Outlaws is perfect for anyone who needs a break from soldiering or spellcasting...

User Rating: 8.3 | Outlaws PC
By JOE714 | Review Date:
To me, Outlaws had the apparent distinction of beginning its development life cycle with one very good question: what kind of FPS does the world need that doesn’t involve space marines or wizards? The answer, natch, involved a visit to an era when seemingly every cowboy, saloon madam, preacher, travelling salesman, and even stablehand was packing heat and loaded for bear; when the explanation “he needed killin’” was a perfectly plausible argument for homicide. Like Doom and Heretic’s one-against-many theme, Outlaws presented the player with no recourse but to take up arms against wave after wave of uncompromising predators to save a life (which, in James Anderson’s case, was his adorable pig-tailed daughter’s). The animated introduction and cutscenes in Outlaws were always interesting and well-designed, as were the levels themselves; in fact, the cartoon theme in the former served to excuse and even enhance the dated, blocky, and pixellated tones in the latter. One of my few complaints about the game’s sprite-based targets is that hit detection was somewhat off when aiming from an extremely high or low level. Cheating the angle a bit (aiming slightly under the target from above, or over the enemy from below) was an easy remedy, however.

Notable Feature: To the best of my recollection, Outlaws was one of the first shooters that required the player to manually reload his weapon. Although the effect of that requirement on the play mechanics in some games is certainly arguable, the reload time for Anderson’s single- and double-barreled shotguns definitely generated more excitement when the odds against him were stacked high.

Favorite Weapon: I’m going to vote for the Winchester rifle here, if only because the picture-in-picture scope view was astonishingly useful for picking out the game’s heavily pixellated targets over long distances. The rifle was also effective up close, so I kept it in hand as long as bullets were available.

Favorite Enemy: Most of Outlaws’ blocky bad guys were little more than boots, jeans, a chambray shirt, and a ten-gallon hat whose accents and vocal patterns changed as the game cycled through its relatively limited set of taunts. The villainous archetypes who served as a very deadly final obstacle on each level were well-designed, but were ultimately just the same bad guys with some extra punch in their characteristic weapons of choice.

Favorite Level: Outlaws included a set of “Historical Missions” and “Marshall Training” bounty hunts in addition to the interconnected story levels. The extra material covered a few different styles of conflict as a warmup to the main game, like close-quarters fighting (the Villa) and long-distance sniping (“Buckshot” Morgan’s Fort level, which also appeared in the main game). The Ice Caverns level was tough at the beginning and surprising toward the end, when Anderson found himself in a barely-controlled slide down a long, slippery slope.

LucasArts has produced some of the best sci-fi shooters in history with their Dark Jedi Republic Academy Outcast Commando Forces series. Their decision to visit an era not quite so long ago and in a galaxy all our own yielded some excellent gunplay and compelling Wild West drama in Outlaws. Although I’ve “retired” most of my 2.5D games (many of which don’t really work well on a P4 running XP, anyway), I think I’ll keep this title around for one more pass in a few years.

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