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
Actually there was alot to like about Outlaws. The western theme was unique for any FPS and the storyline was classic. A peaceful man driven to violent vengeance against the outlaws who took his daughter and killed his wife - sounds good to me.

In addition, the weapons were unique for the time this was released, classic Colt .36 Peacemaker Revolver, legendary Winchester .30-30 Repeating Lever-Action Rifle, simplistic Double sawed off 12-guage shotgun, and of course, throwing knives and dynamite, all very interesting and fun.

And while the soundtrack was certainly much inspired by already-made western film scores, I enjoyed it immensely.

The Bad
But sadly... the actual game didn't work, the graphics engine was very sub-par for the time and though this game was later patched to include 3dfx support, it still looked horrible, but it played pretty smoothly on the Pentium 150 I had at the time.

Probably the worst thing about this game was it's level design, the maps were really quite pointless, mission objectives were strewn about in foolish and illogical fashion and all it seemed to be was "Go over to one side of the map, find key, go back to other side, open door, find next key, repeat." Not very exciting if you ask me.

A strong competitor with the poor map design was the absolutely laughable AI. When your supposedly mean and gritty enemies turn their backs to you in order to walk 2 paces left then slowly turn to shoot at you and miss, you can't help but break out in laughter.

The Bottom Line
Great concepts, poor execution. The AI and Map Design stink, the graphics engine is lame. However the story, weapons, and music are good. I still have the first cd but I threw away the 2nd to make better use of a double CD case.

The Good
I remember, when i've first encountered some screenshots from this game. I almost started to drool :) A cartoon western adventure from Lucasarts! Well, it just has to be the best game ever! Do you remember DOTT, Sam and Max, or Full Throttle? Those were the best games of their age, so I had quite high expectations from this one, since it's been two years since Full Throttle. One day, I finally grabbed my copy of this game, installed, then launched it. As the intro started with construction workers putting down rails, and the dust arose in that great american desert, I was already sucked inside the game...

The Bad
After that, the first characters appeared. The mean ones. I recall, that I liked the raw lines, and simple, rustic shapes. It seemed, it would be an expressive interactive cartoon, that suits the western theme so well.

Then, they started to move.

I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but in the animation looks a little cheap. Broken Sword came out a year before this one, and its ingame animation was about the same quality, or better. I had classmates at animation school, who had done better than this in second grade. 3D objects sometimes fall off from the scenery, and most of them should've been done in in 2d as the characters. That was the first time I felt that the game was rushed.

The plot is okay to me. After the intro stopped, and I started to play, I had to realize, that it's nothing more than a western fps. It has no real adventure elements to speak of. It should've had some, but as I said, this game seems rushed.

The game itself is butt ugly. It has come out in the same year as Redneck Rampage, which was at least colorful and quite proportional. This game is almost monochrome ( all things still or alive is brown ), and has the proportions of an alien base: Not scaled for humans. As I watched the little enemy sprites running around in those strange, cubic, lopsided areas, I almost ordered a book about harmonic division for the level designers.

But I shouldn't have expect more from the engine. It is the very same engine, that brought us Dark Forces, in 1995! So that is, what happened: instead of buying the rights of a better, and more up to date engine ( or designing a totally new one ), they dug up this old engine from the bottom of their drawers, to cut down the budget. Rushed, and lazy game.

Gameplay is very similar to Dark Forces. And it has all its flaws too. I had to run around in medium sized, and mostly opened areas ( and some closed too. If you can remember Dark forces had those dark areas, where one couldn't see a thing. Well, you can enjoy them again ), collecting a lot of keys, solving a lot of puzzles about pushing buttons, and run some more after that, to find the doors to those keys. There are some items, that you can use on the environment, which is fun, but that's a very rare opportunity ( for example: there is a place where you have to dig with a shovel, but only once through the whole game ). And there are the weapons. Revolver, Winchester, Shotguns, a Sawed-off, Knives, Dynamite, and a Gattling gun. The only difference between them is their firing, and reloading time. If I shoot someone with a pistol, or a gun, he dies from one shot at most times. If not, I still have plenty of time to reload and shoot again.

The game length would be proper, if it would be an adventure game, but since it's a shooter, It is way too short. I must admit though, that if it would be longer, the game would be much more boring. If I want more, I can play the historical missions, but to be honest, that idea never came to my mind.

The Bottom Line
This game should've been great. Those people at Lucasarts headquarters should've put more money and time into its development. I still loved the atmosphere, which is so powerful, it saves the game from being ignored.