Outpost: Haven – Alien Breed for the Web generation. Screen shots and trailer video.

“The owl men are here, and they’re so very hungry.” – Gary Mason, former head of security.

A distress call wakes you and your crew mate from C-Sleep. A suspected rad leak at the nearby Outpost space station needs investigating. Don’t worry, it should just be a quick jump in, jump out job…

This is how Outpost starts. With you and your buddy exploring a space station. Ominous sounds coming from every corner, flickering lights making you feel as uneasy as possible, and a tense sense of foreboding hanging heavy in the air.

But wow, what a way to start! Outpost:Haven is the latest Flash game from our good friends at Gaming Your Way. Inspired heavily by Alien Syndrome and the Amiga classic Alien Breed you get to crawl around a gloomy space station, trying to discover what happened while blasting the hell out of the aliens who’ve infested the place. Info-cards are waiting to be collected revealing a surprisingly deep story. Weapons can be customised via the terminals situated around the station, and new ones bought including the obligatory Aliens homage Pulse Rifle.

Visually the game is stunning, with attention to detail everywhere. Most of the objects in rooms are linked to the physics engine (nape powered), which means when you shoot a table or chair it spins off quite realistically. I won’t give too many spoilers away but suffice to say that when you encounter the aliens they too are frighteningly well realised. Some stalk you from darkness, just their eyes giving away their presence. Other face-hugger styled beasts charge at you, clattering through chairs and barrels on-route. With limit ammo and a reload time to account for you need to plan your fire fights carefully. Or as carefully as possible when the room has been plunged into darkness, just a red emergency overhead light illuminating you, and the sounds of incoming aliens are screeching through your speakers.

This game to me is another demonstration of just how far Flash has matured as a gaming platform in its own right. This is a commercial quality game and were it not restricted to a 640×480 resolution it wouldn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to see this on sale somewhere like Steam or Desura. While I understand where the “HTML5” campaign is coming from, Outpost is a shining example of what HTML5 should be aspiring to be as good as. But isn’t yet.

We’ve had the pleasure of privately beta-testing Outpost on its long journey to completion, but it’s finally up for sponsor bidding on FlashGameLicense. If you own a games portal and want a stellar addition to your collection, this is it. Sponsors can bid on Outpost here. If you’re a dev on FGL and have high-enough permissions you can play the game from that link too.

The rest of you will have to make do with this lovely teaser video until the game is officially released:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgM32i2Dav8]

Posted on November 29th 2011 at 3:00 pm by Rich.
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