Outlaws

The Good
I was worried at first that the game would be a dated Dark Forces clone with a thin western look washed over it. So when I got the demo I selected the hardest difficulty level, "Ugly" because I was a Dark Forces veteran, and walked confidently into the small western town. And got shot dead instantly. Ok, I thought, I'll have to be a little more cautious then that, and next time I kept my eyes pealed as I walked carefully into town. Someone called out "Hey sheriff!" as the saloon window shattered and I fell dead to the dust. Ah, I thought, this is going to take a little work. Next time I made my way carefully down a side ally into town, creeping around behind the saloon. As I carefully rounded a corner, crouched on the ground, I came up on a cowboy who turned, yelled and we both shot at once. His shot took a chunk out of the wall by my head, he fell dead, I had survived for once. By the time I had crawled up the back stairs, dispatched 3 more rustlers, dropped into a small store room and came out into the saloon proper with six shooter blazing (getting shot dead again in the process) I was thoroughly in love with this game, I bought it the next day.

It provide a tense, one-shot-one-kill game-play that I simply hadn't experienced up to that point, you had to THINK and be cautious as well as shoot strait to survive in this wild west. The AI could make use of cover, circle around you and was quick on the draw, but get good at it and when you burst into a room and clear it leaving one shot remaining in your six-shooter, you'll fell just like Clint Eastwood. What a feeling.

Add to that the hand drawn movies which moved the (relatively generic 'defeat the robber-baron') plot along, some good voice acting, some excellent level designs, the first sniper scope, satisfying weapons, wonderful Spaghetti Western music and some fun multi-player and you've got a surprising winner that never got the props it deserved.

The Bad
Quake had already shipped by this time and screen shots for Unreal were everywhere, the game world was clamoring for the true 3D experience and Outlaws was 2.5D with flat sprites and a cartoon style that, while it worked for the game, belied the literally killer game-play underneath.

Not all the levels were excellent, some were long and tedious hikes while others became grueling switch hunts.

In anything but the Hard difficulty mode the game plays more like a western mod for Dark Forces.

The Bottom Line
How much did I enjoy this game? I'd never been a big western fan, I thought they were OK but I didn't go out of my way to see them. While playing this I started renting all the spaghetti westerns I'd never seen. Pure Man-With-No-Name goodness, and now I'm a fan. That's a good game, one that can turn you on to a genre.

I think they did themselves an injustice allowing for the weaker difficulty levels. Sure the instant death represented by the hard mode would have alienated many people, but it was clearly the way the game was meant to be played. Play it on hard or don't play it at all.

I can't help but think that this would have been a big hit instead of an underdog if they had used a more up-to-date game engine to make it with. I eagerly anticipated Outlaws II which would, I hoped, use the Jedi Knight engine or something new.

I'm still waiting.

No western game since has captured this ones game-play. Rent "A Fist Full Of Dollars", get this game, strap on your six shooter and prepare to eat some dust!

The Good
After making adventure games for years, LucasArts decided to take a rest from them and focus on creating a first-person shooter that has a Wild West setting. It is called Outlaws and it tells the story of Marshal James Anderson, who has just retired from gunslinging and bought himself a plot of land, along with a beautiful wife and daughter. Bob Graham (a.k.a. The Gentleman) wishes to get rid of this land to make way for a railroad, but Anderson refuses to budge. Then one day Anderson returns home from town, only to find his house burnt down, his wife murdered, and his daughter kidnapped.

All these events can be viewed in a CG-rendered cinematic, and this sets the game up nicely. Similar cinematics are displayed in between the game's levels and has someone telling Anderson where his daughter is and also has him riding his house to his next location. Special filters are applied to make the cinematics appear hand drawn, similar to what has been done with The Last Express.

There are about nine levels in the game, and each one is populated with cowboys. The aim of each level is reach the bosses and destroy them to get to the next level. As common with most first-person shooters of its day, there are certain doors that require a key. Outlaws is one of the last games to feature a map, which you can use to get around the level and navigate dark areas without the need for oil. Not only can you zoom in and out of the map, but you can find out how many secrets you've discovered and how close you are to the boss.

The game includes some realism. Nearly all of the weapons you can pick up - pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, dynamite - are common back in the Wild West era, and you have to manually reload them instead of the game automatically doing it for you. I like the little stamina meter on the HUD, which goes down while you are performing specific movements. If you keep jumping around, Anderson will start huffing, and this adds a nice touch to the game.

Outlaws has some great graphics and stunning locations. In the first level, you browse a village that consists of a couple houses and I loved looking through these; and in the next, you are shooting through a town that consists of buildings that are common back in the era, such as saloon, bank, telegraph office, and jail. And in the third level, you get to shoot cowboys on a moving train. Each level has clouds that serve as a skybox. You can make the clouds move by enabling hardware acceleration, but doing this caused the game to crash on my system. Oh well, you can't have everything. Finally, the backdrop used for the credits look stunning, especially when you view them at the end of the game.

LucasArts may have stopped making adventure games after 1995, but that doesn't mean they couldn't incorporate adventure and puzzle elements into the game. In almost each level, you have to find certain items other than dynamite, health, or ammo and use them in a specific area that will direct you to the level's boss. As for the puzzles, the most challenging one has to be on level five, where you need to alter the water flow of a channel that will lead to different areas.

