This is the most bonkers game trailer of the decade so far

Outpost's the name, and blowing your eyebrows off with high-octane action seems to be the game. Revealed during the Steam Enter the Dragon showcase, which highlights upcoming games from China, the trailer starts with a bang and never lets up. By the end you're not sure if this is going to be the best game ever, or just one of the best.

The trailer, which is embedded above and also viewable on the game's Steam page, begins with a Red Alert-style notification voice saying "Warning: Hostile signal detected"—classic. We immediately see someone jumping off a roof firing a rocket launcher, before a quick cut to someone else shooting at what look like incoming comets.

We're not even ten seconds in yet. Now a character flips open a missile case, lifts out a giant missile, and tosses it up in the air. We cut to another player's perspective as the missile flies up, they catch it, and slam it into a giant gun. We then see a big gun, presumably this one, firing into the distance.

Then someone's shooting zombie-type foes in a snowfield—so far, so normal—when a screen-filling obelisk thing crashes out of the sky into the enemy ranks.

Then we see a base which, and this is probably my favourite part of the whole thing, zooming out to an RTS view, then showing off some RTS combat and cutting straight to an FPS view of a player shooting a giant rock monster, quick-cut once more to a landing craft being assailed by zombies—outside view then one from inside, baby!

A big vehicle in Outpost. — (Image credit: Team ranger)

A dude turns up to give a heroic speech in which he says the word "outpost" twice before we hear "the outpost is under attack!" We see a giant outpost that is, indeed, under attack from hundreds of glowy bad things.

Then there's, like, three battleship platforms stacked atop one another firing, before a mech lands and the character reloads their gun with a giant golden ball.

Actually I lied earlier, this is my favourite bit. The screen fades to black, briefly, before a dude sighs and says: "We have envisioned the collapse of human society in many ways, but it came quietly, from the creation that we are most proud of", and then there's a scene from the Matrix Revolutions, basically. Then some shooting into said scene, and boom: That was 80 seconds of madness.

Who knows if Outpost is the next big thing, complete schlock, or an over-ambitious project we'll never hear of again. It's being published by Lightning Games and, as the trailer suggests, is a multiplayer co-op shooter where you collect resources, and build and improve outposts and various characters. An intriguing element in the brief description is that battles are "filled with random elements"—though this is one of those things that could be a game-changer, or has little effect in practice.

Outpost doesn't have a release date yet but, if it comes with another trailer like this, we'll surely be reporting on it.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."