Outcast

The Good
Developed by a little-known Belgian studio, Outcast is certainly a very ambitious game. Created with its own peculiar technology, the game presents vast free-roaming environments of such intense beauty that simply controlling your character through them becomes an aesthetic pleasure. It is mind-boggling how such marvel could be produced using voxels and a fixed low resolution.

I can keep heaping praises on this world, but my vocabulary is too poor to adequately convey the beauty of hypnotic twin moons, breathtaking sunrises, and sensual, lush nature in words. The important thing, however, is the way how this world becomes open to your interaction. Imagine Tomb Raider taking place in generous outdoor areas and populated locations. Even though there are only a few instances actually requiring you to use your physical abilities, you can physically interact with the environment at any time, anywhere. Climb on house walls, jump on roofs, crawl around, swim in the beautifully rendered water, dive for crystals and avoid angry fish.

The main idea of the game was obviously to create a living, breathing alien world. Each of its five regions has a distinct personality: a journey from the deceptively peaceful Okaar with its deep forests and shiny blue rivers to the stern brown rocks and angry boiling lava of Motazaar is refreshing no matter how many times you take it. Each region has a large settlement populated by Talans - aliens who look a lot like Alf from the popular TV series. The environments in those inhabited areas are so detailed and busy that simply observing their everyday life becomes a goal in itself. People would engage in a variety of activities, work, lie down, and react to whatever you do.

I rarely talk about music in my reviews because, being a musician myself, I appear to have different standards for judging a soundtrack than most other players. But the music of Outcast honestly belongs to the best of the best: magically sensuous and luxuriant, expertly composed and performed by a professional orchestra, it could easily serve as background for the most expensive Hollywood blockbuster. I can't stress enough how much this music contributes to the atmosphere of the game.

The shooting portions of Outcast are quite good. It can be played both as a third- and first-person shooter, with various degrees of zooming complementing the smooth controls. Laser rays are used for aiming, making third-person shooting much more dependent on your precision skills than on awkward manipulations or luck. The enemies display advanced AI routines, teaming up, alerting others, acting with coordination and mercilessly ganging up on you. The fights in Outcast can get quite challenging, and are always exciting thanks to the open battle arenas where you can use a wide variety of tactics to overcome the advantages of the enemy. Six weapon types, explosives, and nifty devices such as teleporters that allow strategic retreats when places cleverly add to the mix.

The Bad
There is one thing in Outcast that constantly undermines the game: lack of genre-bound gameplay substance. It doesn't have enough combat (by far) to be a shooter. It doesn't have any RPG elements despite the towns and the large world that just seem to beg for them. It doesn't have any puzzles that would help it qualify as a real adventure game. Essentially, Outcast is a lot of running around and not much more.

Outcast starts so strong: a fantastic intro that presents a bunch of interesting and promising characters; something happens, and you find yourself in a strange alien realm. You step out of Zokrym's house, and one of the most wonderful views ever to be seen in a game spreads in front of you. Soon you discover (following Jan's tests) that you will swim, shoot, jump, and sneak in this game. You rub your hands, saying: "What a game, what a game! I can't believe it's happening..." And with moist eyes, you enter the portal and prepare to engage yourself for the first Mon quest...

And here it begins. To find the Mon, you have to speak to a certain guy. But this guy won't talk to you unless you bring him something. This something can be obtained from a certain someone, who will talk to you only if you bring him something that you can obtain from someone who will talk to you only if you bring him something that you can obtain from, etc. The brave Cutter Slade (horrible name, by the way) is lost forever in a universe of insultingly inept creatures. The promised savior of Adelpha will be too busy retrieving various household items for priests and village chiefs, running from one Talan to another with his tongue outside. The cool special agent won't find a better occupation other than grilling every boring NPC for obscure information, which they won't share with him immediately, but only after he finds for them their favorite salami sandwich they have lost many years ago.

Outcast thus becomes a curious phenomenon: it is polished and entertaining in details and side activities, but dull and clueless during actual game progression. The constant stream of pointless tasks and long-winded, repetitive conversations emphasizing the Talan's incompetence in an irritatingly condescending way sap the life out of the game.

There are other "holes" in the game's glittering, opulent facade. The settlements and the wilderness look very attractive, but there are no actual indoor areas in the game. Now, I might be biased here since I have a soft spot for dungeon exploration; but isn't it strange that the game doesn't seem to have any real explorable indoor locations in that huge overworld? There's something oddly disjointed in the design of Outcast, in the way it combines its solid tactical shooting with an inane quest system that occupies a noticeably larger portion of the gameplay.

The Bottom Line
As you can see from some other reviews, Outcast took quite a lot of beating from hardcore players who can't be fooled by artificial lengthening of the game, which takes the place of coherent, fulfilling gameplay. I'm at odds with this game - its world is breathtaking and I want to visit it, but I just don't fancy going again through the same hugely annoying string of fetch quests in order to participate in bits of well-designed third-person shooter.

