[Zaxx]

The remake to the classic game Outcast is out:
http://store.steampo...Second_Contact/

My guess is that this game is better known in Europe so a quick summarization for all the Americans: Outcast is one of the best fuckin' games ever made and you should play it. This is where Assassin's Creed comes from, it's the first true 3D open world action-adventure game straight from 1999. The difference: this is an actual mix of the action and adventure genres so you get the usual TPS gameply combined with deep world building and good puzzle design. The protagonist is Cutter Slade, a Navy SEAL who borrows a lot from John McLane in personality and Duke when it comes to the variety of his arsenal and gadgets.

The remake itself stays very true to the original, it's literally the same game with better graphics, more refined controls (not super refined though so expect 1-2 hours of getting used to how things work), faster combat and a bunch of added information that makes the game a bit more easy to approach for newcomers. That doesn't mean dumbing it down though since the original Outcast was famous for its lack of handholding: you're thrown into an alien world that really feels alien (you even have to learn some of the alien language if you want to really understand what is going on so now they included translations to those words in the subtitles), you have a mission, you have to figure out how to accomplish it. Accomplishing it largely revolves around overthrowing a dictatorship, to do that you complete missions that weaken the strength of the army and heighten the natives' morale so a revolution would become possible. The remake's added info screen helps you understand just how to do that step by step, otherwise everything is identical to the original.

Here's a trailer:


Eurogamer review:
http://www.eurogamer...-contact-review

[Maisth]

Feels more like a Remaster than a Remake

[Zaxx]

Maisth, on 17 November 2017 - 05:41 PM, said:

Feels more like a Remaster than a Remake

If you mean a graphical upgrade as a "remaster" then that's mostly true, yes, but overall I think it's somewhere between the two. In the technical sense it's a full remake (they ditched the original voxel-based engine and remade the game using Unity), when it comes to the gameplay the changes are a bit more subtle. Combat works a bit differently because the enemies are a bit smarter and shoot faster, you have the camera over your shoulder instead of the original centered TPS and FPS views, sneaking is different (you crouch instead of proning) so now it actually works and you can take cover without losing the ability to start shooting quickly etc. Of course a "stealth playstyle" is still not something you can do but you can set up simple ambushes a lot better. Oh, and they added a new dodge move but strafing is a lot more useful than that so it's not a huge addition.

This video explains the combat changes pretty well:

They did not make the AI super smart though, the enemies do corner and flank you if they have the chance but the old tricks still work. You can still use the invisibility gadget, carry a large dynamite to the center of a crowd and then detonate it with a proximity detonator and you can still throw down a hologram and just kill everyone with the flamethrower while they are shooting your fake double.

Overall I think the HUD and the new UI is what makes it a blast compared to the original: it's cool that I can aim with the grenade launcher accurately, it's very useful to have an analytics screen that shows how what you're doing affects the soldiers exactly and the new map makes finding talans a lot easier (thankfully they did not add mission markers and stuff like that so you still have to ask around if you want to find people but the map helps just enough so you won't do that for hours).

What holds the game a bit down is the audio quality: the devs originally wanted to re-record the voice acting and re-write the dialogue to a certain extent (so you wouldn't see X-Files references in 2017) but the low budget did not make that possible. They did not have the uncompressed recordings anymore so the audio quality is straight from 1999 too. Thank God that the soundtrack was CD audio originally and that the original composer remastered it a few years ago so at least the music sounds top notch.

[X-Vector]

I bought the original back in the day and the 1.1 version earlier this year during a Steam sale (for € 2), never got to far into it but Outcast SC looks interesting enough for the remake to peak my interest.
There are two things that make me cautious though.
First off I don't know how well this game would perform on my PC given that it's almost seven years old now; the Unity engine System Shock pre-alpha demo doesn't run all that smoothly and newer releases are generally rather hit or miss on my system ("hit" being Dirt Rally and Mad Max, with Mafia 3 and Dishonored 2 in the "miss" category).
Secondly, I've seen a number of reports that mention control issues, even from people that give the game a thumbs up overall.
Not being able to rebind mouse keys should not be a deal breaker, but sluggish/delayed input response and awkward maneuvering definitely is.
Perhaps these problems can be mended in a future patch, but odds are that the early bird and 1.1 owner discounts will be gone by then and I don't see myself buying this at full price (€ 35).

[Zaxx]

X-Vector, on 18 November 2017 - 02:04 AM, said:

First off I don't know how well this game would perform on my PC given that it's almost seven years old now

That may be a problem because the graphics options menu is terrible:

3 presets (the devs say it will be expanded in a patch), that's all so the game must scale quite badly. Anyway it's hard to judge without your specs but the system requirements are not that steep, significantly lower than something like Mafia 3 or Dishonored 2. I play it on an i7 2600 (a 2011 Sandy Bridge CPU) and a GTX 970 and apart from the occasional CPU bottleneck I get a mostly stable 60 fps on the highest settings in 1080p.

As for the controls: it's hit and miss really so it takes a bit of getting used to. I'll try to summarize the issues along with a few tips:

- First things first: even though the original game was a PC exclusive, compared to more modern games it handles like shit on a mouse and keyboard setup. Back in 1999 there was no standard on how to do a third person action-adventure game so developers came up with a bunch of different stuff. Outcast nailed some of its controls (free camera movement with the mouse for example) while royally fucked up other parts of it (you jump with the mouse 1 button, try wrapping your head around that one). Then dual analog controllers became standard on consoles and lo and behold, using those with Outcast is a revelatory experience: it really feels like the game was designed for a modern controller even though modern controllers did not really exist when it came out.

Appeal realized this when they implemented controller support to Outcast 1.1 and Second Contact pretty much runs with the idea (now changing directions during movement is the easiest with controlling the camera for example) considering it's a multiplatform release. Long story short: use a controller, it will make your life much easier and if you look at the complaints people who say the controls are terrible play with a mouse and keyboard.

- Compared to the original game the movement is not snappy enough: Cutter needs a bit of momentum to start moving at full speed and that's not how it was originally. This is not an issue during combat because when you're aiming with a weapon you'll have an instant / constant, fast movement speed with accurate controls but it is something you have to get used to.

- Cutter can sprint now which is great and super useful but they somehow managed to put the dodge move on the sprint button too so this is how it works: if you move forward while holding the sprint button you sprint, if you press A or D (or push the controller's left analog stick to the left or right) while holding the sprint button the character will do a dodge. The result: you sometimes dodge accidentally. I hope they fix this.

- They changed the jumping which is great because the original method was just terrible but since the movement is a bit momentum based jumping became momentum based too. It's awesome and skillful if it works, it's frustrating if it doesn't but thankfully its overall functionality was fine-tuned for the game's mandatory platforming sections so at those parts you won't have problems (no more falling into water in Cyana while fixing the lighthouse).

As for picking it up or not: I say give it a go, there's always Steam refunds if it runs like shit and Shamazaar is the perfect place to test out performance.

[MusicallyInspired]

What a weird title for a remake.

[Zaxx]

MusicallyInspired, on 18 November 2017 - 03:18 PM, said:

What a weird title for a remake.

Sending the probe to the other dimension was the first contact with the talans, Cutter's mission is the second. Still sounds like if it were a sequel though.

[Zaxx]

First patch is out, most importantly it fully fixes the controls:
http://steamcommunit...66180591763819/