Outcast: A New Beginning Review
Hey, remember Outcast? …Ah, yes, I’m being told that no – no one remembers Outcast. But that’s okay, because even if you’ve never heard of the 1999 original, Outcast: A New Beginning is a proudly ridiculous open-world action game that fully embraces sci-fi camp in a world I can describe as, “What if you made Avatar with the budget and feel of Stargate SG-1, except you have a jetpack and nobody takes anything seriously?” Sure, its scatterbrained main story outstays its welcome with way too many menial fetch quests and missions that could’ve been emails. After all of that, it redeems itself with a bonkers toybox of delightful weapon modifiers to mix and match until we break it, plus a set of movement abilities rarely seen outside of Just Cause games with which to amuse ourselves with en route from point A to point B.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time comparing A New Beginning to the original 1999 Outcast, because let’s be honest: even most of us who did play it probably barely remember it. Refreshing my memory with the plot summary on Wikipedia made me ask, “Wait, did I play this?” Records from that era are spotty at best.
It’s clear developer Appeal Studios is fully aware it’s been a quarter-century since we last set foot on the planet Adelpha, and yet it’s just as obvious that it loves the heck out of the bizarre alien world created for that old, obscure game. Appeal came up with an excellent way to have its cake and eat it too: This is a sequel in that it takes place on the same world, but our returning hero, Cutter Slade, has had his memory wiped and he’s as confused as the rest of us when he encounters the two-fingered Talans and their magical Yods (gods) and has to help them defend against high-tech invaders. So if it’s all new to you, that’s fine: it’s effectively new to him, too. It’s a new beginning, if you will – and it actually works pretty well. Suffice it to say, you’re never actually cast out of anything, and outside of a few mentions of events that happened before, this is a very safe point at which to jump into this universe.
If it’s all new to you, that’s fine: it’s effectively new to him, too.
Slade is a quippy, sarcastic dude who looks like a cut-rate Hugh Laurie from an especially taxing episode of House in which he’s sentenced to pick up trash on the side of the highway in a bright-orange shirt. I don’t dislike him, it’s just that outside of his backstory as a Navy SEAL and his constant, hit-and-miss riffing on the weird situations he’s in, the only actual personality he has comes from trying to find his long-lost daughter – sympathetic, but generic. Over more than 30 hours of the campaign (longer, if you stop to smell all of the side missions and activities) we only see snippets of that relationship, and that leaves Slade as a not-all-that-memorable protagonist and renders the story feeling a bit disjointed.
Instead, the most interesting thing about him is the gear he quickly stumbles upon, which includes an initially very limited jetpack and an energy shield. Moving around is the best part of Outcast, and though it takes more than a minute to unlock the most empowering of Slade’s abilities, it’s generally a pretty good time to bounce around the terrain of this respectably sized open-world map. At first you have just one thrust that launches you 20 feet in the air, then two, then three… you get the idea. Each time I unlocked another energy bar felt great because it opened up the ability to chain together more boosting, gliding, dashing, and hovering before I had to touch the ground again for a super-quick recharge (and it gave me more opportunities to correct after messing up). It’s made good use of in the many environmental parkour side activities, which start out trivial but eventually become tricky to pull off.
I call him “Squishy Appa.”
That’s all before the freedom you gain when you earn the right to call in and ride a massive, flying, whale… elephant… squid… thing that – as a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender – I call “Squishy Appa.” In a world that feels almost Zelda-ish in its freedom to go anywhere, no matter how high, and do anything, the liberating movement was satisfying even during stretches when the story felt like it’d stalled out.
It’s sparsely populated, but the open-world map of Adelpha checks all the boxes for variety, going from jungle to desert to snow to lava to marshlands, with some high-tech facilities sprinkled in to make sure you’re never in the same environment for too long. Everything’s hyper-saturated and colorful, and the mostly cartoonish style usually serves it well. Creature design has its fair share of boilerplate angry birds, bugs, and dogs, but sometimes it goes full-on bananas with it – most of that is based heavily on ideas from the original game.
The catch is that it does not always look great. Even playing on a PC with a top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, performance wasn’t awesome. It was usually smooth, but hitches were too frequent, and pop-in is brutal when you’re flying around the world – which is quite often. Even up-close in conversation scenes textures didn’t seem to consistently load in, leaving a lot of background scenery looking painfully low-rez while other times it was in full 4K sharpness.
Everywhere you go, there’s a set of alien weirdos ready to unload their life stories.