The Good
Once in a while, a game so incredibly good shows up that trying to think of a lot of good points is easy but trying to pin one down as a place to begin with is very hard. Those who have played Outcast and are reading this will know why I'm having trouble figuring out what I should begin with. The truth is, Outcast is good. No I take that back, Outcast is amazingly good. When it was first released, I had an interest in it but for reasons of money among other things, I never got around to buying it. Recently, I found it as a budget title and decided to get ahold of it. Now that I've played through this very long game, I can't believe I didn't get it sooner. Where was I? Ah yes, the good points! Where to start... Well I could tell you about the dozens of absorbing quests you must undertake, or the plethora of sub quests you can find. I could talk about the huge and lush world you'll be completing them in, or the brilliant sound and voice acting. Then again I could just talk about the music, the beautifully written orchestral score performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra is utterly phenomenal. More than once I have found myself popping the cd into the cd player and listening to it while I was working or relaxing. Visually the game is strong and even in todays games I have not seen a better rendition of water. In Outcast the water shimmers, ripples and reflects like nothing I've ever seen before in a game. Gameplay is so much fun it's hard to stop and the story is also well put together. I could go on and on about this game but I think my enthusiasm for it speaks volumes by itself so I'll just go on to the easiest section...

The Bad
For the first time in all the reviews I've written I'm at a loss. I can't think of anything I really hated about this game but if you push me then I guess the story was a bit less complex than I'd like and the character development was in some places not as high as others. I am really reaching here by the way.

The Bottom Line
You must get this game. That's all there is to it. You have no excuse since it's now a budget title which makes getting it almost criminal. If you play games then go and get it NOW. About the only people who I think should avoid it are those who loathe action of any kind in their games. On second thought even those people should try this, you might be swayed.

The Good
This game is a nearly perfect blend of action and adventure. It takes place mostly outdoors with expansive vistas (many games tend to have a very limited visual field, whether due to primarily interior or urban environments). It has many supporting characters with individualized personalities. The musical score is performed by the Moscow Philharmonic, and gives the game a "cinematic" feel. The interface was very easy to learn and uses a combination keyboard/mouse. This game is vast and will keep the player busy for many enjoyable hours.

The Bad
I suppose the use of voxels to render the imagery was one thing that could be improved upon. There is a lack of rendered detail of objects. Oddly enough, this did not really detract from the game a bit. I have read that the sequel will not be using voxels and that the detail will be much better.

The Bottom Line
Outcast is a game to try if you are an adventure gamer and you need a break from hardcore puzzle solving. There are puzzles but they are so well integrated into the storyline, and they are usually solved within the context of the action. FPS/action gamers will probably find the action a bit tepid but this game is "aimed" more at the adventure gamers who like some action elements too. My wife and I both enjoyed this game very much!

The Good
The story,graphics, cast and atmosphere.Its a living world with great environments, fantastic soundtrack and a cool hero. Outcast might look dated today...but only for ten minutes, then You just forget about pixel and vertex shaders and admire the viewing distance, landscape and environment. Only recently polygon based games achieved this level of quality.

The game is stable even on win2000 (not even the patch is needed !) and the voxel engine is beautiful. The quests and plot work flawlessly.

A true masterpiece both in design and execution.

The Bad
It spoiled it all for me.No other game comes close, so its pretty hard for me to decide which game to play next. Outcast is so full of it all and so perfect that You might not "need" any other game of that kind anymore. Except for a sequel.

The Bottom Line
A living, alien world, a Bruce Willis-like hero, a great plot with great characters, good speech, good handling, great graphics. The right game for any gamer, especially during christmas holidays.

The Good
This game is absolutely great! Since the first time I played it, I felt almost one thousand different emotions listening to the best game soundtrack ever written (mixed with excellent sounds), and walking on a land that for the first time I looked as real!! Outcast made me know Voxel graphics, whose I'm a fan now, and I think that none of the modern pathetic polygon 3D engines would have looked so amazing as Outcast's!! Besides the wonderful graphics and music, Outcast has one of the greatest storyline ever written for a game! The whole game is amazingly cinematographic, playing it you'll sometimes wonder if you're just playing it or if you're LIVING what could have easily been a movie! There are thousands of people to talk to, to get informations you'll many times have to do something in exchange, and since the world you've fallen to (Adelpha) is divided in six huge regions, you'll have a lot to do to complete the game! Besides you'll be free to do whatever you want: you can be a classic hero, helping everyone (and consequently get more help from the people), or you can be a lone bastard, killing everything in sight (obviously being forced to make everything of your own): just take care of the fact that your deeds will rapidly spread into the six regions, so people will avoid you if you didn't act as the hero they initially think you are! Strategic elements are really strong too: to weaken the enemies you'll be able to cut their resources by convincing the people stopping working for them: this can be done by doing something in exchange, for example saving an important personality, etc. Finally, there are many quests and sub-quests in the game: some are necessary to complete the game, some just help you to get more money, weapons and so on: try to make them all! ;-)

The Bad
I couldn't find anything bad in this game, I love it too much! Well maybe battles are a bit too easy (but I know many people think they're too tough, instead!). I know a lot of people didn't like the Voxel engine: I repeat it's the more realistic 3D engine I ever saw in a game, so it certainly is not in my BAD section. Besides, you'll have to talk a lot: someone could find this a little annoying, considering that in each dialogue a new person will be mentioned, and it could be a little hard to keep everything in mind (but there's a Notepad annoting everything new you know, so this isn't a real problem!! ;-)); I actually didn't, I really liked the complexity of the whole situation.

