Outcast: A New Beginning takes the franchise that pushed the open-world action RPG and pushes mediocrity. Attractive vistas are met with repetitive gameplay and terrible performance. You are Cutter Slade, a hilariously named protagonist who has lost his memory after the events of the first game. Through an Alien world that feels like Earth with dumber-looking people, you’ll trudge and repeat your way to victory as you jetpack around and shoot lots of robots.
The Settings
Adelpha is the alien planet where the local populace looks like a potato version of the Na’vi of Avatar. You are their human savior, Cutter Slade. Taking place after the events of the first game you somehow have returned. The Yods (their version of Gods, how clever) have brought you back to life after the mustache-twirling evil bad guy humans executed you for daring to have not died in the first game. Adelpha can be very pretty. Outcast: A New Beginning is a large open world with varied biome diversity and a decent if trope-filled art style.
The game focuses on a non-linear approach to completing its quests in a similar style to the first title. You have several local villages to do repetitive side quests for as you try to save the people from the big bad humans in orbit. Said humans used to be your bosses and they’ve enslaved the locals and started strip-mining the planet bare. If you called this story Crapvatar you wouldn’t be far off. It is as basic as an invading force vs. the “savage locals” story can be.
My biggest issue is that this is a dimension-hopping sci-fi story, but the aliens are entirely a Zucker-bros-style representation of humanity. Most of the game’s humor comes in the form of “Surely you can’t mean that. ‘I do, and don’t call me Shirley” style of gags. Every alien is Drax, and they take your metaphors literally every single time and it started to drive me insane after an hour. All of their cultural touchstones are based on human ideals, and it just feels like weird potato-head people on Earth 2. It’s the worst form of sci-fi, you just give slightly different names to normal human things and call it alien.
Gameplay
The saving grace of Outcast: A New Beginning would be its gameplay if it wasn’t stuck in a game that runs horrifically for me on PC. They did not have Xbox code, and I fear for that version of the game as it doesn’t even list 60fps+ on its store page. I have a 5800x CPU and 7900XTX GPU and could barely maintain 45 fps at 4k High or Ultra settings during heavy combat. The game runs terribly and kills what otherwise would be fairly fun.
The idiotically named Cutter finds a Jetpack early on and as you slowly unlock its abilities the game becomes far more enjoyable when things work correctly. At first, the Jetpack helps with jumping higher up, though the game has no mantling, so it never feels great. Everything is played from 3rd person perspective with a camera that is pulled fairly far out. Once you’ve unlocked the first few abilities with your Jetpack you’ll be flying around (about 5 feet off the ground) the rest of the game. A press of both bumpers will put you into hover mode, where you can zip around to your heart’s content. Cutscenes are frustrating because Cutter just flies everywhere during them, something you don’t get to do during gameplay.
You get a couple of weapons that you can slot various mods into. Your pistol can have 4 mod slots while your rifle can have 6. It’s a fun system that encourages exploration so that you can customize your shooting experience to your heart’s content. Both weapons have ammo, green for pistol and red for rifle. Once you’re out you can still shoot though it will be slower and do less damage. Shooting on controller and mouse felt ok. The best parts of this game reach the “OK” level and never go above that.
You will spend most of your time doing fetch quests for local tribes. It’s a game of busy work and if you’re in the mood to clear a checklist it could be enjoyable. I found the mission UI to be cool in concept and frustrating in use. There are a lot of submenus and it’s not always clear where to go for a particular thing until you’ve found how to choose it and then check again on your map. There are too many presses to get simple things selected.
Mission variety is low, with many of them feeling like tutorials on how to use certain ability unlocks. You can access them at almost any time but the game’s UI will make sure to say if you don’t have the necessary skills to easily complete a task. Your Jetpack has a battery meter and you’ll need to unlock all of it to complete the more challenging side quest puzzles. There are two upgrade currencies, one for you and one for your guns. Enemies drop the latter often and mission completion is the main way to get the former.
Presentation
Outcast: A New Beginning is an OK-looking 2014 open-world title, and it performs like it used to be on that terrible hardware. There is nothing about this game, visually, that should cause it to run so poorly on such a powerful PC but it sure does. No matter what settings I changed it never felt smooth, even with AMD’s fluid motion frame tech stating I was getting 125 fps it felt terrible at all times. Only when I dropped the resolution to 1080p, the settings too high, and the FOV down to 70 did it feel consistent (and fuzzy) near 60fps.
Character models look like an uprezzed 360 title for the most part. Creature animation work is decent, and emotions tend to mostly come through faces during cutscenes. The writing is thoroughly disappointing as previously stated. It’s cliché, character motivations are obvious, plot beats are easy to see coming from a mile away, and I felt compelled to skip all dialogue after 5 hours or so. The voice actors are trying their best. I can’t fault them at all but I simply couldn’t stand listening to what they had to say anymore.
The best part of the game is the soundtrack. Lush, beautiful orchestral tunes carry what is otherwise a stilted audio experience. Whenever you enter or leave combat, or a cutscene starts up the game just cuts out all audio with a hard fade or direct drop in all sound. It’s jarring and while their notes mentioned fixing it a full re-download of the game patch hit before launch and it was no better.
Bug wise I had so damned many issues. When a game runs this poorly it shouldn’t be a shock but the amount of times I got stuck in the environment for a fairly long amount of time before the game realized it was in the dozens. When this happens, it will flash to a blinding white screen and then move you into a safe spot close to where you were stuck. I had multiple hard crashes as well on PC, and I would highly recommend waiting to see what others say about console performance on this title. It’s a big, ambitious game that doesn’t feel quite ready yet.
Wrapping Things Up
Outcast: A New Beginning does its best to invoke a sense of wonder as you jetpack 4 feet off of the ground in an occasionally beautiful alien world. Weak writing, terrible performance, and repetitive quest design work together to make it a dour experience in the end.
Outcast: A New Beginning
Played on
PC
PROS
- Occasionally Beautiful
- Jetpack!
- Decent Shooting
CONS
- Writing
- Performance
- Bugs
- Repetition
- Acting
