One of my first major explorations of retro games I undertook was diving into the golden era of LucasArts (or LucasFilm games). Maniac Mansion was, after all, one of the games the convinced me that not everything on the NES was impenetrable crap, but also I was a fan of Tim Schafer after Psychonauts.

While I was mainly interested in the developer’s backlog of poinks, I did check out their other stuff. One that interested me the most was Outlaws. When I finally played it, I bounced off it pretty hard. I remember exactly why. I thought, “What the fuck is this level design?”

I never went back to it, but I always keep an open mind. So, when Nightdive announced that it would be remastering the title, I was onboard to give it another try. This time, I played through this conclusion. My only thought now is, “What the fuck is this level design?”

HEY! MR. LAWMAN!

Outlaws is based on a sound theme: an early FPS based on Spaghetti Western movies. It’s built on the Jedi engine, which powered Star Wars: Dark Forces. It’s a pretty capable 2.5D engine. It does room-over-room more convincingly than anything I’ve seen in Duke Nukem 3D’s Build engine, for example.

The story follows James Anderson, an ex-U.S. Marshal. Some jerk, acting under orders from another jerk, kills his wife and abducts his daughter. Anderson then, obviously, goes on a killing spree, tearing a violent swath through a seemingly bottomless supply of goons to get revenge on those jerks. It’s such a trite narrative, but I think the objective was to evoke the feel of a Spaghetti Western without really trying to innovate on the standards. Mission complete.

The story is told through animated cutscenes, which are quite enjoyable. They’re nicely stylized, and Nightdive’s upscale lovingly retains the imperfections while cleaning up the overall image. Considering the narrative in a lot of the FPS games of the era were told through text crawls, the cutscenes help Outlaws stand out.

DON’T BE A FOOL, MASHAL!

Outlaws straddles this weird line of historic accuracy and cartoonish abstraction. The guns include fist, knife, revolver, rifle, shotgun, shotgun, shotgun, TNT, and allegedly portable gatling gun. I can appreciate there being nothing outlandish, but it’s strange to have three different flavours of shotgun. They are single-barrel, double-barrel, and double-barrel sawed-off. I’m not sure why there’s a single-barrel shotgun, since you can fire one barrel of the double-barrel. The range seems to be the same. You’d expect the sawed-off would just have higher spread, but it also has ridiculously short range. Sometimes, I’d swear it couldn’t hit a dude three metres away. I could spit on him from that close, but would still miss with the sawed-off. I mostly just stuck to the double-barrel, but the rifle, especially when you have the scope, is easily the best weapon in the game. And the TNT has ridiculously large splash damage, which is useful for clearing rooms or getting around corners.

But on that note, most weapons have secondary fire, which is nice. In particular, the revolver has a rapid-fire mode which extends its usefulness beyond a simple pea-shooter. Not something that was really common in video games at the time.

There isn’t a very wide range of enemies. In fact, I’d have difficulty telling you what the practical differences are with many of them. The ones that throw TNT are obvious, but everyone else just seems to shoot. If they’re throwing different projectiles, I can’t tell them apart. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to recognize which enemies throw dynamite based on appearance. They’re all just a bunch of guys wearing hats and neckerchiefs.

Strangely, there are a lot of dudes on medium difficulty (Bad), and they’re everywhere. There are times that you solve a puzzle and find the area beyond crawling with baddies, even though they clearly didn’t have access to square, stone keys.

Most levels cap off with a boss. Most of the bosses also just shoot bullets. However, they do significantly more damage and can kill you in one or two hits (again, on medium difficulty). Generally, it’s best to get them at a distance, or throw TNT around the corner.

HOPE YOU HAVE A COFFIN PICKED OUT!

Going back to the level design I mentioned in the opening, it certainly is interesting. It’s varied, to be sure. Many of the levels seem to be aiming for a sort of realistic approach. You’ll often just be assaulting forts or towns, going from building to building, room to room, clearing them of baddies. They often feel like early fan-made levels. These attempts to create realistic spaces in 2.5D engines that always seem to neglect flow or coherence. Which, to an extent, I have a fondness for.

