You’ve got to remember that you’re a robot. Standard drones can help with building, gathering and crafting, amongst other tasks, and you can also build specialised combat drones to follow you or patrol an area. You begin the game with one drone, but there’s an emphasis on building up a workforce of them (not that the materials to produce them are easy to come by). At least you get a good view while you build - like this worryingly large skeleton, for instance. You have to click and hold with your handy tool to continue building it - or just make use of your drone companion. What’s different from other survival titles is that this is only a frame at the moment.

You scroll through some component menus before selecting a piece, moving to a good spot and using your handy tool to place a framework. Of course, different tools are better suited for different jobs, so whilst the handy tool is more effective for iron nodes, you’ll want to use an axe (your only other starting tool) to cut down trees.īuilding is mercifully simple. So get wild with your handy tool and decimate the locals for sweet, sweet carbon as you go off on a search for iron and other materials to start building. There isn’t a massive variety of flora and fauna, but the planet Gaiya (yes, spelt like that) hasn’t seen the terraforming touch just yet. This is your introduction to the wildlife, otherwise known as fuel. Trees, however, do not run away.Īs with all survival games, you don’t start out with much - in fact, your drop pod explodes soon after landing - so you have to bring a few resources together before you can properly set out. The weird demon-deer are completely harmless, but they make good fuel. As it is, the tutorial UI flickers in and out of existence, offering you a series of recommended tasks and repeating itself every time you respawn after death (you can just skip it, in that case).

You belong to a corporation preparing the planet for human colonisation, but hey, it’s a free market out there - in PvP, you share the space with other corporations’ robots, all eager to claw out their own share of the spoils.īeing in early access, the tutorial and general discoverability of new tools and features is rather slim at the moment, although there’s a twenty-minute quick-start video you can watch for pointers. Outpost Zero drops you into its world quite literally, sending you crashing down upon a dusty planet’s surface, there to spend the rest of your robotic existence.

We’ve taken a look at early-access title Outpost Zero, from Symmetric Games and publisher TinyBuild, to see how it’s shaping up. This being the case, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd and deliver a solid gaming experience all at the same time. It’s popular, it’s time-consuming and it’s everywhere.

Outpost zero resource map