The Bottom Line
This game rocks! If you've never played it, you don't know what you're missing!! Its atmosphere is amazing, if you're a science-fiction fan you HAVE to play it at least one (well, I did it three times! ;-))

The Good
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to our lecture "Game design -- how to do it right, for those who need it most." Ah, I see many familiar faces in the crowd today -- there's Westwood over there; most of the staff of Nihilistic, hi guys! And, yes, none of the German developers seems to be missing. Very good. Now, how do you get to know the secret of excellent game design? All of you should have received a copy of Outcast upon entering. Now do the following: Go home. Play Outcast. Learn. That's it. Class dismissed!

I do not want to go into the obvious details, such as the technical brilliancy or the immersive game world that make Outcast an outstanding experience. But there are a few things that are easily overlooked, and which add to the overall atmosphere and playability a lot. Outcast is full of ingenious answers to those little questions that come with the complexity of a huge world. How do I find a certain person in a crowd? By asking your way through, as anyone will point you to the one you seek. How do I find small objects in the wilderness? By following the marks that your visor draws around them. How do I cut a long walk to the other end of a continent short? By using portable teleporters that you can deploy anywhere you like. These features are small, yet a boon for fluent gameplay.

Another thing that has earned special attention are the excellent sound effects. From the smooth splashing of the waves in Okasankaar to the busy chatter in the city of Okriana -- the FX underline the character of each continent. From the soft humming of the teleport daokas to the shouts of approaching guards -- the FX help you orientate yourself. The FX are not only decorative, they're important -- but never obtrusive. This is a lesson that many a software company has yet to learn. Oh, and did I mention the impressive orchestral soundtrack and the perfect voice acting?

The Bad
Who is Shamaz Keb? This is a question that'll keep you occupied in Outcast. It's the only downside of Appeals' exotic game world: the names. It's okay to design a credible culture. But it's not necessary to scare inexperienced players with an overkill of expressions. In a typical mission, the Ulukai'd have to ride his Twon-ha through the daoka to Okasankaar and fight Gamors to collect zlingtog for Jeokaze in Okriana. See what I mean? As a consequence, you'll need quite some patience to make yourself familiar with Adelpha (that's the world's name, by the way).

The Bottom Line
Outcast is one of the Top 3 games of 1999. An admirable piece of art, technical as well as in terms of design, it is one of those few milestones that prove that computer games have evolved from being toys to a serious and independent form of modern entertainment.

The Good
Sadly, this review is only going to echo the other negative reviews for this game. Outcast is, frustratingly, a game that offers so much, that made me fall in love with it, then it stuck a bad-tasting boogot in my mouth and sent rabid gamors to revert my essence (i.e. The game hurt me. Badly).

Well, let's start at the start seeing as this section is where I talk about what made me love this game, if only for about 8 hours.

Yes, you are presented with a beautiful world. You start off in a snowy region and soon travel to a lush region of green grass and rivers (with lovely reflection effects on the water). The voxel-based engine is unique and the world is presented very differently to any other 3rd. person adventure you may have played. If games are a kind of virtual holiday, then this starts out seeming like a perfect trip that you'll never forget.

The default controls (I used keyboard + mouse) are intuitive, and the 3rd. person camera works well. Controlling your avatar is a snap and I had a real feeling of control as I saw how easily I could leap, climb, crawl, swim, jump and fight. Your first tasks act as a basic tutorial on the game's controls, and I experienced a genuine burst of pride as I worked out how to complete the 'sneaking' task - This, I thought, was really exciting, involving gameplay!

Initial conversations with the game's characters seem good. Yes, you are presented with a lot of 'alien' words which are confusing at first. However, repeated conversations and the in-game lexicon (or in-manual dictionary) allow you to become familiar with things and tell a 'mon' from a 'daoka.' There is even an underlying sense of humour which made me laugh out loud a couple of times. Pity this changed as the game went on...

What else? The music! Fantastic. I was blown away by the fully orchestral score. It made my character's quest seem so much more 'epic' (Oh, the irony!)

The first time I sat down to play this game, I couldn't stop. I kept meaning to, but I just kept on. I think I played for about seven hours straight. I was up 'til 6am, and a game hasn't done that to me in years! Those seven hours were fantastic - Make no mistake. I explored the green land of Shamazaar; I completed tasks, picked up items, helped people out, bought and rode around on a 'Twon-Ha,' discovered the mystery of the idols and worked out that this game was an adventure, an RPG, and perhaps best of all, a tactical combat game!

Personally, I think the combat in this game is awesome. Enemies show a degree of intelligence and the optional (but highly recommended) on-screen map can be used to plan your moves and gain a tactical advantage. There are plenty of exciting sounding guns - The first weapon feels like a pea-shooter, but you can do certain things (I won't spoil it by telling you what) to weaken the enemy forces as a whole. Then the combat becomes somewhat easier. You have several cool gadgets at your disposal, including an invisibility device and a hologram generator (straight out of 'Total Recall'). You have explosives that can be dropped and remote-detonated, tripwires and perhaps coolest of all, personal teleporters. You are encouraged to make creative use of these devices, to get in and out of areas sneakily, to hurt the enemy in novel ways. I loved the combat in the first main area (Shamazaar), which culminated in an attack on an enemy stronghold. The level of difficulty felt just right - Challenging, yet not frustrating.

