After enjoying my time with Outcast 2, I decided to give the first game another shot, as I never finished it when I tried it several years ago.
There's something I want to make clear right off the bat: despite being referred to as a remake, Second Contact is really a remaster, while the Outcast 1.1 "remaster" was really just a port playable on modern systems. Second Contact features a (quite nice!) new coat of paint, but underneath it, this is still the same game, with a couple of minor improvements. The audio is the same, obvious from its heavy compression and use of stock sound effects (enemies make That Aargh Sound when they get shot), movement and targeting is clunky, and sometimes the increased draw distance can let you see things that you weren't meant to see.
Looking at Outcast from a modern perspective, however, there's a lot to admire. It's more of an adventure game than an action game at its heart, as most of NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE's time is spent talking to the native aliens and solving their problems, in an effort to free them from the tyrannical rule of the evil Fae Rhan. Rather than having objectives marked on the map, you operate based on landmarks and asking the locals for directions. This seems like it would be tedious, but the areas aren't nearly as large as they seem. Except for traveling between areas, as some of the portal placements are... Suspect. The worst one is how there's only one way to get to Okaar, and it involves going to a different area first, and then slowly swimming your ass over to an island with the portal. And you have to get back the same way.
Your main objective, apart from collecting the Plot Devices to get back to Earth, is convincing the locals to stop supplying Fae Rhan's soldiers with food, money, and weapons, thus weakening them when you have to fight them. The combat is, to put it lightly, total ass, and not difficult at all. The hardest thing is not running out of ammo, as the enemies are massive bullet sponges until you weaken them later. On the bright side, the vast majority of enemies do not respawn when killed, but this also means that by the time you've done all the work to cripple their efficacy... They're pretty much all dead. This weakening, by the way, apparently does not apply to the enemies in the final fight. Before this fight, your weapons have been removed, along with all of your ammo. Before this showdown, you are given your weapons back along with an amount of ammo apparently determined by how many sidequests you've done. With around 75% of them finished, I got, uhhh, like 60 bullets for the machine gun and maybe 10 shots for my laser rifle. Cool. Thankfully, the boss seems to have the same one-shot weakness to the flamethrower that the regular enemies have.
Other than the combat, the main issue is that a few of the puzzles are insanely obtuse. This isn't unique to Outcast, and if anything only proves that it's really a point-and-click adventure game with some combat bolted on. The organ puzzle would not be out of place in a King's Quest game, and the temple puzzle early on is a great example of pre-Gamefaqs games just straight-up telling you the wrong thing to do, because they gotta sell strategy guides and/or keep people from beating them in one weekend. Sometimes key objects are also very difficult to see, which can be worse due to the increased environmental density in Second Contact. The aforementioned organ puzzle is a prime example of that, where the pipe near the dragon-thing was damn near invisible. Items you can pick up are sometimes highlighted by the HUD, but sometimes they aren't. Oh well!
Despite these issues, Outcast interested me enough to see it through to the end. There was a lot of ambition here, and while it doesn't really come together, especially when played in The Year of Our Gorb 2024, I can appreciate what they were trying to do. My feelings on this game are almost a complete mirror of my thoughts on the second: The dialogue is actually much better than the sequel, with Slade being way more of a smarmy asshole, while the sequel's combat is miles better than the first's. The sequel does not have the pixel hunt puzzles of the first, but it has more generic quests in general. Maybe Outcast 3, if it ever gets made, will hit the perfect middle ground.
6/10
There's something I want to make clear right off the bat: despite being referred to as a remake, Second Contact is really a remaster, while the Outcast 1.1 "remaster" was really just a port playable on modern systems. Second Contact features a (quite nice!) new coat of paint, but underneath it, this is still the same game, with a couple of minor improvements. The audio is the same, obvious from its heavy compression and use of stock sound effects (enemies make That Aargh Sound when they get shot), movement and targeting is clunky, and sometimes the increased draw distance can let you see things that you weren't meant to see.
Looking at Outcast from a modern perspective, however, there's a lot to admire. It's more of an adventure game than an action game at its heart, as most of NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE's time is spent talking to the native aliens and solving their problems, in an effort to free them from the tyrannical rule of the evil Fae Rhan. Rather than having objectives marked on the map, you operate based on landmarks and asking the locals for directions. This seems like it would be tedious, but the areas aren't nearly as large as they seem. Except for traveling between areas, as some of the portal placements are... Suspect. The worst one is how there's only one way to get to Okaar, and it involves going to a different area first, and then slowly swimming your ass over to an island with the portal. And you have to get back the same way.
Your main objective, apart from collecting the Plot Devices to get back to Earth, is convincing the locals to stop supplying Fae Rhan's soldiers with food, money, and weapons, thus weakening them when you have to fight them. The combat is, to put it lightly, total ass, and not difficult at all. The hardest thing is not running out of ammo, as the enemies are massive bullet sponges until you weaken them later. On the bright side, the vast majority of enemies do not respawn when killed, but this also means that by the time you've done all the work to cripple their efficacy... They're pretty much all dead. This weakening, by the way, apparently does not apply to the enemies in the final fight. Before this fight, your weapons have been removed, along with all of your ammo. Before this showdown, you are given your weapons back along with an amount of ammo apparently determined by how many sidequests you've done. With around 75% of them finished, I got, uhhh, like 60 bullets for the machine gun and maybe 10 shots for my laser rifle. Cool. Thankfully, the boss seems to have the same one-shot weakness to the flamethrower that the regular enemies have.
Other than the combat, the main issue is that a few of the puzzles are insanely obtuse. This isn't unique to Outcast, and if anything only proves that it's really a point-and-click adventure game with some combat bolted on. The organ puzzle would not be out of place in a King's Quest game, and the temple puzzle early on is a great example of pre-Gamefaqs games just straight-up telling you the wrong thing to do, because they gotta sell strategy guides and/or keep people from beating them in one weekend. Sometimes key objects are also very difficult to see, which can be worse due to the increased environmental density in Second Contact. The aforementioned organ puzzle is a prime example of that, where the pipe near the dragon-thing was damn near invisible. Items you can pick up are sometimes highlighted by the HUD, but sometimes they aren't. Oh well!
Despite these issues, Outcast interested me enough to see it through to the end. There was a lot of ambition here, and while it doesn't really come together, especially when played in The Year of Our Gorb 2024, I can appreciate what they were trying to do. My feelings on this game are almost a complete mirror of my thoughts on the second: The dialogue is actually much better than the sequel, with Slade being way more of a smarmy asshole, while the sequel's combat is miles better than the first's. The sequel does not have the pixel hunt puzzles of the first, but it has more generic quests in general. Maybe Outcast 3, if it ever gets made, will hit the perfect middle ground.
6/10