Outlaws

aka: Outlaws: Cidade Sem Lei, Outlaws: Die Gesetzlosen, Outlaws: Une histoire de feu et de sang
Moby ID: 931
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/27 8:59 PM )
Add-on (official) Add-on (unofficial) Included in Special Edition See Also

Description official descriptions

Marshall James Anderson had been a great gunfighter. He had worn the badge of the law and put men to death or to jail. But a Marshall can only travel alone so long. And so James Anderson retired; he got himself a wife, got himself some land, got himself a daughter and dedicated himself to the peaceful life of a home on the range.

The Gentleman, Bob Graham, has other plans for James Anderson's plot of land however. It sits right along some prime real estate for where the railroad is going to go, and whoever could own that land might be able to get rich setting up a town. So Bob hires himself up some of the roughest and toughest ruffians west of the Mississippi to try and "persuade" Anderson and the other land-owners to sell or abandon their lands.

James Anderson returns home from town one day to find his homestead aflame, his wife killed and his daughter abducted by Bob's henchmen. Not willing to trust in the fates, Anderson dusts off his six-shooter, digs up his buried shotgun and dons his old tin star. He's about to follow the trail of these men across deserts and valleys, until he finds his daughter.

Outlaws is a first-person shooter set in the American Old West, featuring hand-drawn graphics and a stylized soundtrack. Locations include outdoor as well as indoor areas, most with a characteristic Western flavor: a small town with one main street and a saloon, a canyon, a speeding train, and others. The Marshall uses firearms such as a revolver, single- and double-barrel shotgun, a rifle (with or without a sniper scope), and others. In dark areas James can light a lamp, for which he will have to find canisters of oil.

The game contains no supernatural elements: enemies encountered in it are exclusively human. The gameplay focuses on combat, though exploring the levels is necessary in order to locate various keys needed to unlock the next part, or discover secret areas. Manual reloading of the guns is required during combat.

A secondary game mode, called "Historical Missions", allows the player to relive Anderson's rise to the rank of U.S. Marshal. Each of the missions involves the protagonist capturing a killing a criminal, preferably recovering gold stolen by them. Ranks (Deputy, Sheriff, and Marshal) are awarded to the player upon a mission's completion.

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

Credits (Windows version)

177 People (154 developers, 23 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 76% (based on 29 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 84 ratings with 10 reviews)

A tense and fun game experience if you play it right...

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!

Windows · by Jeff Thomas (18) · 2005

Spaghetti Western Shoot-em Up

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.

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2001

Refreshingly different western shooter, highly recommended.

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.

Windows · by Shadowcat (121) · 2001

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
No music. The Fabulous King (1332) Jul 19, 2007

Trivia

Patches

The update to version 2.0 adds four new additional levels ("Civil War", "Ice Caves", "Villa" and "Wharf Town") with completely new terrain never before seen in Outlaws such as ice and vast snow terrains, huge rivers or sunken cities. It also adds music to the levels on the second CD. A Direct3D patch lets the game use slightly higher resolution and improved textures.

References

  • "1138" sighting: Engine number of the train in the intro. (1138 is a reference to George Lucas' first feature film: THX-1138)
  • Bob Graham's Big Rock Ranch is a tribute to George Lucas' Big Rock Ranch in Marin County, CA.
  • The character 'Bloodeye' Tim was named as an homage to Tim Schafer who Shaw worked with on Full Throttle.
  • Max, the wicked bunny from Sam & Max Hit the Road makes an appearance in western style in Outlaws.

Soundtrack

Outlaws' musical score was included on the game CDs on Red Book Audio tracks so one can listen to the music with an ordinary CD player. As of 2000, a separate stand-alone soundtrack album is available at LucasArts Company Store as a bonus for the buyers of Outlaws.

Story Spoiler

"Dr. Death" Jackson is killed when Marshal Anderson drops him down a mine shaft. However, a crash landing can be heard behind the music as Anderson turns away, and Dr. Death distinctly shouts "Dammit!". It's not known if the villain was meant to survive his fall to appear in a possible sequel or if this was just a humorous secret included by the game developers.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 1998 (Issue #164) – Musical Achievement of the Year

Information also contributed by Chris Mikesell, JayBee, Kasey Chang, MAT, mwnoname and Sciere

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Coyote's Tale: Fire and Water
Released 2009 on Windows, Macintosh
A Prince comes to school
Released 2000 on Windows, Macintosh
The Bad, The Ugly and The Sober
Released 2008 on Windows
Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy
Released 2013 on Windows, 2014 on iPhone, Macintosh...
P. B. Bear's Birthday Party
Released 1998 on Macintosh, Windows 3.x
Goosebumps Horror Town
Released 2018 on Android, iPad, iPhone
Peanuts: Snoopy Town Tale
Released 2015 on iPad, iPhone, Android
Get Dexter 2
Released 1988 on Atari ST, Amstrad CPC
Stuart Little: Big City Adventures
Released 2002 on Windows

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 931
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MAT.

Additional contributors: Andrew Hartnett, Swordmaster, Shoddyan, Atomic Punch!, chirinea, Jason Musgrave, Sciere, Alaka, formercontrib, Patrick Bregger, RetroArchives.fr.

Game added February 29, 2000. Last modified March 5, 2024.