The game's music is stored as CD Audio tracks, a technique a few game companies used in the mid-nineties. The music is brilliantly composed, and fits the western theme of the game quite well. Unlike other games that also use CD Audio tracks such as Quake II, the music doesn't loop while you are on a certain level, but instead plays the next piece of music in the queue, and since the music used for the entire game is split across the two CDs, this means that if you get sick of the same tracks playing, you are free to insert the other CD and listen to other tracks without consequence.

The sound effects are nice. Each weapon in the game has realistic sounds, and when you pick up an item, the game makes a rattlesnake sound. The cowboys in the game taunt you, saying lines such as "Don't be a fool, marshal" and "Hey, Mr. Law Man". Only the bosses use specific lines. I found the Indian known as Two Fingers hilarious, as he says such nonsense like "You are a dead man walking" and "Too slow. You will regret that".

The game features an extra mode called "Historical Missions", and this mode chronicles the life of Anderson before he became marshal. There are five levels, in which you go around shooting cowboys, solving puzzles and killing a leader. One of these is the "Marshal Training" level where you can enter what looks like outhouses, and one of them features characters that totally look out of place in the game, and they do a pathetic job at killing you. I decided to play these missions before doing the actual game.

The Bad
You have to swap discs during the game, because the first half of the levels are on one disc while the other half is on another. I don't see why LucasArts couldn't ask you to do this during the installation, then have the soundtracks as MP3 files. Also, I agree with John Romero in his review: you are forced to go to the game's menu if you want to save or load a game, and this becomes tedious after a while.

The Bottom Line
Outlaws is not the first first-person shooter LucasArts made. Dark Forces was released two years earlier, and Outlaws uses the game's engine. The game incorporates CG-rendered cinematics which add more depth to the story, and both the graphics and sound (including the soundtracks) blend in with the game's wild west theme. The gameplay, meanwhile, is a mixture of action, adventure, and puzzle-solving. Realism is added in the way you have to reload your gun manually, and your stamina levels decrease over time if you do certain tasks. Although there is a fair amount of CD swapping, this is a good game that every fan of Western games should play.

The Good
In brief, what I liked most about Outlaws was the atmosphere and tension which was created largely by the unique (for the time) nods to reality it made, while remaining within the action-shooter genre (which was rapidly becoming stale.)

Although you could play on easier settings, the hardest difficulty level was and is the only way to play Outlaws. On this level your opponents hit the dirt in one or two shots, and although stronger than they are, you yourself are highly vulnerable. When combined with the realistic (if extremely rapid) manual reloading of your weapons, the combat experience became tactical and tense in a way that none of its peers could ever hope to match.

Imagine yourself, a gunman standing at the corner of a building, your back to the wall. You duck around the corner and back again. Three men. A shout of alarm -- one of them saw you. You grit your teeth, and step out with your double-barreled shot-gun levelled. The left barrel explodes, and the first man crumples. Instantly you spin and let loose the second barrel, but your aim is off; your target jerks but doesn't fall. A shot whistles through the air where you were standing, but you are already back behind the wall. Grimacing, you eject the empty shells and push the fresh cartridges home. The barrels snap closed, and you press yourself flat against the wall again, breathing heavily. Your eyes flick quickly from one side to the other, looking for signs of movement from the other direction, in case others have been drawn by the gunfire. One down, one injured, one unhurt. You try to imagine whether they've moved position, and prepare to step out from your cover once more...

Let yourself sink into the atmosphere of the game, and this is what playing Outlaws is like.

Throw sniping with your rifle and scope, tossing sticks of dynamite into an ambush, panic-stricken 'fanning' of your six-shooter as you stumble into sight of an opponent, fantasic music, and some wonderfully realised scenarios and scenery into the mix, and you have an idea of why people loved this game (and in many cases still do).

The Bad
Outlaws isn't perfect by any means. The graphics engine was aging at the time of its release, but this isn't all that big an issue. My major annoyances with the game are:

a) The general stupidity of your opponents. While the sheer number of people you eliminate in the game may necessitate that they not be the fastest and most accurate guns in the west, you do tend to get the impression that these people have been inbred to the point where you're surprised they don't shoot themselves instead of you. (Although they do occasionally shoot each other; generally a happy occurance for the player :)

b) While often very aesthetically appealing, the level design is often less than ideal from a gameplay perspective, and frequently completely irrational from a practical perspective (not that this is a new thing for FPSs)

c) The introduction is nicely done, and certainly puts you in a vengeful frame of mind, but the 'story' is, in reality, next to non-existant. "May be the first shooter with a plot!" (paraphrased) read one of the box quotations. Well, maybe this was true in a purely literal sense -- there was a game, and it was accompanied by a plot -- but there was pretty much zero integration of the two beyond the basic theme. You fought a bunch of guys in the setting introduced by the previous cut-scene, and then moved on to the next cut-scene. (Having been spoiled by System Shock, which features one of the finest integrations of plot and gameplay ever seen in a first-person game, I suspect this deficiency annoyed me more than it did many people.)

The Bottom Line
Outlaws is a highly atmospheric, tense, and unique action-shooter.