed, with construction vehicles running over to patch them up. Once you are fully developed a few of them clumped in a couple of areas around your perimeter is all you need, but often the game forces you to construct a fleet of vehicles as a mission goal. A few missions make things more interesting by forcing you to conduct raids on the other colony, which I found fairly satisfying.

Another related problem was that the weapons simply weren't that different from each other - put the biggest gun on the biggest chassis and go. It would have been a lot more interesting if some of the weapons were really different so that the two colonies would have different strategies.

Finally the missions for Plymouth (the other guys) turned out to be identical. The story was changed a bit, you don't really know what's going on except that volcanos are suddenly going off all over the place. Thus the "natural enemy" was reversed and you were running first from the lava, and I assume later the blight. That aside, they played identically so I stopped playing it.

The Bottom Line
One of the best RTS games I played, it's really worth a look!

The big mystery is why Sierra would want to connect it in name to the truly horrifying Outpost. This certainly couldn't have helped sales, and considering the game is completely different in every way (even the most basic, SimCity 2000 3D isometric in the first one, SimCity 2D isometric in this one) I just don't get it.