‘Outcast – A New Beginning’ Review – Rocket Vet Adventures

New beginnings are lovely but rare – so the fact that 1999’s Outcast has received a modern revival for modern platforms is nothing short of either a stroke or luck or proof that developers Appeal Studios have made some blood pact with an eldritch god.

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Bringing with it a delightful sense of nostalgia and an impressive vehicle riding system that will lead players to wasting dozens of hours zipping around on a jetpack while fighting robots, Outcast – A New Beginning is a game that while very obviously made by a smaller developer with plenty of room to grow, will still delight fans who long-hoped for a proper return to the world of Adelpha.

Developed by Belgian studio Appeal and published by THQ Nordic, Outcast – A New Beginning is an open-world action-shooter platformer that serves as a continuation and sequel to the somewhat obscure, aforementioned 1999 PC game of the same name.

Funnily enough, the title of Outcast fits the original game to a ‘T’, as while relatively well-loved in Europe, it struggled to make a splash anywhere else – though not for lack of effort.

Made by Appeal and published by Infrogames, it was one of the first open-world action games to ever exist and featured things that while standard now, were limit-pushing at the time, including high fidelity voice acting, orchestral music, and both NPC reputation and general AI systems.

Unfortunately, its developers made a poor bet by choosing to produce its graphics using voxels instead of polygons – a choice between models being made up of squares versus triangles, basically.

While voxels are more accurate in their rendering, they used more computing power, and as such polygons instead become that 3D game industry standard.

For Infogrames, this decision meant that developing games for a voxel engine would become more expensive – and when combined with Outcast‘s already abysmal sales resulted in the series ultimately falling to the wayside.

Yet, by some miracle, 2014 saw most of the original Appeal team reunite to update the game for Steam (and at the same time place its ownership solely under the Appeal banner). Then, three years later, they managed to release a complete and overall decent remake of the game, Outcast: Second Contact‘, in the Unity engine.

And now, a quarter of a century after the original’s release, the team has returned to pick back up right where they left off with A New Beginning – and I mean that near literally, as the game feels like someone stepped into a time machine and introduced today’s development tools to the dev sensibilities of the 1990s.

Bearing a strong narrative and visual resemblance to both the TV show Stargate SG1 and James Cameron’s Avatar films, A New Beginning follows the adventures of Cutter Slade, an amnesiac, 50-something military spec-ops vet who after his last adventure on the alien planet is returned to world of Adelpha in order to help liberate its Talan people from a looming invasion by a technologically-advanced foe.

As far as graphics go, the game looks excellent, particularly in its lush environments, which feature a solid mix of organic landscape and sci-fi offerings.

The same holds true for its performance, as though I’m sure I experienced some slow-down or graphic hitches during my time with the PS5 version of the game, they were so minimal that I can’t even really remember any particularly ‘bad’ highlights.

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Unfortunately, the same cannot be fully said of its story, as though A New Beginning‘s ambitious world-building efforts are both commendable and something sci-fi enthusiasts will appreciate, its narrative elements, especially in the early game, feel more like a nuisance than anything else. It also just feels truncated overall, akin to a grand epic being hastily edited into a novella.

(However, it should be noted that the game’s voice acting, which features Luke Roberts of Band of Brothers fame as Cutter himself, is exceptional.)

But that isn’t too big of a drawback, as the story is not why most players will be coming to A New Beginning.

Instead, what they’ll likely be heading to Adelpha for is the game’s enjoyable traversal options and ‘pew-pew’ shooty gameplay.

Similar to the Assassin’s Creed or Switch-era The Legend of Zelda games, A New Beginning’s addictive gameplay loop involves engaging with light story elements as a motivation to move from challenge to challenge, with activity completion being the key to enhancing your talents and equipment.

However, for all the fun this loop provides, I do have to admit that the core gunplay, while fun, feel cut-and-paste from other ‘over-the-shoulder-camera-shooters’ you’ve played before.

The game’s mechanical ‘pièce de résistance’ is its vehicle riding system, which once unlocked easily becomes its most compelling feature. Nothing is more fun than zipping around with your jetpack or forcing some poor creature into combat as your mighty and loyal steed while you fight a futuristic analogy for the US military. The last time I found such joy and lost so much time pursuing enemies in this fashion was perhaps last year’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora or 2016’s Far Cry: Primal.

Meanwhile, the game’s focus on cinematics helps to break-up the gameplay, with unique events happening often enough to keep the overall experience from getting stale, but don to foster an itch to get back to its core gameplay loop.

It’s important to temper one’s expectations with A New Beginning, as while many players might expect AAA polish here, that would ignore the fact that the title was made by a smaller team on a reduced budget from those typical for open-world titles.

But don’t let that deter you – as proven by Palworld and Helldivers 2, a game that is slightly-rough-around-the-edges but made by a team who actually cares about their work can often deliver more fun to players than the most big-budget offering.

Ultimately, it’s okay to play a game you only hope to invest a few dozen hours into instead of a few hundred, so if you’re looking for a game where you can relax, fly around, and enjoy the sarcastic musings of a pterodactyl-riding action hero, then Outcast – A New Beginning just might be worth your time.

A review copy of this game was provided by THQ Nordic

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