The Bad
It's quite shocking how quickly my feelings changed after that first heady seven hours of joy. I left the region of Shamazaar, and went to the huge desert city of Okriana. The more I played after that, the more everything grated on my nerves to the point where I eventually decided to stop playing this game because I couldn't take it any longer!

There are two main problems that kill this game: The conversations and the tasks. Talking to people seems fine at first, but after I'd talked to about 50 different characters, it started getting really annoying. There are only a few different voices that are used; Everyone is male, adult, generally obsequious, and they all talk about the same things; Rambling on about the evil Fae Rhan, heaping praises on you, the great saviour, the 'one,' the 'Ulukai,' then sending you off on some trivial task to some far-off destination to talk to another character with exactly the same personality. You are meant to be the god-like saviour of this world (cliched, archaic storyline but there ya go), yet you are reduced to running around doing menial errands that these people are too useless to do themselves. For instance, you meet some guy who makes beer. But he's going to go out of business, because he's had to put his prices up, because the guy who supplies his water has put his prices up. So you have to go find the water guy. But there's a problem with his well. So you have to fix that. And then you find out you have to talk to three other merchants in three other parts of the HUGE city, and convince them to drop their prices (which in turn involves more menial running about) and... Oh god... This is NOT fun, and is complicated by the huge size of the map, the sheer number of characters around, the stack of names that are thrown at you... Grr!

After running around Okriana for several hours, any humour in the conversations was now long gone, for me, particularly as the humour is actually rather limited (e.g. This character is stupid! -or- This character tells incredibly long and boring stories just so your character can make a feeble wisecrack about how long and boring they are!). And there are no likeable characters. Greedy merchants! Beggars who are sickening in how much they whine about their lack of money and how much they love and revere you! Really dumb people (usually signified by them constantly referring to themselves in the third person... Ugh)! Really boring people! And everyone is incapable of achieving the most basic of tasks! WHY!?

You see how upset I am? No, I don't mind performing tasks in RPGs, but they have to have some level of interest and variety. Also, it helps if you like the characters or care about them in some way. It still amazes me, in a game like Chrono Trigger, that even the minor characters with one or two lines of dialogue seem able to convey some element of intrigue, personality or humour through what they say. Here though, the design team seems to believe that 'More = Better.' Not always! Everyone you speak to is so long-winded and what they say is repetitive that it drove me to distraction.

There's also a lack of imagination when it comes to the design of these people, their clothes and their environments. Hmm... These guys work in the fields, which resemble rice paddies. Aha! They should wear Chinese hats! And the whole desert city of Okriana... Well, it's in the desert, right? Okay, so everyone is wearing turbans and the place is full of Arabian-style bazaars! Great! No, actually it's lazy, bordering on stereotypical and stupid. This is meant to be an alien world!

Another problem: The items you can pick up... Now don't get me wrong here. I like amassing items as much as the next virtual kleptomaniac. I like to finish a game with spare clips of ammo and some unused life crystals because I explored every corner of every map. But the problem here is that items are everywhere. And you are constantly informed of this by a female voice saying things like 'Stable energy source -- detected.' Then an indicator box will appear around the item. At first, this seemed like a good idea. But seriously! Items are everywhere. And while it's nice to get ammo and rare gadgets, about 70% of the items you find are an assortment of odd crystals, shells and plants. The only use for these things that I have so far found is to take them to a guy called a 'recreator,' who can use say, a couple of shells and a bit of fruit to make more ammo for your weapons. But this is totally pointless, as ammo is freely available, scattered everywhere! After playing this game for a couple of days, I am so sick of constantly being told to pick up useless lumps of metal and sticks of crystal. I'm even sick of finding useful stuff like ammo.

I'm sick of talking to the same basic character again and again. I'm sick of hearing about the tyranny of Fae Rhan and the imagined greatness of me, big powerful human man Ulukai! And I am sick of this game.

The Bottom Line
What a shame. If only Outcast's adventure aspects could match up to its beautiful environments and great action.

I ignored the advice of a friend who warned me about this game. I didn't listen. And three days later, Outcast has been uninstalled and is sitting in my 'sell on eBay' box.

So don't make my mistake! This game lets itself into your heart and promises great things, only to reveal its true nature: It is repetitive and DEEPLY irritating.

I've seen the screenshots. I want to fight giant beasts in water and woodland regions! But I can't take it any longer!

The Good
"Outcast" is an interesting game which tried to emulate an alien world complete with creatures and inhabitants when other 3D games were mostly still limited to in-door levels or only short outdoor sequences in need of constant reloading ("Half-Life") and, to some degree, it succeeded.

"Outcast" is an action-adventure. The story is hardly worth mentioning, it's about some growing portal to another world threatening to devour earth entirely, thus requiring the player to enter said alien world to close said portal. Naturally, something goes wrong and one ends up trapped on the "other side" with some alien race which takes the player for their god-like saviour figure "Uluk-Hai" - resulting in the fact that one has to safe two worlds instead of one (just what video gaming needed) within a limited amount of time (although there is no time limit), but more of that in the "bad" section.

