Summary
Help me find my toothbrush, Ulukai
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 Ulu*glub*"
"Can you*blip*"
"Yes Uluk*flub*"
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)
