I’m into old games. I’m really into old-old games from the times when I was a kid, my life was simple, and I didn’t even need to know the English language to understand and love the game. Outlaws is this game.
Produced by LukasArts. Yes, the LukasArts. The same LukasArts that created Star Wars games, The Curse of Monkey Island, Sam & Max, and many-many-many other games I can’t remember at the moment. So, yeah, no wonder the game was awesome.
Outlaws is a first-person shooter where you play as a retired Marshal turned vigilante on the quest to save your daughter and avenge your wife’s death. Since I replayed it approximately a year ago, I remember the plot. And the plot goes like that.
There’s a very rich (and bad, of course) dude who wants to build railways. He wants to build railways so bad that he hires a gang of thugs to intimidate everyone whose lands stand between him and his dream. Our hero, Marshal (I don’t remember his name), has a house right where the tracks should be. And he isn’t going to sell the house. So, the rich dude sends his thugs to fix the problem. And while Marshal runs errands, thugs kill his wife, burn his house, and kidnap his daughter. Marshal returns home, sees this shit, gets visually angry, and goes on a rampage like any self-respecting action hero from the 80s would do.
The plot is given to you through cool animated cutscenes where you can see that our hero has killer Honest Abe’s beard, damn long arms, giant hands, and is taller than Slenderman. When I was a kid those cutscenes were the best. Now? Well, I still find them awesome.
Overall, while playing the game I was pleasantly surprised how well it held. It’s 26 years old and still, it is one blast to play it. The movement is swift and precise. I would dare to say it is somewhere between Doom and Blood. It is better and more responsive than Doom but still doesn’t have enough fluency and raw speed of Blood. Nevertheless, it’s just fine.
What is actually still manages to surprise me is the shooting mechanics and reload system. I think it was the first game where I had to reload weapons and not just reload, but I had to know when to do this. In the case of this game, reload mechanics are one of a kind (seriously, I don’t think anyone implemented something like that; tell me if I’m wrong) and are a crucial part of the gameplay. So, without further ado, I’ll explain. For example, you have a six-shooter. You have six cartridges. You got in a confrontation with enemies, took them out, and ran out of bullets. Your gun is empty and no matter how much you keep pressing the left mouse button (I think when I was a kid I played it on the keyboard, but can’t be 100% sure) the gun won’t shoot. So, you have to initiate reloading since it doesn’t happen automatically. To make things even better, you’re reloading one cartridge at a time. So at some point, it becomes the game where you’re reloading in the middle of the gunfight, dodging bullets, and trying to keep your gun always ready.
It just changes the game. Changes the way you have to approach shootouts and in general how you engage in gunfights. Should I say I enjoyed actually jumping in the room without any sort of reconnaissance and just dealing with the enemies on my terms. Playing on easier difficulty helped a lot. Knowing the approximate layout of the levels too (at least the first three or four).
The levels, by the way, are starting damn good and by the end turn into a typical 90s FPS maze. Unfortunately, even this game wasn’t spared from this destiny. That’s why personally, I’m a strong believer that the first three levels are just the best. They convey this Wild West mindset and stereotype. You have your rancho, you have your little town in the desert, you have your train shootout (basically train robbery, but you’re not robing anyone since it’s full of bad guys and you’re still representing the law… to a certain extent).
After those three levels, everything turns for worth. The levels become cryptic, they start to have lots of jumping elements (looking at you, canyons), then they add puzzles to it where you have to shoot the right levers to put current in the right place, press the right combination of symbols and yada-yada-yada. Just gets worse and worse. I won’t lie if I’m going to say that probably the last several levels I was playing after watching playthroughs. It’s just how it is. Maybe as an adult, I got better at shooting and moving across the map, but my navigational and puzzle-solving skills are still on the level of the same confused kid who didn’t even know the English language and had only to guess what exactly was going on.
Still, this is one of the first FPSs I played. In fact, I’m still trying to remember what FPS I actually played first – Doom or Outlaws. And I’m not quite sure. Anyway, what matters is that the game is still fun and still brings lots of joy and adrenaline from daring gunfights on the Wild-Wild West.