Asteroids: Outpost (Hands-On) (PC) Preview

The player takes the role of a lone astronaut whose job will be to create a mining complex on a minor planetoid near Jupiter, blast away falling asteroids, and then gather ore from the leftovers, which can in turn be used to create more structures, or simply be sold for money, so that various upgrades can be purchased. However, bear in mind that there might be more space miners roaming this cold rock, which can turn into a potential threat.

The concept doesn't sound so interesting but, then again, even the simplest of ideas can be tons of fun, like, for example, with the original Asteroids. Does this happen here, though? Unfortunately not. First of all, this is marketed as a survival game, yet it feels more like a building/farming simulator. The first two-to-three hours will be spent on shooting down asteroids with a large turret, and then slowly walking towards the fallen boulders to gather ore from them. The only "survival" aspect throughout this process will be to avoid getting squashed from the falling rubble - something that is very unlikely to happen - and not running out of oxygen - which is more annoying than challenging.

Money can be spent on various items, like a better armoured space suit, less oxygen consumption, more ammunition for the assault rifle, or even a vehicle. The structures that can be created improve the recharge or the mining tools and the oxygen deposit, or can simply serve as storage for minerals so that they can't be stolen. However, while it's possible to get every single upgrade and building in no time, it's pretty hard to stay interested while doing the same few, and boring, things again and again.

Apart from wandering all over the place and looking at the nice, yet devoid of any variety, barren landscape and the asteroid-filled star where a titanic Jupiter dominates the view, what else can be done here? Unfortunately, the only thing left to do is to reach the base of another space marine, to have a bit of trigger-happy fun, or just take his minerals. Finding people to battle is next to impossible at this stage of development - in fact, in the few play-through sessions that were done for the sake of this preview, no opposition was actually met.

Being a pre-alpha version it's no wonder that there are a couple of pretty annoying bugs here and there. Sometimes the controls go bonkers, the connection with the server frequently gets lost, the game crashes to the desktop, and, finally, the vehicle might start to accelerate the moment its unfortunate owner makes the mistake of getting out of it - an event both as irritating as it is hilarious. Needless to say, however, these problems are a frequent phenomenon in such an early stage, therefore, most of them will probably get fixed at a later time.

The audiovisual and technical flaws are, for the most part, irrelevant, at least for the time being. The gameplay, however, isn't - not only due to how unbelievably boring it is, but also because it is hard to imagine that any future additions could manage to make a difference. Atari might add missions, aliens to kill, more weapons, vehicles, gadgets, structures, and so forth, but the core of the game will still be the same: shoot at asteroids, mine their remains, and try not to fall asleep at the wheel…