The second level has you in a town, and it seems like you explore to find keys to get into different buildings. But I think the boss is just wandering around in one corner of the map. Like, out in the open. At the very least, I wasn’t done exploring when he started shooting at me and taunting. I don’t know if he was always there or something triggered him, but it was weird to just have him roaming in the open taking potshots at me while I was still trying to find keys.

Then there are more corridor-like levels and traditional key-hunts. The sawmill is awful, involving puzzles that require switches to be hit while flowing downstream in a horrible maze. I was feeling the pain, so I looked it up. Apparently the stage is a bit notorious among fans.

At the same time, I don’t hate the level design. It’s not as bad as Star Wars: Dark Forces, which makes sense, since it’s a completely different team of level designers. It’s just that it feels really unpolished and un-playtested. A lot of the stages feel like experiments that weren’t refined into enjoyable experiences. Still, I’d rather they be somewhat awkward than uninventive and bland. It just means that Outlaws doesn’t always feel that great to play.

YOU’RE OUTNUMBERED!

The remaster is a pretty mixed bag, as well. While most attempts by Nightdive try to stay as true to the original visuals as possible, it seems like there was some difficulty when it came to Outlaws. That’s probably because the visuals were already uneven. Parts of it have a stylized, hand-drawn look, and others are pre-rendered from 3D models. Nightdive’s artists recreated the models as best they could to pull new, higher-resolution renders, but the increased fidelity shows the awkwardness of the approach.

The textures in Outlaws also didn’t have a hand-drawn look to it. So, you essentially have stylized cartoon mixed with pre-rendered mixed with pixel art. And that stands out even more when it’s cleaned up. That’s not necessarily Nightdive’s fault, since they were just trying to stay as close as possible to the original intention. However, when it comes to the more cartoonish elements, such as the character’s hands, I wish they went with a more, erm, hand-drawn look. Instead, they have consistent, bold lines and shading that remind me of old Flash games.

You can, however, just switch back to the original rendering, so it’s sort of a non-issue. At that point, we can just blame Outlaws for looking so weird. Personally, I played through with the remastered visuals, but going forward, I’ll probably use the original rendering. Again, I’m not saying Nightdive did a bad job, it’s just easier to swallow low resolution awkwardness.

Thankfully, Outlaws’ soundtrack is the most consistently high quality part of the entire package. It was fantastic back when the game released, and it’s fantastic now.

I HOPE YOU PLANT BETTER THAN YOU SHOOT!

Included is the Handful of Missions expansion. The whole package is actually called Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster, but I resent typing that out so much. But that’s not important. The Handful of Missions is kind of neat. The levels in the main story feel very experimental, and that continues into the expansion. But since they’re a bunch of disconnected scenarios, it sort of feels more acceptable because they don’t require any consistency. That also allows for a greater range of locations and situations.

Otherwise, it’s hard to really sum up what I think about Outlaws. It’s a very rough game. You can still taste the experimentation with every lick. Some of it pays off. Some of it doesn’t. That’s something that usually gets smoothed over with iteration, but that doesn’t seem to have really happened here, from what I can tell. It’s kind of raw, which is, again, not a bad thing. It’s just not a terrific thing, either.

The quality of the visual remaster isn’t the best that Nightdive has done, but, as I went over earlier, I think that’s largely due to the unevenness of Outlaws’ original visuals. It’s solid for what it is. But if the updated visuals really bother you, you can just revert to the original rendering. Otherwise, everything seems to be here, and it seems to work well. The vault of behind-the-scenes goodies is a little sparse with this release, but still worthwhile to skim through. I didn’t try multiplayer, because that just isn’t my scene.

So, there you have it. A solid remaster of a decent game. I’m not going to make a The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly reference, but here’s a fistful of review points.

6/10

This review was conducted using a digital pre-release Steam version of the game. It was provided by the publisher’s PR.