Outcast: A New Beginning by Appeal Studios is the reimagining of the old third person shooter, Outcast. Invaders have come to the planet Adelpha, causing a disturbance of the inhabitants’ way of life. Can you be the mediator that stops the invaders and progresses the lives of the Talan?
I’m currently halfway through the game I believe, but also could be just scratching the surface. Outcast has a nice steady progression of story beats, where there doesn’t seem to be much grind, but more and more story reveals itself. The storylines act like spiderwebs, where you’ll explore a location, learn about the problems to solve, then dive deeper into that problem. Different from a spiderweb, your actions are pretty linear. Even collecting the items you need won’t complete a different mission unless you specifically mark to track that mission. While that problem can be a little irksome, I do respect the design in it, because it forces the player to open the task menu to see all the other tasks that need to be done.
Currently Outcast consists of a lot of fetch quests and escort missions. There’s even a quest where you have to take a baby sky creature out for a walk. While cute in its essence, escort missions kind of feel like a drag. They give the feeling of someone forcing you to do chores, and chores feel like, well, a chore. Looking on the bright side, escort missions take you through various parts of the world that you weren’t used to exploring. You can find little shrines where you chase after orbs, cool quest items, enemy bases, and other landmarks. The problem when finding interesting things during an escort mission is that you have to make note of them to come back to later, after you finish the mission. Escort missions are a challenge to your attention span, not to their actual difficulty in gameplay. Seeing all the alien wildlife and fighting baddies gets me distracted, and it makes the task of guiding slow moving creatures boring.
The movement and fighting mechanics in Outcast are a nice variation to what you normally see in third person open world games. The high double jump is the most notable. It creates an extended verticality that other games don’t have. The developers take this ability to provide tall structures and make a more fleshed out and compact open world. There are floors and floors of Talans (alien people) and creatures living in the treetops. Having a stacked world allows the map to be smaller because more things can fit in one place. If everything was spread out and the map was larger, Outcast would definitely slack.
Looking forward to how the story branches out. No twists as we speak, but I feel something spicy coming along. I’m hoping that the missions will get a little more interesting, or if the story integrates itself into the gameplay a little more. Playing on with a positive outlook!
Jordan is playing Outcast: A New Beginning on PC with a review code.
