[h3]Outpost: Infinity Siege Review - "I'm Tired, Boss" Edition[/h3]
Honestly? I can't be bothered to write one of my usual reviews for this game. It doesn't deserve it, as it doesn't deserve any more of my time.
Spectacularly low-effort Unreal Engine 5 project, completely unoptimized, with DLSS/FSR slapped on it to make it barely playable. <30 FPS during battles and in some maps, with DLSS "Performance" and tweaked settings on a 4090, 64GB RAM and i9 13th Gen. The stated system requirements are simply not true.
If you don't have a high / top tier PC you can stop reading the review now and move on. I saved you 30 bucks.
Generic sci-fi AI apocalypse setting with nothing interesting to it whatsoever. Most maps are a bunch of random assets thrown around to make it all seem remotely post-apocalyptic. None of the characters is even remotely remarkable, and their voice acting is truly some of the most terrible mumbling I've ever had the displeasure to listen to. At times, it felt like I was playing an AI-generated post-apocalyptic sci-fi game; a surreal experience, truly.
The grind is tremendous, and you won't get any cool base full of cannons, towers, drones, and other defenses like those you probably saw around the Community Hub anytime soon. In 21 hours, without wasting any time, after looting everything possible and being efficient, my base still looked like a crackhead's shack in Louisiana with machineguns strapped onto it. Rough estimate? 100+ hours to get a remotely decent base that feels like a fortress rather than a treehouse.
Exploring the various maps is boring, repetitive and full of backtracking, since your backpack is ridiculously small, compared to the amount of loot you'll have to haul around. I probably have seen the same exact maps 3-4 times while in the same biome, meaning there's not many total archetypes, except for unique story ones. Combat in all non-defense maps in so easy it's inconsequential, while fully exploring an area takes quite some time, for loot that, however, you'll very much need to upgrade your character and base.
Base building enables complex designs and could be great, if it wasn't for an array of menus, sub-menus, panels and UI fiddling that could rival EVE Online. And of course, for the grind itself. Each component has to be crafted manually in a separate menu, to then go back to the building interface to finally deploy them, instead of just being able to build everything in the same window. That's the logic this game follows for getting anything done.
The management of your facilities, research projects and characters, follows the same sluggish, counter-intuitive design concept. For instance, you'll have a facility divided into several departments, but instead of being able to access them from a general menu, you'll have to fast-travel to each of them to access most functions, and talk to generic NPCs every time to do so. This bloats the gameplay tremendously, taking you around, not even joking, half an hour to just do all the chores required between one mission and the next.
The combat is almost never a challenge, exception made for the last day of each expedition, where you'll actually play a tower defense for once, instead of a looting simulator with decorative enemies as you do in most exploration-based maps, which compose the majority of each mission day's content. The base defense segments are interesting and visually spectacular, requiring a high amount of input on your part to succeed. You'll have to refill guns, build additional defenses, and also use your operative to fight enemies alongside your defenses. It sounds like some truly peak gaming stuff, but it does get stale fast due to how repetitive enemies become, and once again, for how fiddly it all feels.
The degree of micromanagement during battle is much closer to an RTS than to a tower defense, and that would be fine, if dying didn't mean losing everything you looted so far, including your character gear, in an extraction shooter fashion. Also, you'll have to do all of this with 30-40 FPS at the best of times, depending on how crowded it gets. The more enemies / defenses, the less FPS you're going to get, no matter how beefy your rig is.
Just don't buy this game. There are many better tower defense out there.
