Outlaws

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.

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
First of all, I loved the whole "Spaghetti Western" theme used in the game. I'd really like to see another first person shooter game using this theme. I also liked the way Lucasarts designed the game to be as faithful to the genre as possible, it seems they went out of their way to avoid being over-the-top or campy. You won't get your hands on a rocket launcher, you'll never run into a steam-powered giant spider, and the last boss won't be a guy in bullet-proof 19th century power armor complete with arm cannon.

The way Lucasarts tries to keep the gameplay "realistic" can be seen throughout the game. All the weapons look completely authentic, you won't find a single one that looks like it doesn't belong in a Spaghetti Western movie (again, no rocket launchers). The most powerful weapon you'll find is a gatling gun you pick up in the last level, and even that is limited by the fact that you can't move around when it's selected. On top of that your weapons run out of ammunition and have to be reloaded manually, bullet by bullet (they don't have weapon clips in the old west, sorry). This adds a strategic element to gameplay since you can't rely on the computer to reload your gun for you when you run out of ammo. One particularly fun item is a telescope you can add to your rifle to create a rudimentary sniper rifle, allowing you to pick off your foes at a distance.

The types of enemies is a bit limited. There are only three or four different types of cowboys, however the game tries to create a bit of variety by giving each type three or four different sprites with different cloths on. There are also a few tarantulas, a couple of chickens, and some civilians who run around certain levels. The enemies seem to be moderately more skilled than most FPS enemies, since they run fairly quickly, can shoot while moving (strange how rarely this happens in FPS), and occasionally are smart enough to run away from your fire or duck behind obstacles. They also yell a variety of taunts at you (with enough variety to avoid too much repetition) which helps make them seem more lifelike.

The game makes up for the lack of enemies with its wide variety of boss characters. Most FPS games only have three or four different bosses overall (the newer, polygon-based FPS games have even less). Outlaws has at least 12 different bosses, ten at the end of each level and two in the middle of levels. Each boss has their own unique taunts which they yell at you as you fight them, which serve to give them each a unique personality. Your character, on the other hand, is the strong silent type who (unlike Duke Nukem and his ilk) doesn't make ill-placed wisecracks while killing, which also fits in to the genre.

The enemies are also realistically designed. Your foes are all flesh-and-blood cowboys, even the strongest of them takes only a few bullets to kill. Even the bosses are relatively mortal and most of them can be taken down with a single shotgun blast.

The game balances this out by making your character very much mortal as well. Bullets do quite a bit of damage, and a single shotgun blast will take off more than half your health (and kill you on higher difficulty). The bosses in particular do a great deal of damage, and the toughest of them can kill you with three or four shots.

All this makes the gameplay in Outlaws a bit different from other first person shooters, as instead of charging in guns blazing you'll often have to duck, take cover being obstacles, and sneak up on your enemies or snipe them from afar. Of course if you really prefer the "Doom" style of play the easiest difficulty setting allows it (In this game difficulty doesn't cause more enemies or respawning, but instead decides how human or superhuman your character is and how much damage they can take).

Level design is also top-notch, and most of the levels look like they'd fit perfectly into a wild west movie. The majority of levels take place in large, wide-open outdoor spaces, showing how good the "Dark Forces" engine is at this. Level locations include frontier towns, Spanish forts, desert canyons, gold mines, and even a speeding train. The last level in particular is a huge ranch-style mansion that's really fun to run around in.

The main "story" part of the game is a bit short, with only ten levels overall. However there's also a "historical missions" game which has six extra levels as well as three bonus levels which are unlocked with points gained by completing the extra levels successfully. The bonus levels contain some cool surprises, such as a shooting gallery, an Indiana Jones style cave adventure complete with booby-traps, and a showdown with the game's only superhuman enemy, Max the psychotic rabbit from Lucasart's own Sam & Max Hit the Road.

The music in this game is amazing. The music in the intro credits actually sounds like it belongs in a real wild west movie, and the in-game CD music is very much the same.

The animated cutscenes are simply breath-taking. There's a cutscene at the end of each level which helps to move the plot along and link the different levels together. The animation is very smooth and the coloring seems to be in a sort of "watercolor" style which makes for very beautiful backgrounds. The style of animation is fairly mature and not "cartoony" which fits the serious subject matter. And it is quite serious. Your wife is killed by outlaws in the intro movie, and by the end of the game almost every character except you and your daughter will end up dead (you kill most of them). The game's violence is high but not graphic. There's very little blood in any of the cutscenes even though a few characters are killed rather violently off-screen (one guy gets cut in half by a sawblade), and only a little in the game itself. The hand-drawn animation is also not limited to the cutscenes. During the game, all of your weapons are hand-drawn as well. This is certainly interesting to look at.

Finally, there's the game's surprisingly strong story. This is perhaps one of the strongest stories I've seen in a first person shooter. It's also rather derivative with many of its elements being taken from old wild west movies, but that's all part of its charm. There's the vengence seeking ex-lawman, the greedy land baron, the cold-blooded murderous henchman who quotes Shakespeare and the bible. In fact the game's plot is more inter-woven and complex than you might first realise, and the ending manages to elevate the over-arching story to an entirely new level.

First Person Shooters always seem to have short, pointless endings (even today this seems to be true). I'm glad to say Outlaws is at least one game that doesn't suffer from this problem. Marshall Anderson's last gunfight with Bob Graham and the subsequent ending cutscene actually manages to tie-up the game's plot, and there's even a strong surprise at the very end. Finally there's a touching scene of you and your daughter leaving Graham's Big Rock Ranch behind and riding off into the sunset while the credits roll.

The Bad
I can honestly say that there's nothing about this game I don't like. The only real complaint I think anyone might have is that LucasArts is still using the Dark Forces bitmapped engine when true-3D polygon games have already been out for more than a year, and Quake 2 about to be released. However the gameplay is so good I really don't mind that the technology seems a bit dated.

The controls can also be a bit awkward since there are so many buttons you'll need to press in the middle of combat (fire, secondary fire, reload, duck, jump, etc). The default configuration isn't very good and it took me about an hour or so to get a custom configuration which I was comfortable with.

I would have preferred having a bit more variety in the enemies, but I can understand how the game may have limited the enemy types in order to stay faithful to the genre (the poison spitting tarantulas were probably streching credulity already).

The Bottom Line
Outlaws is a first person shooter set in the style of the old spaghetti western movies. Its differs a bit from the standard FPS formula, but does so in a good way. If you like westerns or like first person shooters and aren't married to your Voodoo II, than you'll probably enjoy this game. I know I did.