Visually, this game is a true masterpiece. I played it very recently and it doesn't look bad at all, in fact, the animations, water reflections and colouring are extremely well done and will most certainly look good forever. The game's resolution is quite low but after one has gotten used to the resulting blur (easy for us DOS-gamers) it's not a problem anymore since important items or creatures are still easily recognizable. The blurry images in combination with the non-polygonal, "smooth" feeling of its employed voxel-engine give "Outcast"s graphics a sort of watery notion, though, as if one would move through an impressionist painting. However, I didn't object to that in the slightest, for me, it even enhanced the unreality and overall alien feel of the world and rather heightened than lowered its artistic qualities. Moreover, apart from being very good, "Outcast"s graphics are quite unique, too: the few other voxel-based games (i. e. "Blade Runner") share only a limited set of technical features while the more common polygonal games appear to be altogether different in style. Since every 3D game uses polygons nowadays, the development of other voxel games gets more and more unlikely. Thus, "Outcast" will most probably keep its unique status as a very differently looking, beautiful game with a masterful use of colours, a great feel for the right effect at the right time (this game definitely got that lens-flare thing right!) and a variety of cool design ideas, like some interesting vertical structures.

Another great point about "Outcast" is controls. Game controls are easy and quick to learn, yet allow an adequate amount of different movements, standard stuff like jumping and crouching goes together with riding on (sort-of) horseback and climbing ledges. Control reactions are great and really give the impression of being able to intuitively move around with one's character.

This leads to the game's best gameplay side: the combat. Due to its precise controls, some great sound-effects, a rather intelligent (or at least sufficient) A. I. and a very limited but clever arsenal of weapons, fighting in "Outcast" is exciting. There aren't too many types of enemies, but the way one can use the (beautiful) environment, the ease with which one can control one's character's every move, and the well balanced amounts of damage one can deal and take make for some fine challenges nonetheless. Adding to that, battles in "Outcast" aren't graphic at all, an enemy gets hit and dies without a single drop of blood being spilled - another proof of the fact that simulated combat doesn't need to be overly violent to be engaging. The only problem with "Outcast"s combat is: there's simply too little of it, and too much of everything else.

The Bad
As a world simulation, and that was certainly one of it's aspired main goals, "Outcast" falls flat on its face. Of course, every aspect of realism is instantly vaporized when one finds the first ammunition and health packs on a rooftop and starts jumping from house to house in search of gadgets someone (?) deliberately placed there for one's convenience. But the problems start earlier on. The game world is just not believable. There are creature, yes, but of too little variety. People walk around and do interesting things like push-ups or harvesting rice, but there is no day/night cycle and most of the aliens are just there to molest the player with uninteresting, generic tasks they could easily do themselves if they would possess any real "life". Moreover, there are neither women nor children. This is explained in the game, but in a thoroughly unbelievable way ("They live on some distant island...") - one immediately realizes that it was a game design choice to omit them and that it had nothing to do with a better way to depict the aliens' culture: this would have been far easier and a lot more convincing if the game would have been able to depict their "normal" family life, especially because they appear so very human in most other matters. Adding to that, the male NPCs are far from being interesting themselves. With a few exceptions, most of them are dull, generic and stupid to an unbearable degree, even worse, some of them appear to be merely present to give the main character enough opportunity to wise-crack juvenile jokes at their expense. This does not only render the game's world extremely lifeless, since all on-going conflict appears to directly involve the player in some way and since there's is no sense of any "progress" or any "action" when the player's not around, it even omits a minor, but still unpleasant feeling of racism.

SOME SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Without over-interpreting anything: here you have an alien race which wears Arab clothing and lives in Arab-style buildings, situated mostly in desert regions, harvesting rice. They are not able to do anything without the help of their "saviour" Uluk-Hai, a white American marine (in a French game!) whose main and final act of "saving" is actually getting rid of an omnipotent Asian midget impostor. I am certainly not the most "politically correct" person on this planet myself, but the stubbornness with which just everything in "Outcast" is centered around the one white "action" guy is really something to behold. Quite simply, this game, while employing an extremely poor, predictable and most of all short plot, does a wonderful job at being perfectly chauvinistic. Just imagine: a world without women and children, led by a small, Asian tyrant, inhabited by helpless Arabs - what more could the average video gamer want as a playfield to live out his/her (and I doubt the "her" in this case) own omnipotence fantasies? For this is clearly one reason for the existence of so many games where the player takes the role of a god-like saviour figure: the human urge for an easy, understandable world which one can conquer and dominate as an all-knowing, all-seeing, benevolent god who's able to save and load. However, the slight fascist tendencies of this common cliché were hardly ever more present in any other game than in "Outcast". Just because the player does nothing but help everyone out and act as Messiah, the questionable ethics of depicting a white guy as the only "active" person in an otherwise completely inactive and helpless "alien" world whose own visible purpose is to serve as said white man's playground gets apparent.

Still, this is not where this game's trail of tears ends. "Outcast" does not only employ a weak plot, puffed up with unbearable loads of "epic" music, "cool" one-liners and, worst of all, some noticeable chauvinist omnipotence tendencies, moreover, the adventure parts of this game are to laugh at. Either they are no puzzles at all or they involve unbearable degrees of running to and fro across miles of terrain carrying around despicable amounts of "MacGuffins" (objects which get a story going without having any real purpose or meaning by themselves) from person A to identically looking person B. While some side-quests are not that bad, these are completely overrun by the sheer mass of generic errand quests. This is quite a serious problem in a game which does not have an interesting main quest to begin with (although I think that saving Earth could be interesting, it isn't in "Outcast"). To top it all, the game's main character Cutter Slade (what a name!) and his "supporting cast" from Earth are almost as numb and uninteresting as the indigenous people to be found - there is not only no character development, these are no real characters to begin with. Everything about them appears to have been copied/pasted from a random oh-so epic Hollywood flick - which leads to this game's last major weakness: it tries to emulate the "movie"-feeling far too hard, it doesn't want to be a game, it wants to be "more", it wants to be an "interactive experience", whatever that is.

