Outcast

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)

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
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.