Outcast: A New Beginning Review (G00N3R)
Outcast - A New Beginning is an open world action game where player character Cutter Slade has been transported to the alien world of Adelpha, and must fight to free the Talan people from invaders while trying to find his way home.
Gameplay (medium quality)
• Third person shooter combat feels similar to Mass Effect Andromeda (but without companions).
• As you explore Adelpha, you’ll need to fight against robots and flying drones belonging to the invaders’ army, and various types of aggressive wildlife including Adelpha’s equivalents of birds, dogs, spiders, wasps, and worms.
• Cutter has two laser guns which can be upgraded with modules to function like a rifle, shotgun and SMG, with other effects such as increased damage, reduced heat buildup and ammo cost, homing projectiles, and restoring health from each kill.
• You can also freeze nearby enemies temporarily with an area of effect ability, and use an energy shield to block enemy attacks.
• Cutter has a jetpack which allows you to glide over long distances like Batman, and can be upgraded to give you a 5x jump which is useful for both navigating the open world, and to quickly reach a better tactical position during combat.
• Quest design is often more detailed than many open world games. Each quest will have multiple stages relating to collecting items/raw materials, rescuing captive civilians, helping local villages restart production of food/drink/weapons, establishing trade routes, and eventually fighting back against the invaders. You can complete parts of quests while exploring the world before actually being given the quests, although this does sometimes result in having conversations with NPCs about things you’ve already done.
• Some quests ask you to use the jetpack to follow energy orbs by gliding through specific paths and locations within a time limit, and if you fail you have to start the whole sequence again. This can be annoying to begin with, but gets easier after fully upgrading the jetpack.
• Open world has some activities which are copy/pasted in dozens of locations around the map, such as clearing enemy outposts, destroying corrupted wildlife hives, unlocking shrines to upgrade your maximum health, and activating fast travel portals.
• Normal difficulty is actually quite easy. I literally never died during gameplay, and in hindsight probably should have played on hard difficulty. The biggest reason for this is because you fight against the same enemies for the whole game and they never get stronger, which means that as the player acquires new abilities and upgrade your weapons and max health, you’ll gradually become really overpowered.
Story (medium quality)
• Similar to Avatar, with evil Humans invading an alien world to steal their natural resources using advanced technology.
• Has a strong theme of cooperation. While the Talans initially view Cutter as a saviour sent by the gods, his actions during quests are more focused on helping the Talans to rebuild and work together to help themselves.
• Voice acting is mostly fine. Some attempted jokes felt a bit cringey and I’m not sure if its the fault of the actors or the writers.
• I played the original game when it released in 1999, although I don’t remember much about the story now other than it felt a bit like the Stargate film/TV show. Cutter has amnesia in this sequel, so knowledge of the previous game isn’t required to enjoy this one.
Technical (low quality)
• It took me 31 hours to finish the main story and most of the open world activities.
• Environment looks great, featuring large villages and enemy bases, surrounded by forests, mountains and lakes.
• Cutscenes are locked to 30 FPS, which means action scenes look very choppy. I really don’t understand the developer’s decision making process here. Why intentionally make your game look worse? Thankfully the rest of the game, including conversations with NPCs during normal gameplay, does not have this restriction.
• I saw frequent traversal stutter while running or gliding around the open world. (RTX 3080, i7-12700K, 32GB DDR4, 1440p). Most of the time, combat is stutter free, but it did happen in a couple of specific areas. For example, there’s an underwater outpost which has especially poor performance.
• Most controls are rebindable, but some are locked to specific keys.
• The game never crashed, but I encountered a couple of other small bugs which aren’t game breaking but are just a bit annoying.
• I saw quite a few examples of enemies getting stuck in the floor, or spawning T-posed and inactive.
• During some cutscenes, the music would stop and start again a couple of times.
Recommendation
Outcast – A New Beginning is a good game, but also feels quite janky and low budget. If you can put up with the stuttering and bugs, you should enjoy the combat and story. I would recommend buying on sale.