Outlaws

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.

The Good
This interesting LucasArts game uses the oft ignored Western genre for a fps. The story is the typical revenge plot you'd expect in a Western and has the typical old west guns. Your six-shooter, rifle, and shotgun all come in handy. Plus there's dynamite for those people you just can't seem to reach.

I was also very impressed with the levels. There were some beautiful settings with great looking water. I wish LucasArts had stepped behind this game and made it a series.

Some cool Easter Eggs, too.

The Bad
As cool as the Western setting was, the design decision to use animated cutscenes and cartoonlike villains was a poor one. Also the linear design and find the correct key nature of the game diminshed the gameplay and re-playability.

The Bottom Line
An animated first person shooter set in the Old West.

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.