Outcast: Second Contact (PC, PS4, XBOne)

[Frogacuda]

This thing's out. Anyone try it? The reviews are mostly bad but they seem to be from people with no experience with the original. People are understandably going to be harsher today on clunky controls than in '99 but I can deal with that if the spirit of the original is intact.

Yeah, I haven't sunk serious time into it, but I played it for maybe an hour.

It's the best version of Outcast for sure, and nothing about it is notably worse, but there are some missed opportunities for improvement. The player animations are improved as are the controls, but they're still built on the original paradigms, and that shows through. It feels sluggish and clunky by moderns standards, even if it's better than the original. Most disappointingly to me the menus, while again improved, are still really unintuitive. The original voice acting is likewise untouched, which is jarring not just for the campy, bad acting, but also because the recording hasn't been remastered at all, and it's very compressed sounding.

But it's gorgeous, and it packs some nice quality of life improvements. It's a very nice update, it just has some vestigal issues lingering from the original 1999 design.

[NeoZeedeater]

My initial impressions match yours. One major difference is I don't remember the original having a detailed map to use. I remember it being quite overwhelming navigating the farm area. This time it seems easier but at least the game still lets you figure out what to do on your own.