Outcast: Second Contact

Although its augmentations are selective and skin deep, Outcast remains a generous and uniquely captivating game.

Despite that, Adelpha’s diverse environments still prove every bit as enjoyable to explore as those in a modern release. And Slade, daft name and all, is a bright spot, managing to straddle that precarious line between annoyingly cocky and charming, like a proto Nathan Drake. The variety of his arsenal can make combat entertaining if you stick around long enough to master it, but the game almost dares you not to. With how difficult it is to both a) learn all the mechanics and b) execute actions with Slade’s lumbering movement, it’s tempting just to move on, and to leave Outcast in the past.

Return to the '90s, and then one step beyond in Outcast: Second Contact.

With pretty landscapes and settings, Outcast - Second Contact fulfills its aim to recreate the original.

Every game is the first something. Wolfenstein 3D is known as the 3D shooter, Pong is known as the first video game, and Undertale is the first game to make me shoot chocolate milk through my nose. Outcast: Second Contact, a remake of the original, is hailed as the first 3D open world. Whether or not that is true is debatable, but it's frankly impossible to play Outcast and not see the inspiration it had for the action-adventure genre.

In 1999, video games were cruising into the third dimension with hits like Donkey Kong 64 and Silent Hill. Outcast was impressive when it released initially, offering a huge open world in a 3D environment with quests, NPCs, and combat. It garnered a bit of fame, became a somewhat small cult classic, and faded into obscurity. Now, eighteen years later, Appeal has remastered their creation for old fans and new players alike. I can easily say that this remaster brings Outcast to life and goes far beyond the original, but at the end of the day, it struggles quite a bit to compete with other remast...

No summary available

A great remaster of a forgotten almost-classic, but most of its flaws were already obvious 18 years ago and this does little to improve any of them.

Outcast: Second Contact is an eighteen year old game that’s been given a makeover. This is absolutely fine if you’re a fan of the original and want to play it again on modern hardware, but if you don’t have the nostalgia quality there’s absolutely nothing that you won’t find here that’s done far better elsewhere. For a steep price tag of £39.99 on PS4, that’s just not good enough.