Outcast: A New Beginning Review – An Empty Open World

When it first came out all the way back in 1999, Outcast was an innovative and even visionary title. In an era where most games didn’t really have too much of an emphasis on their storylines outside of adventure games or RPGs, Outcast was a fully 3D open world game with a deep plot, a rare commodity of its time, and expert use of a technology to render its massive world where players could go wherever they want. The long-awaited sequel, however, comes at a time where many would argue that the genre of open world games has been perfected by various titles, be it Fromsoftware’s Elden Ring, or even Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series. In a time where featuring an open world by itself isn’t really much of a selling point anymore, Outcast – A New Beginning has to figure out how it can set itself apart.

There are a few things I immediately liked about Outcast – A New Beginning, at least initially. The world of Adelpha is wonderful, gorgeous, and incredibly interesting from not only a visual perspective, but from an NPC interaction standpoint as well. Just about every interaction you can have with just about any of the world’s natives indicates that there’s a rich history behind the game. While the game succeeds in making protagonist Cutter Slade feel like someone who is going to save the world from doom, the people of Adelpha seemed to have lives before he showed up which adds to the world’s immersion factor.

Sadly enough, this doesn’t last long. You see, Outcast can’t seem to make up its mind about whether to assume that the player might have experience with the original Outcast or not. Right from beginning, it’s going to start wildly throwing alien terms and phrases at you, and while there’s a glossary for every conversation that updates in real time as the conversation goes on, a lot of the dialogue in Outcast – A New Beginning really suffers from not only trying to provide just a bit too much information to the player, but also just feeling like it’s been quite poorly written. This also impacts the characterization of various NPCs throughout the game. Since the game is bound to its fiction to such an extent, some characters can just start feeling downright insufferable as they start repeating the same alien words and phrases in the same conversation.

Thankfully, the moment you actually get to play Outcast – A New Beginning, things start feeling much better. Controlling Slade feels responsive and quick, and once you get your hands on the jetpack, one of the central features of the game, the combat, as well as traversal starts feeling a lot better than just running around everywhere. When it comes to combat, you only really have a single gun to start out w ith that can be endlessly customized with various modules in order to change its behavior. While its default form acts as a pistol, slapping enough modules on to it can turn it into something much more fun, like an SMG that shoots explosive rounds, or a shotgun that can concuss enemies, for example.

By making use of Red Helidium, you can unlock new mod slots for your gun, which in turn allows you to modify it. The sheer variety of mods on offer can open up interesting combat strategies. While this might largely come down to using a few specific mods that work well for your style of play, the fact that Outcast allows you to experiment quite a bit with your primary weapons is a great thing.

"Controlling Slade feels responsive and quick"

Progression throughout Outcast – A New Beginning revolves around finding and making use of a few specific currencies, namely different colored Helidium, Nano-Cells, and even money. These range from allowing you to upgrade your weapons, to giving you traversal abilities for the open world, to even unlocking extra mod slots for your weapons so that you can add even more ludicrous effects to your shot. The progression largely remains inconsequential, especially once you get a couple of key early-game upgrades like the ability to glide or a couple of weapon mod slots. Once you hit a certain point in the game, it can be downright easy to forget that you might have some upgrades waiting for you thanks to all the materials and currencies you’ve gathered, especially if it weren’t for an in-game message system that lets you know about having enough upgrade points.

Generally speaking, the progression system feels decent enough without feeling too overbearing. It’s incredibly easy to target specific progression currencies that you might want to grind up. A lot of the upgrade tree feels like filler, however. Aside from key abilities like gliding or mid-air dodging, a lot of the backpack upgrade tree, for instance, is just more jetpack fuel, which can feel quite underwhelming.

And, of course, let’s not forget that the jetpack deserves its spot as the big feature for Outcast – A New Beginning. Along with giving you regular abilities like dashing and jumping, you also eventually get to unlock the ability to glide along the ground or soar through the air. The moment you unlock these abilities is when the exploration aspects of the game start getting really fun. There’s a level of freedom you get once you get the ability to glide that isn’t really matched by too many other games, and this is definitely helped by the fact that Outcast’s open world is designed to encourage just about every bit of use you can get out of the jetpack as possible.

"The progression system feels decent enough without feeling too overbearing"

Unfortunately, the game’s open world doesn’t feel like it’s well equipped for the player to have all this freedom during usual gameplay. There just isn’t much out in the world in the way of clever discoveries or moments of emergent gameplay. While the world’s beautiful, there just isn’t much there to make exploration worth it. To top it off, most of the side content revolves around just killing certain numbers of specific enemies and this bland design leaks through the game’s main quests as well, where things never really get more interesting than “go here and kill things”.

Despite these shortcomings with its open world, however, it’s difficult to not find some level of charm in Outcast – A New Beginning. Slade, for instance, is an incredibly charming protagonist with equal measures of determination and sincerity that makes following his journey surprisingly interesting. Similarly, the Talans you encounter throughout Adelpha tend to have their own unique personalities, and while their dialogues can often feel like a slog, there are just enough moments of comedy or drama that will keep you going.

Outcast’s story tackles many of the same topics as its predecessor. They were considered revolutionary back then but now has become common enough in the modern video game landscape that nothing in it really stands out. In fact, the story can get downright boring, since the conflict between Talans and humans is one-dimensional. The game also has the incredibly bad habit of forcibly showing you cutscenes that really should have been gameplay instead. Just about every side quest and story mission in the game will constantly break up the action and wrest control from the player, only to show Slade doing exactly what the player was likely going to do anyway. While only slightly bearable early in the game where you’re still presumably learning the ropes, this quickly starts getting out of hand and ultimately had the nasty side-effect of almost discouraging me from doing just about any quest.

"The game also has the incredibly bad habit of forcibly showing you cutscenes that really should have been gameplay instead."

Outcast – A New Beginning feels like it might be stuck in the past. The good thing about it is that there’s a level of freedom that you get quite early in the experience that you just wouldn’t really get from many modern games, especially once you get a couple of upgrades for your jetpack. And to that end, flying around in the world of Adelpha is definitely one of the most fun open world experiences out there. The bad part of being stuck in the past is in the design of the quests, a design that feels like it’s too scared of the freedom that it has given to its players, and keeps trying to take control away from you to make sure that Slade does the right thing through cutscenes instead of gameplay.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.