Once again, I find myself fighting robots, and after a whole day of playing, grinding, and having an absolute blast, it’s not surprising that Outpost: Infinity Siege is my game of the year. Developed by Team Ranger and Published by Lightning Games. Let’s dive right in.

Outpost: Infinity Siege is based on humanity giving robots the ability to think, and soon after, they became self-aware and brought an uprising against humans, pushing humanity to extinction by the robot empire, but humankind wasn’t finished. They created the Earth United Army (EUA) to push back the empire and retake what was once theirs. You play as Fae, a member of the EUA who was recently promoted to Commander of the 11th Core Outpost, and it is up to you and your allies to take back the world.

The beginning of Outpost: Infinity Siege starts with a tutorial/opening fight that teaches you the basics of movement and fighting while helping you understand the Outpost’s functionality. During the Starfall Project, you take command of a very impressive outpost fighting off an immense onslaught with no end in sight. Outpost: Infinity Siege has a fascinating concept of putting together three very competent genres with a first-person shooter getting up close and personal, exploring zoned maps with many locations within the zone.

Although you can go outside the border, I wouldn’t suggest it. Outpost: Infinity Siege is almost like a real-time strategy game with its top-down view of the Outpost building while in the zone to fortify your defences for the recovery day.

Near the beginning of the game, you are Given Outpost 11. You can slowly upgrade with armoured walls, machine guns, and heavy artillery, not to mention extra storage for the energy used to visit locations and the storage for scrap.

Scrap can be used to make ammo and be converted into energy for your Outpost and many more exciting things that will bring your station to life and a force to be reckoned with. Outpost 11 also has legs, so it’s like a giant walking crab that fights back, moving with you from location to location.

One neat thing is that little easter eggs are on each map, which sometimes requires a bit of cunning thinking to work out how to collect the rare loot. Once you have looted and explored as much as you can hold, you begin the recovery day, during which you can pick through loot that you acquired throughout the zone but be warned the amount you take back affects how long the recovery time will take.

Recovery time ranges from 90 seconds to 600 seconds with different stages of waves, from scorpion robots as the grunts and in mass quantity to shield robots that defend a more giant robot who has a large calibre gun, to even massive tanks with long-range missiles that target defences, and depending on the difficulty you take and amount of loot gathered there can spawn a large boss who takes massive slashes at the air cutting through your final line of defence pushing your combat ability and strategy to the limit.

One exciting thing was that once you complete a map, you get a choice of cards that can be super beneficial for the rest of your exploration through the zone, from extra loot from other maps, or for each kill, or giving you a bonus to your damage. Be careful though as some cards may look perfect but have a negative effect, like adding multipliers to enemies on a recovery day, making it nearly impossible to complete.

At this time, Outpost: Infinity Siege only supports a mouse and keyboard, utilising the most common keys for movement, running, and gun use, which makes it seamless and easy to understand. I did find that the early game is very smooth and easy-going story-wise, but getting into the later game tends to be a lot of grinding and time-consuming.

Outpost: Infinity Siege also features co-op, in which you can invite or join up to three others to fight and loot with you. This makes each map a breeze and allows you to take back much more loot on recovery day with extra firepower at your side. However, the lag from joining others was very annoying and happened almost every time, with sometimes the session being terminated, the experience could have been better.

The Graphics in Outpost: Infinity Siege are impressive. Graphics are on a level with many AAA games being realistic, with distant terrain being rendered to a lower quality to give the effect of distance, giving it perfect realism. This also adds an excellent balance to performance with the game having quite good overall performance, with in-depth settings to fine-tune your experience. Animations from robots and defences are very smooth and look absolutely flawless.

However, the game sometimes stutters from large explosions and freezes the game for a couple of seconds, but other than that, it’s amazingly done. Not to mention the detail on buildings and texture and shading on the robots that made my eyes glow, with natural storms rolling in while on a mission with thunderstorms and thick fog, giving it an intense atmosphere and different storms in different regions giving Outpost: Infinity Siege a real vibe of realism and attention to detail.

Audio hit hard with scary robot hounds hiding in the fog, waiting to pounce, to fighting off endless hordes of robots, each with their own unique sounds, from being alerted to your presence to hearing them thud around and chase after you with heavy footsteps, to bullets pinging off of shields, feeling the impact of every bullet fired. Base construction and plain exploring with rain falling, lightning, and thunder striking around you make it feel natural and authentic. While exploring music is very calm and natural, with fight scenes being ramped up to the extreme with deep base and high tunes, getting you amped up to take on the world. However, voice acting still needs much attention, which is expected because the game is not natively in English, so mouth movement does not match the voices that come out.

Overall, I’m thrilled with the progress the Developer team has made since I did the preview for Outpost: Infinity Siege, fixing many of the issues I had encountered in my playthrough, although the game is still lacking in some areas like the lip movement not matching the voices and lag spikes in co-op and some other issues found I know that the development team is in full swing to make this a great title, and I’m sure many people will love the experience they have provided, and I can’t wait to get back in and slaughter some robots for the good of humankind.

Written by: TypicalCambieAU