Summary
Doom can go to hell!
The Good
When you say
LucasArts, think how correct the second part of this name is. Virtually every fan of adventure games worships this company as the greatest deity of all. Indeed, the people who work for LucasArts are true artists. I haven't played all LucasArts' games, and of those I have, almost each one struck me as a complete perfect work, where attention was equally paid to gameplay, ambiance, and content. In most of its adventure games, LucasArts reaches a level that can't be surpassed.
But what about shooters? Could the "adventures" produce a shooter that will satisfy the needs of action gamers and at the same time will be full of the same creativity that penetrated their adventure games? The answer is one big
yes.
From the very beginning, I was stunned by the beautifully designed visuals and the overall atmosphere of the game. I must admit: I'm a
sucker for sad and touching stories. Just like the story of
Max Payne, which I played before this one, hooked and captivated me, I was involved in the story of "Outlaws". Both stories are, by the way, quite similar. In "Outlaws", your wife has been killed and your daughter kidnapped by criminals. Death ain't enough for 'em, like the front cover of the box the game comes in expressively states. Your sole feeling is revenge. Now your gun will speak for you.
Quite a banal story, isn't it? Still, it works for this game, because it loads you with emotions and then drives you forward, with its direct and primitive gameplay, which leaves you no choice but to kill those who did such an awful thing to you. If there must be an excuse for first-person shooters, here it is. I don't understand what is the point of playing stupid games like
Doom, where you just shoot without even having a good reason to do it. The gameplay of "Outlaws" is hardly more sophisticated than that of "Doom", but the whole feeling of the game is entirely different. This game has a hero, has a plot and has a great setting, while "Doom", "Quake" or other shooters just let you shoot without feeling anything. A game consists not only of gameplay, but also of story and setting, which are, in my humble opinion, even more important than the gameplay itself. After all, there are books and movies that deal with profound matters and still are uninspired and boring, and there are detective stories and action movies which are so well made that they touch and fascinate you much more than any "intellectual" stuff. Same is with "Outlaws". It is just a Western, but such a beautiful one! I'd really like to see somebody who played "Outlaws" and didn't feel a deep sympathy towards the unfortunate Marshall Anderson, the game's hero.
Story alone would not be enough to make this game so great. It is so wonderfully executed, that sometimes I almost feel pity it is just a FPS. Don't understand me wrong, I don't think it should have been an adventure. Adventurous, puzzle-solving gameplay would ruin a great deal of suspense and straightforward action this game has. But I think the game's cut scenes and the overall execution could marvelously decorate any adventure game. Even the little things are so well made! Those short dialogues, typical for the Western movies... Unfortunately, I first played the German version of the game, and the translation ruins at least half of the fun (and what did I expect?! I must say I really hate it when games are being dubbed to other languages instead of using subtitles. Maybe the Germans feel differently about that, but they don't know how much they miss having but a pale copy of the original American expressions, dialects and slangs). Later I got the English version, and it changed everything. I loved the cool accents and intonations and the top-quality voice acting. By the way, did you ever noticed the high quality of voice-overs in LucasArts' games? If not, you should. There are very few dialogues in "Outlaws", but they are so well written and so convincingly spoken that you'll want to listen to them again and again.
The music of "Outlaws" belong to my all-time favorite game soundtracks, right there after Uematsu's and Mitsuda's works, and the amazing music of
Arcanum. Clint Bajakian did one hell of a job in composing typical Western-style melodies and arranging them in such a way that they sound fresh and charming. The music accompanies you all the time and adds so much to the atmosphere. The sounds effects, by the way, are also excellent. You hear everything that happens around you: the sounds of footsteps, distant voices, opening door, cows, chickens and pretty much everything.
So here you have it, cool setting, involving story, great artwork, fantastic music... anything else? Oh yeah - the gameplay. Although it is traditionally straightforward and simple, there are some very nice little things about it that make it different. First, the levels always have some tricky parts, and even puzzles which are often anything but simple. It's not just a "shoot everything you see, proceed" kind of game where you should pay attention only to your enemies. Sure, most of the so-called puzzles involve nothing but hunting for different keys and opening doors with them, but there are surprisingly difficult tasks, some of which gave me a real headache. The underground level with a lot of water canals comes to mind, where I had to swim and jump out of the water at the right time to hit switches and to change the configuration of the maze. Sometimes some tricky jumping and climbing is necessary, especially in the end level (the mansion), where I was jumping like crazy while being trapped behind a fireplace. The levels themselves are pretty versatile, considering the graphic monotony: there are typical town-saloon-bar level, underground caves, mines, water levels, train, a beautiful outdoor area (canyon), a mansion, etc.
The weapons are very cool, there is some authentic stuff that is much better than the impossibly unrealistic and bloody constructions that fill most FPSs. A nice feature is the necessity to reload your gun every time you run out of bullets. Most other shooters I played didn't have this feature, you could just go on shooting, and the game would reload for you automatically.
The Bad
The graphics... Well, it's not such a new game any more, but I suppose some representatives of the new generation, spoiled by all those fancy graphics we see nowdays, might call "Outlaws" hopelessly old and outdated. While houses and walls are all in 3D, the characters are just sprites. It is somewhat similar to
Under a Killing Moon with its strange 3D world, where tables, pictures and vases would turn around together with you and always look the same, no matter from which angle you look upon them. Same in "Outlaws", where cows and horses look as like thin painted cartoons, put into the 3D world by mistake. The 3D graphics themselves are highly pixelated. "Outlaws" was released at the time where 3D acceleration was still not an ordinary matter, and only Voodoo cards boasted their 3D abilities, so in the original version there's no Direct 3D support. However, I recently found out there was a retail Direct 3D patch for "Outlaws", released, if I'm not mistaken, only in 2001. Needless to say I downloaded it immediately, and what do you know, no pixels, just nice smooth 3D, up to a very high resolution. Strangely enough, I didn't enjoy it that much. Probably because sprites look really awful on those smooth backgrounds, and the game loses some of its character somehow... Don't ask me, it's just a feeling.
Other than that, I found some levels unnecessary confusing and maze-like. Finding different keys gets old pretty quickly and requires too much backtracking. Also, there are not enough enemy variations. You fight the same kind of guys all over again. I'm very glad they didn't put monsters or other nonsense into this strictly realistic game, but it is a pity they couldn't design any more baddies beside the usual two or three types.
The Bottom Line
LucasArts proved with this game they could make a fantastic first-person shooter when they wanted. If you admire their adventures (and if you don't, how come aren't you ashamed to sit there and to look at your monitor?!) and want to see what happens when all the typical LucasArts quality is transferred into a shooter, don't hesitate and try "Outlaws". And even if you don't play adventure games and enjoy shooters above all, do yourself a favor, drop whatever mindless Doom-clone you are playing now and get this game... The law's back in town!
