Demo Review: Final Outpost

I'm a sucker for a 'build by day, survive by night' base-builder, so I nearly sprained a finger hitting the download button on the demo for Final Outpost when I saw it fly past in this most recent Steam Colony Sim festival. And I have to say that I wasn't disappointed, though maybe not for the best of reasons.

Graphically, Final Outpost is...not terrible. It's got a flat pixel-art style that's mostly consistent, and developers Exabyte Games have made some clever choices that help gloss over what might otherwise be weaknesses. Some of the pixel art on display here is actually quite lovely, like the graphics for upgrades & tech you can research:

In other places, though, things start to look a little more...programmer art. For a game notionally about preserving precious remnants of humanity in the face of a zombie apocalypse, here's how it displays three non-zombie humans at work:

Mechanically Final Outpost is exactly what you'd expect: assign workers to harvest resources during the day, assign other workers to fight off zombies at night. Both working and fighting effectively turn into watching timers tick down, which works but is really rather unsatisfying. Similarly, you grow your population by filling in a birthrate timer, which counts faster when more workers are off-shift. Survive enough nights in a row and you're given an upgrade point, which you can spend to progress down a tech tree that's a mix of new mechanics (Archers! Firearms! More walls!) and +% upgrades.

If all of this timers-and-upgrade grind feels a bit mobile, that's because Final Outpost: Definitive Edition (to use its full Steam title) is just the PC release of the originally-designed-for-mobile Final Outpost – and as soon as you dig under the covers, it starts to show.

I'm giving this one a miss, and a thumbs-down for bringing mobile mechanics to a PC game. It's competently built and all perfectly...fine, but this is essentially an idler. Maybe that's your thing! Maybe you love mobile games, and could use a good PC idle game.

I'm out, though.

Final Outpost is available as a free demo on Steam, or you could just play it as it's clearly meant to be played on the iOS App Store.