14 DAY TRIAL // Atari is currently rebooting the classic Asteroids, now dubbed Asteroids: Outpost, at the hands of developer Salty Games.
The title is currently in pre-alpha on Steam Early Access, joining the herd of incomplete survival games on the platform.
Many of those game are buggy messes that manage to offer some genuine enjoyment to fans of the random and frustrating nature of the genre, while others are just feature-stripped promises of an eventual game.
I delved into the unforgiving and solitary world of Asteroids: Outpost, eager to see what it has to offer. The first-person shooter doesn't yet have too much content, as after you pick a server and a base location, you start gathering ore from falling meteors.
Your starting base has an automated turret that hunts down pesky meteors that would do you harm, but in order to get any use out of it, you have to jump into the gunner's seat yourself and shoot down some incoming space rocks.
The slow-falling meteorites are in steady supply, but they only yield resources after you manage to shoot them. The ones that fall by themselves simply explode, so you have to take careful aim and fill your surroundings with minable pellets.
You then step outside the safety and comfort of your outpost, head to the fallen meteorites and smash them to pieces, after which you return home, log into a console and sell whatever you gathered in order to upgrade your equipment, or use the precious resources to expand your base.
For the time being, that's pretty much everything there is to do. You sit in your turret, patiently shooting down a couple dozen meteorites, as they slowly and constantly flood the sky, and then proceed to strip them of their otherwordly mineral goodness.
There's not a lot to do aside from shooting rocks and then shooting them again
Once you shoot enough rocks with your mining guns, you can build new modules for your base and expand it, but for the time being, everything is pretty static, so there's not that big of a need to do so.
Upgrading your base and equipment can, for instance, expand your maximum oxygen supply level, permitting you to spend more time outside the safety of your outpost, and potentially exploring your surroundings more thoroughly.
There's not a lot to do and there's not a lot to build, and given the fact that the Ore Exchange only lets you sell ore for credits, sometimes you're stuck with ample quantities of a certain mineral while lacking another one.
As the asteroids are completely random and they provide variable amounts of resources, you can spend quite a long time before being able to erect some of the structures.
In any case, the developers have made it pretty clear that the game is meant for online play with others, as it won't even feature a single-player campaign, so although it is currently lacking the attractive features and ample building elements of a sandbox game, I could see this turning into a relaxed, long-term base building and management game, where you have the option to head into an occasional shoot-out.
But it still has a long way to go until it gets there. In any case, a survival and building game set in space could turn out great, if done right. For the time being, the publisher's decision to launch the game on Early Access seems a bit puzzling, given the fact that there isn't even a complete skeleton of the activities you will be able to enjoy in the final version.
The good part, however, is that the developer is issuing daily patches and there is some activity on Asteroids: Outpost's forums, so if you want to get involved, you won't be alone and you won't feel ignored.
