Outlaws

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
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.

The Good
The music in this game is above and beyond any western music ever made. Phew, how come computer games have such a perfect music, at least large number of them. Their music can easily shadow the ones from some movie without a doubt. The game comes on two cds, and all the music is placed on the first cd, so when you get to the later levels that play from second cd, you'll only be surrounded by sounds and effects, no music whatsoever. That gives me the idea, if you have two cd-players in your tower/case, you can switch one to play music, while you're playing from the other one. I'm sure that'll work, 'cuz I did the same thing when I was playing C&C: Red Alert. I used soundtrack from The Rock movie, and turned off the music from original Red Alert game, leaving only sounds. You can create many tricks that-a-way if you get bored of the same music.

So, let the game begins... you're in a role of ex-marshal that has retired from chasing bad guys, instead, you live with your beautiful red-haired wife (no matter how sweet they are, LucasArts rarely made a happy end in their games, anyway, even when using just a few colors, they sure know how to paint a woman) and young and childish sweet daughter of no more than ten. The main megalomaniac as they always exist in the games (in rare occasions they don't), is up to the idea to buy all the lands in a row, because railroad's coming up soon. I guess he's determined to take a bigger straw when selling the land later. Whatever he had in his plans, he sure was never going to achieve them. Maybe if he finished in the land of the dead back there in Grim Fandango, and Manny Calavera will help him out. Otherwise, not a frickin' chance. So, he sent his guys to 'persuade' the farmers and land-owners what business seem to be the best.

Anyway, that very same day, just as a sun was going down, your wife sent you to town to buy some supplies. Meanwhile, the of the 'persuaders' waited for you to leave, so they can come to your house. One of them was called Doc, a trully magnificant character with such an evil tense that you gotta like him. Eventually, and that'll be fast enough, you'll hate his guts and let him check how deep is the well. Just as you're getting back home, you saw a big smoke caused by the burning of your house. After touchy love-scene (the last words from your wife) you get a doll from the floor and now clearly decide not to negotiate anymore. After passing through many rocky areas and few cities, you'll eventually rescue your daughter, and kill the bastard we spoke of earlier. Somewhere in between the animations, you'll find out that he happens to be the one that killed your father.

Whatever it seems to be like, his idea wasn't to kill your wife and kidnapp your daughter, but only to teach you some lesson or two. Instead he tought a lesson of death and destruction. Playing the game is rather easy, and tricks and traps are not too hard to solve (I mean, even I was up to those without asking anyone for help :). Moving is bestly controlled with arrow keys, and looking/aiming up and down with mouse control. Left click is for shooting, and right one for reloading. You can use other things to help you through the game like kerosene lamps (to help you through the dark areas), shovels, dinamits, etc.

Trully amazing story this game gives you, with neverseen music as good as this one before. Sound effects are great, especially when it comes to provocating and taunting sounds like 'where are you marshal?' with a special accent on idiotism that make this atmosphere richer for a half. When it comes to speech, LucasArts is the best company ever - even if I have to compare it to some movie company - that has on helluva voice control. Characters speak so real, that even a slight step aside is not seen. And no matter how LucasArts games are good or bad, their sound quality is among the top ones, always.

Graphical elements are okay, well, great better said. That game got out sometime like Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny, and that means somewhere about late 1997, almost 1998, when 3d cards were better known only as Voodoo cards, and that means only Voodoo I series. Both, Lnads of Lore 2 and this game wasn't made for 3d cards, and yet, they marked their time. Anyway, Lands of Lore 2 later made drivers for other and incoming 3d cards, while this game only made drivers for Voodoo cards, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, this is more then great to play even without 3d cards that actually only makes blur to the walls and other elements, so if the game was not originally made for them, you cannot achieve the look like if they were made for 3d cards. No matter what others say, this game is one of the best 3d 1st person arcade-action games that has an excellent story and other elements like music and audio stuff. Noone can compare some piglet from Duke Nukem 3d with this game. Don't you even dare to mention Doom or Quake which marked the history as how the game can be stupid, which was unbelievably high factor for these two games. Who ever say big red tomato shooting fireballs, or a monster with a rocket launcher. Stupid and disgusting, really. Only games that can match Outlaws would be Wolfenstein 3d, Lands of Lore 2 & 3, and now if we step higer, we'd accomplish to reach the realm of fantastic Half-Life.

The Bad
Maybe this game has too little levels to complete, and since it comes on 2cds, you'd expect it to be at least a little bit longer to play. Beside that fact, it's unbeatable.

The Bottom Line
The story like some ordinary western movie ones, animations better then Full Throttle, but still two-dimensional (2d) will give you excellent pointview of characters, story, and the time of wild wild west. You, as an ex-marshal whose kid's kidnapped is gonna teach a lesson to those punks and retrieve the lost gold of youth, which happens to be your sweet li'l daughter. From LucasArts you can only expect the best things (at least in few occasions like this one), which they prove by many titles so far. Would you be so arrogant to skip this one? I think not. This is not one of the best 3d shooter-action games by the time he got out, but you actually look at THE best one. Yahooo!