The Bottom Line
Zovni's review mentions that this game is filled with European "art-house" pretentiousness. I disagree. Of course, European "art-house" pretentiousness does exist, but that's more like filming a cup of coffee for fifteen minutes and ending on a girls lips uttering a soft: "This is your life getting cold". The pretentiousness of "Outcast", on the other hand, is the pretentiousness of Europeans trying to emulate Hollywood's "worst-of" (note: of course, there are a lot of good Hollywood movies, too). It's filled to the teeth with everything that screams "epic", but doesn't contain any intimacy - in fact, compared to "Outcast", "Independence Day", also done by a European guy, is a psychologically intriguing melodrama. It's extremely conservative with chauvinist tendencies and doesn't assign any really meaningful piece of the action to any other character but to the main jack. It's puzzles and plot are not only dumb, but completely unoriginal and it's whole content is little to none across the board.

However, its graphics are wonderful, its controls are crisp and the fighting is well executed. In the end, "Outcast" is a sad game. It could have been at least a piece of good entertainment if only the designers had concentrated on the combat aspects. Maybe the stereotype story and characters wouldn't have been so terrible in such a context, and with less text and less meaningless tasks depicting the sheer inactivity of the indigenous population, with an added female touch and perhaps a different main villain (he would actually have been great if this game would have had but a slight ironic undertone), "Outcast"s chauvinist tendencies could have been drastically lowered. However, it wasn't meant to be: as it is, this is far from being a good game. It's worth seeing for its graphical splendour, but it's not worth playing through and the opposite of a "rewarding" game, since it doesn't leave a stone unturned to remind the player that we Western people sometimes have indeed peculiar views of what's "entertainment" (of course, this probably goes for any other culture, too).

The Good
Yes, that was from Dieter ;)

Outcast has so much promise, really it has. It's sprinkled all over with inventive designs and it seems (note I said "it SEEMS") to provide an original gaming experience. There are a lot of touches of genius in this game, for starters the designers have managed to create a fully believable living, breathing world. Populated with hundreds of characters that feel alive and which add a lot of "feeling" to the game. Besides the cultural aspects (which can become somewhat tedious at times) the game does make you feel like you are in a truly believable alien world, with it's own architecture, fauna, climate, etc. And not just a collection of green locations and corridors. Furthermore, the game takes place almost entire outdoors, which show off some truly magnificent (though blurry) vistas that coupled with the awe-inspiring music (specially orchestrated for the game) give the game a tremendously epic feeling. Sometimes you just feel like stopping for a second to marvel at the sheer beauty of it all, contemplating the sheer beauty of the gameworld, a thing which is made possible thanks to the game's laid back pace. Don't get me wrong, you can get into some heated action sequences every now and then, but you decide when to tackle them, and they are usually very serene affairs compared to most shooters. Some might consider this bad and label the game as sedated, but I think it works perfectly if you consider that this is an adventure first and foremost. The shootouts are there only to break the monotony and release some stress.

Another star of this show is the controls, which are strikingly different from other 3D action adventures and more similar to a fps. You don't get an independent camera control, instead you control the camera and your facing with the mouse (as in a fps) and you move around with the keyboard keys. The magic is that the keys control your character RELATIVE to your camera position, plus the combat and jumping is done solely via the mouse using a clever semi automatic/manual aiming system via a laser sight. So essentially the whole affair becomes much more intuitive and simple, I cannot imagine how much fun games like Tomb Raider or similar titles would be if they adopted this type of controls, even Heretic 2 falls behind it when it comes to ease of handling.

So there you have it, inventive, easy to control and on top of that a solid and interesting storyline (though it unfortunately falls in several pitfalls thanks to an endless stream of bad action-movie cliches) and you've got the best game ever right?? Wrong.

The Bad
Sometimes a lot of games come out that have a series of innovative stuff that really stand out on their own, but which are placed in a crappy game. Terra Nova: SFC comes to mind, which is a game that did years ago what Tribes is praised for doing now, but which failed to catch attention due to the fact that it was really a bad game despite the clever things it had. The same happens to Outcast. In essence you could say that it's a piece of doggie crap covered with a delicious chocolate topping. It's epic, it's "magnifico" it's larger than life, but when you look into the game itself... it's the most tedious and uninspired affair ever to be placed in a cd-rom.

If you ever wanted a definition for the terms "Fed-Ex" quests, "Pixel Hunts", etc. This game is the textbook example of it. Ulukai must really mean errand boy to the aliens as it's the main occupation you are going to be doing. Forget about saving the worlds, your most important task in this world is to be "helpful" to the citizens and go from place to place taking messages, and looking to speak to the right alien (and yes, they all look alike). This let's through the level of lazyness the designers must have had doing the game, I can picture them right now: "-Hey Pierre, the game is too straightforward! It's too short!! What are we going to do? - I know! Instead of bothering to give the player a challenge or, coming up with some clever puzzle, let's just make him go through an un-ending series of errands and conversations... yeah!!"

