Outcast – A New Beginning Review

Outcast – A New Beginning is a 2024 reimagination of the 1999 cult classic Outcast. The game takes players to Adelpha, a breathtaking alien world teeming with vibrant flora and fauna. You play as Cutter Slade, a cocky ex-Navy SEAL who gets blasted through a dimensional rift and finds himself stranded on Adelpha. While the original Outcast was praised for its innovative open world and quirky story, A New Beginning attempts to modernize the experience with a graphical overhaul and gameplay tweaks.

The original Outcast was a pioneer in the open-world genre. Released in a time dominated by linear adventures, it offered players an expansive alien world to explore freely, complete with side quests, hidden secrets, and a rich tapestry of alien cultures. While the graphics were groundbreaking for its time, the quirky dialogue and sometimes clunky controls became hallmarks of the game’s charm. A New Beginning retains the open-world structure of the original. You’ll traverse Adelpha on foot or soar through the skies with your handy jetpack, uncovering alien settlements, solving environmental puzzles, and engaging in combat with hostile indigenous creatures and the invading robotic forces. However, the execution can be uneven, leading to a mixed bag of experiences.

Exploration is undeniably the strongest aspect of A New Beginning. Adelpha is a visually stunning world, bursting with vibrant colors and strange alien lifeforms. Lush jungles teem with exotic creatures, some passive herbivores, and others territorial predators. Towering alien structures, seemingly defying gravity, hinting at an advanced but long-lost civilization. Vast alien plains unfurl before you, offering a sense of awe-inspiring scale that can leave you breathless. The jetpack adds a refreshing verticality to the exploration. Soaring through canyons, weaving between towering bioluminescent flora, and gliding over vast alien lakes adds a layer of freedom and exhilaration to traversing the world.

However, exploration can feel repetitive at times. While the developers populate the world with collectible items and environmental puzzles, these can feel like a chore rather than a rewarding discovery. Hidden stashes often contain generic crafting materials, with little to differentiate them from one another. Their placement can also feel arbitrary, scattered across the landscape with no logical reason. Puzzles can also be hit-or-miss. Some are genuinely clever, requiring you to manipulate the environment using your jetpack’s thrusters to activate hidden switches, use your weapons in creative ways to solve physics-based challenges, or interact with the unique properties of Adelpha’s flora. However, others are frustratingly obtuse, relying on obscure mechanics or trial-and-error approaches, and solutions can sometimes feel illogical, leading to moments of head-scratching confusion that disrupt the flow of exploration.

Combat is another area where A New Beginning stumbles. While the game offers a variety of weapons, from pistols and shotguns to energy rifles and experimental alien weaponry, the enemy types remain limited. You’ll face a handful of robotic enemy variants throughout the game, with only slight variations in their attack patterns and vulnerabilities. This repetition quickly sets in, making combat feel like a chore rather than a test of skill. The initial thrill of wielding alien weaponry quickly fades as you mow down wave after wave of the same robotic enemies.

The upgrade system for weapons adds some depth, allowing you to modify your firearms with different attachments and elemental effects. However, these upgrades feel incremental rather than transformative. You might gain a slight damage boost or a new elemental effect, but it doesn’t significantly change the core gameplay loop of shooting down repetitive enemies. Stealth mechanics are present, but the enemy AI doesn’t offer much challenge. Their limited field of vision and predictable patrol patterns make stealth takedowns feel more like a cheese tactic to avoid combat altogether rather than a viable strategic approach.

Compared to modern open-world giants like the Horizon game series, A New Beginning feels dated. While Adelpha is a beautiful world, it lacks the sheer density of activities and emergent gameplay found in those titles. The world feels sparsely populated, with alien settlements offering minimal interaction beyond basic fetch quests or generic barter systems. There’s a distinct lack of gameplay opportunities. You won’t stumble upon unexpected events, hidden storylines, or opportunities for creative problem-solving through environmental interaction. The world feels static, a beautiful backdrop for the core gameplay loop rather than a dynamic environment that rewards exploration and experimentation.

The jetpack traversal, while fun, doesn’t quite reach the exhilarating freedom of movement offered by something like Just Cause’s wingsuit. While A New Beginning captures the sense of soaring above a vast alien landscape, the controls can feel less precise, and the overall experience less bombastic compared to its open-world counterpart. Just Cause offered a sense of playground physics, where you could chain stunts and maneuvers together for an adrenaline rush. A New Beginning’s jetpack feels more grounded, limiting those opportunities for creative and physics-defying movement.

Despite its flaws, Outcast – A New Beginning offers a glimpse of what could have been. The core concept of exploring a beautiful and strange alien world holds immense potential. A New Beginning captures the wonder and awe of discovering a truly alien ecosystem, with its unique flora and fauna unlike anything found on Earth. The jetpack adds a vertical dimension to exploration that can be exhilarating at times. However, the repetitive combat, uneven puzzle design, and technical issues significantly hamper the overall experience.

Unfortunately, A New Beginning is plagued by technical issues that significantly hamper the experience. Frame rate drops can occur during exploration and combat, especially in crowded areas with lots of foliage. The game also suffers from occasional crashes and glitches, disrupting the flow of gameplay. Also, there is a huge screen tearing problem in the game. The voice acting deserves its own category of criticism. While the original Outcast’s quirky dialogue held a certain charm, A New Beginning’s voice acting is a masterclass in mediocrity. The delivery is flat and emotionless, failing to breathe life into the characters or the narrative. Cutter Slade, the protagonist, comes across as arrogant and one-note, and the supporting cast fares no better.

With a focus on polishing the existing gameplay mechanics, adding more engaging activities to the world, such as deeper interaction with the alien cultures, more varied enemy types and combat encounters, and a greater emphasis on emergent gameplay and environmental storytelling, A New Beginning could have been a worthy successor to the original Outcast. As it stands, it remains a flawed but potentially nostalgic trip for fans of the original and a forgettable experience for newcomers seeking a polished and engaging open-world title.

Outcast – A New Beginning is a game caught between nostalgia and ambition. It captures the essence of the original’s open world and story, but technical issues, underwhelming voice acting, and repetitive gameplay elements hamper the execution. The core gameplay loop of exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat can be fun at times, but it lacks the depth and polish found in its open-world contemporaries. For players with fond memories of the original Outcast, A New Beginning might offer a trip down memory lane. However, for newcomers seeking a polished open-world experience, there are better options available to buy for 70 bucks!

The review code was provided by the publisher