The Outforce

I'll be straight with you: The Outforce is a twenty-year-old game that got a Steam re-release in January 2024, and most of what reviewers said back in 2001 still holds. It's a top-down space RTS built around the harvest-build-conquer loop that defined the genre in the late '90s. You mine metal from floating debris fields, chain together solar arrays and reactors for power, crank out fleets from orbital stations, and send those fleets at whoever is bothering you. Three races to choose from - the Terrans, the droid-like Crions, and the turtle-ish Gobins - though the honest answer is that their unit rosters are uncomfortably similar under the hood, a symptom of the game shipping before it was finished. The unit variety on paper looks generous. Over 120 different ships are in there, including towships that physically drag objects back to your base (the mass-based physics on those is actually impressive for its era), phasing units, and self-destructing units. The physics engine - pressure waves, elastic collisions, gravity effects - gives combat a slightly unpredictable feel that keeps skirmishes from being pure click-fests. The Quake-style scripting console is still a weird, appealing curiosity; power users can automate unit tasks and tweak variables in ways most RTSs won't touch. On top of that, everything on the map can theoretically be destroyed, planets included, if you bring enough firepower. That's the kind of detail that makes you sit up for a second. The problems are real, though. Pathfinding is rough - units clump into tight blobs and shuffle toward targets without spacing, which makes large-fleet engagements feel sloppy. The AI was criticized at launch for following predictable patrol routes, and nothing in the Steam re-release suggests that's been patched. There's only a full campaign for the Terran side; the other two races have no campaign whatsoever. And the movement corridors imposed by the game's space-wall and obstacle design constantly remind you that you are, in practice, playing a ground RTS with a prettier backdrop. Steam user scores sit at roughly 85% positive, but that's a tiny sample and skews heavily nostalgic. Multiplayer is where the game had its best reputation at launch - fast-paced skirmishes, up to eight players over LAN or internet, and fleet combat that stays readable. Whether you can find a live lobby in 2024 is a genuine question, and I wouldn't plan a session around it without a group of friends already committed. Cloud saves are in. That's a modern quality-of-life addition. Beyond that, you are essentially running a compatibility wrapper around a 2001 executable. This is a game for people who remember renting something like this from a video store and wanting to own a clean digital copy. For everyone else, the RTS genre has moved so far past what The Outforce offers that recommending it as a primary purchase takes more goodwill than I can manufacture. Treat it as a time capsule, not a recommendation.

Fred · Scout Team

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