Back in 1999 a Belgian pc game took the world by storm. Two years before Rockstar would popularise the open world genre with Grand Theft Auto III, the Belgian studio Appeal would release their open world action-adventure Outcast. Fast forward 18 years and the reboot of this revolutionary pc game is out today.
There’s plenty of reason to be excited about Outcast: Second Contact. For one, most of the original team – Appeal went financially down in 2001 while working on a sequel – have worked on this installment. After the original top brass managed to secure the rights back from Atari in 2014, the reassembled team failed to Kickstart an HD reboot of their acclaimed magnum opus. While they had to secure funds for the project elsewhere, they brought a reworked installment of the classic cult game, featuring graphical updates and bug fixes, to Steam and GOG under the name Outcast 1.1.
Secondly, chances are your computer wasn’t up to snuff back in the day. Outcast didn’t only deliver ground breaking gameplay ideas, it was a technological marvel that made many a pc set-up combust spontaneously by only vaguely gazing at it. There’s a reason they call it the Crysis of its time.
Outcast: Second Contact then, is an excellent way to discover the story of Cutter Slade and the gorgeous alien sci-fi world of Adelpha. The game has been rebuilt from the ground using Unity 5 so this project goes a little deeper than your average HD-remake. While Appeal have tried to create an experience that’s as close to the original as possible, many aspects have been fine-tuned to suit the needs of most modern gamers.
We’re quite sure a lot of people have missed Outcast the first time around (we know we have), so Second Contact looks like a great opportunity to relive an important piece of gaming history. The game’s out today on PC, Xbox One and PS4.