Outcast is a game that I had my eye on for a very long time as it features one my favourite settings in video games; a foreign planet with aliens and a good story.

Knowing this is a remake of a fairly old voxel PC game, I went into this with an open mind. Unfortunately while the unfolding story was intriguing, everything else from the gameplay to exploration is subpar.

This is one of the very first open world action adventure games, and it shows. The world itself while looking cool and otherworldish, is just really a maze of boring design. It's a huge world too but mostly empty and filled with same-y locations.

The best part of Outcast is the questing system. It's kind of similar to Morrowind where you need to talk to individuals to uncover more information about the quest at hand, rather than just following a marker. The writing can be quite funny and charming and I enjoy some of the conversations you have here. This is where the positives end.

A lot of what you'll be doing in Outcast is shooting enemy soldiers, and unfortunately here it is just not fun. Enemies are really bad bullet spunges that are not fun to shoot at all. It can take a good while to kill 1 enemy in the beginning, and with this being an action adventure game, the action not being fun is a killer.

Exploration is also not too great as you'll be exploring one section that feels similar no matter where you are on the map. Back then, this game would have been revolutionary but today it is not so great.

I have shelved this, but I may come back to it one day to give it another chance if I ever want to play the sequel.

You must fully understand going in to this that this is a game from 1999 that was given a gorgeous coat of paint 20+ years later. I'd be willing to bet the voice acting audio was lifted straight from the original version based on how it sounds.

I picked this up after the first teaser for Outcast: A New Beginning in late 2023 and heard people say nice things about the original. I walked away charmed and even more excited for the sequel. I also enjoy euro-jank games that have more ambition than budget (Gothic, Xenus, <Noun> Simulator etc.) so I can't say I have refined tastes.

There are lots of little touches that show this was a labor of love. The way your jet pack fires when you fall to slow your descent, the diving animation when jumping in to water, the way the visor slides over your characters eyes when you open the mini-map; just these little touches that were satisfying every time you see them.

One thing this game does that I wish would catch on is it defines terms and gives you context in paratheses which made following along with the lore so seamless without having to open and memorize an in game dictionary. Video games shouldn't feel like homework! Example: "No. I do not think other Talan (race which populates Adelpha) will follow their great leader Maar on this." This is done constantly so at this point you would easily know that Adelpha is the name of the planet you are on. Repetition and context make learning lore so easy. My eyes usually glaze over in JRPGs when they start listing all these different nations and I'd welcome other developers implementing this.

So it's a good looking refresh of an old open world game (there is no HUD so you have to actually explore and talk to characters to advance the story! What a concept!) that has interesting lore and an engaging sci-fi story to propel you along that is occasionally interrupted by awful combat that is kind of fun to cheese your way through in spite of itself.

I can't imagine playing this on a console. Quick save on PC is your friend with old, buggy games.

You can definitely see the original game's legacy in some of the better open world games today. It's approach to more open ended direction for how you tackle each map is pretty good even today. There is a lot this game does right in terms of exploration and the regions are pretty neat looking.

I just wish this remake was a lot more polished. There's a lot of QOL improvements made to the original but many of it still introduces it's own jank to an already kind of janky experience. I think there was a lot of ground here to improvement movement, gunplay, and UI but it's just all so stiff. I think that jank is a lot of what will turn people off from this.

But if you can work around it, there's a very solid open world game here amongst a world that even with all it's ancient level design looks awe-inspiring.

Also that soundtrack is just fucking great.