So, the quest that was "Go get the mon" turns into "Go and talk to the only guy who knows where the mon is, which of course is hidden/lost/in prison/etc. and so you must go talk with the guy who knows where he is, who won't tell you until you fix his chair, which can't be fixed unless you have the magical wood of Kuluku which can only be found in an unknown area, and which you can't get through unless you get the help from a certain alien who knows of it, who won't help you unless you get him a soda which can only be made with a certain fruit that only one character in the game has and won't give to you unless you bla..bla..bla..." You get the picture, right?

And once you are done with those, you usually have to contend with the "collect the keys" type of puzzles, which involve going and hunting for the "4332543 keys that unlock the secret to the sacred temple of Koloko and placing them in the right order so you can access whatever the hell is hidden there"....

Wow, so much inventive design choices make my head hurt! This wonderful set of "puzzles" slow the game down to a crawl, and you never get the feel that you are saving anything. You are eternally lost in this world of menial tasks and riding from one point of the world to the other. That this "enlarges" the gameplay is true, but it does so thanks to repetitious, redundant, tedious adventuring. Not by providing an extensive gaming experience. Just consider how long would the game really last if you took all the "red tape" from the game's quests...

So there you have it. The game is lame... but it's still beautiful, right??? Nope. The Voxel/polygon hybrid engine makes a good work of making huge outdoor settings with minimal cpu load, managing to fully populate the areas and adding lots of nifty stuff like one of the most impressive water effects I've ever seen, but it's not perfect. Due to the voxel's nature the entire game has a completely blurry effect, and it renders everything that is not "landscape" a pixely mess. I can't understand how this is so since Comanche 3 which also used voxels had a much more clear visual quality (and I'm not talking about tanks a million miles away, I'm talking about close camera images of the choppers, buildings, etc...). Of course, that is when you are outdoors, when you go indoors the shit really hits the fan. In the best of cases the perspective will close so much that you'll see nothing but the back of Cutter's head so you won't notice the jagged textures (boy, I never really understood how much antialiasing is needed for games!) the clipping problems, but most importantly the blur, THE BLUR! And yes, I had my glasses when I played it.

Ok, so it's not so bad... but there's no question about it: the voxel engine is not the best one ever made, and it's no match for fully polygonal engines in terms of visual quality and the additional bonus of future enhancement (since no matter how powerful a machine you may get in the future, Outcast will run with the same graphics, at the same speed, forever...).

The Bottom Line
So? What the hell is the bottom line?? Is Outcast really that good? yes, but in superficial things that can't hold the game on it's own. Is it really that bad? I guess not either (thanks to those "superficial" things too) So the bottom line is that it's a game born a couple of years too early. It has incredibly inventive details, but it is an obsolete experience game-wise and it's the perfect example of why so many people hate adventures nowadays. To that you have to add that the game is filled with art-house pretentiousness, it's got a "majestic" musical score, it's epic, and most of all: it's European.

I feel at odds with this review in a way, since I didn't hate the game so much and enjoyed playing it to an extent. But I won't fall into the "Dieter" routine of praising it just because it's odd and European. Outcast is like the Final Fantasy movie: it's innovative and interesting, but it's also banal and stupid. And no matter how much innovative and interesting it gets, it will still be banal and stupid.

Now it's the time on Sprockets when we dance! - Touch my monkey!! ;)

The Good
Almost everything is good.

The plot is incredible, and could have been a best-selling sci-fi novel. The game is just too prefect. A gamers dream come true...

The Bad
Bad? What bad?

The Bottom Line
My favourite game of all time, simply one of the best and most revolutionary games ever created.

We have never seen anything quite like this, neither before, nor after.

It would probably have become the most famous game ever, had it not been for the big hype with Half Life which was released the same year.

In my view: Outcast beats all other games, and is simply one of the best games ever made.

Perfect graphics, an excellent plot (the best, and most engaging plot I have ever seen in a computer game), perfect atmosphere, perfect music and sounds, perfect AI, you cant get it better then this.

The Good
Well, it has an impressive initial impact. For a few minutes it seems as if you have been dropped into a deep, interactive world which you can explore at your leisure; the environments are very attractive, using smooth voxels, whilst the sound and music are professionally done and, in the latter case, expensive. Indeed this game reeks of money and talent, and like many expensive collections of expertise it is absolutely hollow inside.

The Bad
As explained quite well in some of the other reviews, the actual gameplay is dreadful, dated, linear, uninvolving. Each level involves running up to a character, listening to a dull conversation, running elsewhere to pick up three or four objects, running to a second character in order to repair the objects, running to a third character in order to find the location of a fourth object, running to the fourth object, running to the second character to find the new location of the first character, running to the first character to hand him 'object Z', at which point he tells you that you need to locate character X in order to embark on a very similar quest. The whole game is nakedly a modular series of looping flowcharts, with no enjoyment at all.

The 'sci-fi' angle involves taking a bunch of quasi middle-eastern characterisations and environments, renaming everything (so that instead of locating Farmer Giles and asking him for a pair of 'scissors' you have to locate Qu'loth and ask him for his 'maarg', or his 'tarrn', or his 'tazmak'), and little else. The game is thus very, very complex but utterly shallow, indeed it is meaningless, impossible to relate to or feel anything for. It reminds me a great deal with 'X: Beyond the Frontier' in that respect; attractive, quality stuff, no game.

