Outcast 2 - A New Beginning is a sequel to a game th🎃at came out in 1999 and it absolutely feels like it.
That may sound like a criticism, but after playing the short demo at PAX East over the weekend, I mean it as an endorsement. When the THQ❀ Nordic representative demoing the game asked for my impressions, my first unfiltered thought was that it reminded me a whole lot of Di꧙notopia.
If you don't recall, Dinotopia was a TV miniseries that aired on ABC over three nights in the summer of 2002. The sci-fi show centered on two brothers, played by Tyron Leitso and (future Prison Break star) Wentworth Miller, who crash land off the coast of the titular utopian island where humans and intelligent, speaking dinosaurs live together in harmony. Though there was intrigue and conflict in the series, it was mostly just a sunny slice of sci-fi life.
The first Outcast game launched a few years before ABC aired that staple of my childhood. I never played it, but while going hands-on with the sequel I got the strong feeling that someone had time traveled back to the early 2000s, handed the developers at Appeal some PS5 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series X/S dev kits, ꦍand are now returning with the finꦏished product.
The demo begins with returning hero Cutter Slade learning to use his weapons and combat abilities on a high-tech ship. He practices shooting and smacking a robot dummy around before coming face-to-face with some actual killer enemy bots. Defeat them with a mix of your light gun, heavy gun, melee, and an energy shield and you'll come to a big sliding door. That door opens to reveal the sun-dappled world below, which feels much more like a budget version of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar's Pandora than anything else in modern interactive sci-fi.
It's at this point that the demo introduces Cutter's glider, plasma flaps that appear from his arms and legs allowing him to sail down to the world below like a flying squirrel. The glider gains momentum when you fly downward and quickly loses it if you turn it upward. It takes some getting used to, but I really enjoyed my way toward the surface of the planet, pulling up, and skimming along the water which ripples as you pass. Cutter also has a jetpack which he can use to hover above the ground or boost upward three times — high, higher, highest — like Mario doing a triple jump. During this initial flight down, I see a Talan — the humanoid race of the series' setting Adelpha — get devoured by a massive burrowing worm with sharp teeth circling the inside of its jaws and spindly limbs extending out from the treacherous maw.
Once Cutter lands, the game directs me toward a settlement called Bidaa where Talans live in wooden huts. Each of these bipedal people have tan skin, elfen ears, giraffe-like bumps on their heads — which, I've just discovered, are called ossicones — and two fingers (plus a thumb) to a hand. I quickly grew to like the Talans and chuckled multiple times at their dialogue. The writing and voice acting have the same feeling that they come from an earlier era. When Cutter Slade asks Bidaa's chief who's calling the shots around the village, the chief replies, "I am Hiron, chief of Bidaa, but you got the wrong information, stranger. We don't drink Lampé in shots." This then leads into a conversation about Bidaa's production of Lampé, a drink which, it turns out, is a hot commodity on Adelpha.
Each of the characters I spoke to had a slightly rough charm, and Cutter Slade, too, feels like the '90s holdover that he is. Though he's a version of the gruff white dude we've seen in a lot of games, he has more of a sense of humor than most without feeling like he's in the quip-a-minute Marvel mold. I expected to be bored by him, but damned if Cutter Slade didn't charm me.
After you speak to a few villagers around Bidaa you find out that the worm creature is called a Garondar and that they live outside the village. This leads to a pretty uninteresting boss fight. The big worm has a three-tiered health bar and the battle was nothing to write home about. After a few dozen laser pistol shots the worm fell over easily. But, afterward, I had a few minutes left before the demo timed out to explore its small playable chunk of Adelpha. I found its warm world incredibly inviting. Appeal is working at the high-end of double-A (or the low-end of triple-A depending on how you look at it), and Outcast 2's world is quite detailed but a little janky. The big flower petals around the village look wonderful, but if you try to jump on them you'll clip right through. Most of that jank is working for me — the UI in particular looks like it comes straight from 2004 — but it is going to make some people bounce off the game really hard. If you have warm memories of Dinotopia, though, you may want to check Outcast 2 out when it launches sometime "soon" on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.