You’ll see that a lot, because Talans love to talk. This isn’t an RPG – you never make any decisions other than what topic to discuss first – but it’s kind of amazing how much voiced dialogue there is. Adelpha is home to an array of native Talan cities that are as different from one another as New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York (it’s impressive how much detail went into distinguishing their wardrobes and architecture). Everywhere you go, there’s a set of alien weirdos ready to unload their life stories and every little thing you could possibly do for them, delivered with cheesy, tongue-in-cheek voice acting. The goofball Talans, despite being a low-tech society, are all very recognizable stereotypes that range from earnest doofus-turned-leader to doddering deaf sage to vain chieftain and drugged-out activist. Given that there’s so much chatter, it’s not surprising that the lip synching is subpar and the repetitive gesticulations they wave at you as they talk your ear off are way behind the curve of modern games.
I rarely skipped the dialogue, though, because – credit where it’s due – they do have some chuckle-worthy jokes in the mix. Most of them revolve around the Talans taking Slade’s human idioms literally. “You’ve lost me,” he’ll say, and a deadpan Talan will reply. “I haven’t lost you, you’re standing right in front of me!” The biggest running gag, though, is that Outcast delights in talking about the Yods and the Gork and Zorkins and the Ulukai. It is some truly wild and overindulgent sci-fi gobbledygook, and you can tell the writers were just loving sending up the made-up vocabulary of George Lucas and his ilk. Thankfully, you can hold a button to bring up an on-screen glossary to remind you what these words mean, otherwise it would be as completely incomprehensible as tweens on TikTok. (Reminder: I am old enough to have played the original Outcast.)
Almost without exception, when you boil it down all of those guys are sending you out to either kill or collect some plant or animal part or blow something up. That usually involves bloodless combat against invading robots and native fauna that may or may not have been corrupted by Gork, which I’m not even going to try to explain. It’s actually kind of absurd how drawn-out some of these quest chains are, sending you to kill something, talk to someone who tells you to talk to someone else, who tells you to collect something and then return it – and you can see exactly how convoluted they are in the interesting flow chart-style quest map. Thank goodness load times for fast-travel have gotten so quick!
Thank goodness load times for fast-travel have gotten so quick!
In its favor, combat stays fairly entertaining in part because there’s a decent variety of enemies coming at you when you combine the 10 or so bot types with the birds, bugs, wolves, and worms that you have to contend with, and their AI only occasionally glitches out and just sits there while you shoot them. Other than that, my biggest gripe is that you’ll never come across the two different enemy factions you can face fighting each other instead – that sort of action could’ve brought more life and spontaneity to this open world in the same way it has to games like Fallout and Grand Theft Auto.
More important, though, is the super-flexible weapon customization system. Technically you only have two guns, but the pistol and rifle you start with can be augmented with a good number of upgrades that can, for example, split their projectiles into three and make them home in on targets and then explode. Or maybe they will become a rapid-fire weapon that grows more powerful the hotter they get, but then cool down quickly. Or, once you’ve upgraded your rifle to unlock all six slots, any gonzo combination thereof – with a bunch of even crazier stuff thrown in for good measure. It’s a little silly that you can hot-swap upgrades between the pistol and the rifle, though, because once you find a set of really effective upgrades, if you run out of ammo for one you can just swap them over to the other gun in the middle of a fight and keep on blasting. Also, pretty early on I settled on a recipe that thoroughly deleted anything that I pointed in the general direction of when I pulled the trigger, so I didn’t feel the need to mess with success after that. But I did anyway, and it was fun to see what different combos did even if they weren’t as effective.
By default, Outcast is not all that challenging. I turned up the difficulty to hard after the first few fights didn’t provide much resistance, and while I almost turned it down again halfway through the campaign when I died multiple times on one tough fight (you just respawn nearby so you can whittle them down with persistence, but your consumable health potions are toast) it turned out I was just one weapon upgrade away from turning things dramatically back in my favor. The only times I died after that were when I neglected to keep track of my health items, since there are very few other options for healing on the go if you aren’t well stocked.
There are a few tougher enemies out there, but I wish there were more boss fights in the mix. There’s one when you take out Invader mining bases, but it’s re-used multiple times, and there’s a mega-bot that’s only trotted out once in a while. The fact that there are so few big threats meant I almost never used some of the long-recharge powers I unlocked because I was saving them for something more than the typical bot I could already one-shot with my amped-up rifle. Taking down flying convoys is fun the first time or two, but it really feels like they could’ve mixed up the resistance you face there so that it didn’t immediately become repetitive and exploitable.
As far as bugs go, I’ve had a fairly smooth time outside of a very annoying reproducible bug where every time I came back from the map screen while I was mounted on my flying monster it would crash to desktop. Outcast gets away with a lot, such as warping you out when you get stuck on terrain and some extremely hard cuts in and out of cutscenes, thanks to its overall rough-around-the-edges charm. Only occasionally did I get frustrated by something like an enemy I needed to kill being stuck inside a wall or a quest marker pointing to nowhere, but it was nothing a reload couldn’t fix.
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