The Bottom Line
The nightmare is that this game showed enormous promise. Each level is like a functioning city/village, although sadly not loose enough for you to simply wander around, playing with things. If it had been married to some kind of RPG it would have been excellent, but it isn't, the game itself is no more advanced than a simple Sinclair Spectrum arcade adventure.

I could feel my initial intrigue - the game is very, very attractive - wearing off, until by the second level I was playing it out of sheer bloodymindedness. Again, this reminds me of 'X: Beyond the Frontier' and, oddly, 'Serious Sam', another game which had promise but ran out of ideas very quickly. If only...

The Good
The graphics are good, very good. The sight of the huge twin moons hauntingly filling the horizon will take your breath away. The controls are almost always intuitive. You feel immersed in a rich, entrancing world.

Your first chores are actually a well-designed tutorial, fair to you player, with no fire-breathing dragon eager to pounce upon you, without even a plague-carrying sewer rat to bite you into writhing agony. Just tasks to familiarize you with the interface.

The Bad
"Can you help Bippy-Poo find his toothbrush, Ulukai?"

"Where is Bippy-Poo, Shazam-Kaboom?"

"I cannot see him from here, Ulukai, but he is somewhere north-west".

Ulukai is you, a cross of Clint Eastwood and Duke Nukem propelled into a parallel universe, courtesy of... well, game designers, really. Bippy-Poo and Shazam-Kaboom (not their real names, we want to protect their privacy here), are Talants, the only intelligent inhabitants of this world. Your arrival was prophesized, you are the long-awaited saviour. The world has been subdued by ... no, no spoilers... an evil tyrant, whose minions the ordinary Talant slaves, sweats, and starves for, to keep them in the local firewater and in ris (the staple food with an uncanny resemblance to rice, even down to the watery paddies where ris is grown). No women, though. They do exist (read on), but the closest whiff you'll get of the fair sex is a spoof of a poof in the fine city of Samarkand (not its real name, no spoilers please).

By now, Ulukai has run enough errands to know that Bippy-Poo hides right at the opposite end of the map. He even suspects that Shazam-Kaboom is giggling under his breath at the prospect of the Saviour of the World hoofing it for the umpteenth time across a land graced with not much of a fauna and as little of a flora. The Great Western Desert (that's Death Valley for you American readers) teems with life in comparison.

Hold your twon-ha there! (A twon-ha is their equivalent of a bronco, a brumby, a horse in short, only with two legs and no tail).

Have I talked, er... WRITTEN you into giving "Outcast" a miss? My apologies. There are good things which make this game worth playing. It is only once the storyline and the gameplay have spoilt it that you think back on it all.

How you had to go into god mode because, shot at from certain angles, the enemy soldiers just seemed to be invulnerable. How you had to repeatedly hit the "skip dialog" button because you got thoroughly sick of having to listen to the same lines from a Talant, when you only wanted to hear again where Bippy-Poo might hide, and so you were treated to this wonderful audio:

"Greetings Uluglub"

"Can youblip"

"Yes Ulukflub"

and so on, and so on, until you got to the bit that you were after.

By and by, you get to the finale. A movie sequence that gives you the distinct feeling that either the scenario writers were fed up to their eyeteeth with the story, or were marched off under heavily armed escort to bring it to a speedy close for commercial reasons. You stare at your screen and you remember... you remember when you learnt that male and female Talants lived separately outside the mating season, and that, as Bippy-Poo (not his real name) told you, the females were on those islands just north of the long line of power poles that zapped you to death (even in god mode) whenever you dared approach them. You remember how something you did caused those power poles to shut down. Yet, there was no way for you to travel further north. You remember all those tantalizing enigmas without answers (yes, you did download a number of walkthroughs, but to no avail). Your remember the tiny offshore island, a mountain in its middle, with a rough staircase leading up to some giant bird's nest with a giant egg in it. Who, what, built those stairs? No clue, no further quest, no answer, a dead-end good, proper and final, my fearless explorer. Too many such dead-ends, and the side-lanes that did lead somewhere were so short and narrow.

The Bottom Line
This could have been a fine game.

Final score.

Graphics. Fine, well tuned to the storyline, often breath-taking, in their passive sort of way. You can even tell the time of the day by the shadow you cast. I couldn't care less, that's not my cup of tea, but perhaps it's yours.

Gameplay. There is much good about it, much bad. Those occasionally invulnerable enemies are a great let-down. Until you switch to god mode of course. It's never so bad that you quit and uninstall in disgust. It's often bad enough to make you want to strangle the culprits: "You had such a great game in the making, why did you stuff up so?" But the puzzles are logical, even though too many of them require you to travel, not only to the other end of the map, but to the other end of any one of the six maps. Oh well, at least it gets out in the fresh air, just like crucifixion does (you jammy, jammy, bastard!).

Replay value. Almost nil. I found myself playing it again only for the landscapes, once I had cleared them of hostile grunts. Those two gigantic twin moons... they are hypnotic. Of course, they are impossible, such a planetary system cannot exist, but this is where art must be allowed to take precedence over reality. If only there had been more of that. And a deeper storyline. Gentlemen, why did you let us down? (Pardon my Aramaic)