HomeReviewsOutcast 2: A New Beginning
Outcast: A New Beginning review: an open world dead endCutter down
Cutter down
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
A shame, then, that all its visual splendour amounts to is little more than an empty husk filled withopen worldbusy work that already felt tired and done ten years ago. Its non-linear approach to storytelling remains intact, letting you tackle the quests and problems of its numerous village settlements in any order you wish, but even this has been boiled down to tedious checklists of fetch quests, escort missions and shooting up the same identikit facility one after another. Topping off this fatal combo is returning protagonist Cutter Slade, whose macho army dude dial is still set firmly to cringey wise-cracking and patronising stereotypes. A new beginning this ain’t.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Slade is quite slippery to control a lot of the time - his run feels like it’s constantly catching on furniture, and zooming around on his jetpack turns him into a rocket-fuelled human eel. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Despitedropping the 2from its name in an attempt to draw in newcomers, this is still very much a direct sequel to the original, with the plot immediately assuming you know what a Talan is and why Cutter Slade thinks he’s a big deal around these parts. The result is off-putting and abrasive, though in all honesty, everyone is such a bad hang in this game that it’s hard to care about what anyone’s got going on here, let alone Slade or the Talan he’s trying to save from extinction. As it turns out, humans are the ones oppressing the aliens this time (that old chestnut), and shock horror, they’re mostly all terrible. You don’t ever feeltoobad about turning their largely robot army into piles of scrap metal, though, as the main villain of the piece - a bald and pasty army general who at one point utters the exact line, “If we can’t teach you English, what good are you?” to a captured Talan - is such a broad and cartoonish caricature of an ignorant colonial boomer that you activelywantto wipe every last smug wrinkle off his face with the business end of your laser rifle.
He’s such a colossal turd, in fact, that it makes one of the two primary objectives you’re working toward here feel utterly redundant, as your main goals are to both set the stage for a once-in-a-lifetime sex orgy for the Talans (so they can secure the lineage of their race and not get instantly wiped out the moment you stop paying attention to them), while also strengthening the defences of their main village stronghold. The latter I understand, but mates, this is not the time for peace and love and babies. There are more important matters at hand, like bursting boomer boy’s spaceship like a balloon.
I really wasn’t kidding, folks. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
They’re all familiar reskins of quests you’ve completed a million times before, though the way your quest log funnels them all into one another does at least give the impression that they do all serve some wider purpose. It also does a reasonably good job of always putting more villages in your way to keep your quest log well-fed, and there were brief moments of satisfaction to be gained from seeing how some of them loop back into one another further down the line.
Turns out the road to saving this alien species from extinction is to herd birds and collect fruit. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Thing is, while its menus have a whiff ofmanagement gameabout them, the whole system is so beholden to ticking boxes in a specific order that it becomes nothing more than a big, inter-connected checklist of tasks to complete. This is not a game about spinning multiple different plates in multiple different villages, and even quests that ask you to stockpile certain resources seemingly never need topping up once they’ve been deposited. Once each quest was complete, I didn’t have to think about it ever again, and it’s wholly lacking that sense of permanence and evolution that makes otherRPGsprawls feel so alive with opportunity.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
The humour isn’t quite as cringe as Jagged Alliance 3, but there was certainly a lot of eye-rolling going on. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Combat, too, feels trivially easy, making even Outcast’s more action-packed encounters and facility takedowns feel leaden and tepid - and that’s before you realise they’re all constructed from the same clutch of identical corridor templates in slightly remixed configurations. The third-person shooting is serviceable, but Slade’s choice of laser pistol and rifle both lack any sense of heft or impact when pulling the trigger, and your enemies are all such dullards that you can pick them all off from a distance without barely stepping foot in the place. Indeed, if you find yourself engaging with its also quite lacklustre melee punch-ups, something’s gone wrong, especially when the game’s idea of upping the difficulty is to simply throw more of everything at you at once.
Alas, managing its growing crowds is equally monotonous. Slade only know how to go on the offensive in A New Beginning, which means battles simply descend into drawn-out stand-offs where you’re taking potshots while darting in and out of doorways to stay just outside your prey’s patrol zone. There are upgrades and modules and extra gubbins to collect to make your guns more powerful, but I rarely felt the need to actually make use of them. These robots arethatmuch of a pushover.
The auto-aim assist is so generous in this game that it’s practically unfair to the poor robots. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Ultimately, it just makes Outcast: A New Beginning feel very tired and generic - an open world that might have impressed a decade ago, but now comes across as a game both out of time and out of favour. A small word on the game’s performance, too, before I close, which (politely) runs like arse. Aside from frequent stutters when moving to new areas at speed, there were also moments where the frame rate had a full-on meltdown, descending into a farcical slideshow. Publishers THQ Nordic have assured me that optimisation patches are incoming for launch day, but oof, the review build was not a pretty sight at times, lemme tell ya. Even without these performance issues, though, Outcast: A New Beginning has bigger, more fundamental problems lying at its heart. It may finally look like the Adelpha you dreamed about 25 years ago, but this weary sequel has never felt more alienating.
