I’ve quite literally been hoping for Nightdive to do an Outlaws remaster for years. I was incredibly fond of the game as a child and spent many an hour exploring it and vibing with its aesthetic and sound design. However, it’s been a very long time since I’ve played it, and I was surprised to see that the level design has unfortunately held up very poorly. Despite that, this is another fine Nightdive remaster that makes the game look and play better than ever. Plus, getting hit by the waves of nostalgia even amidst all the frustration isn’t at all unpleasant.
Outlaws opens with an incredibly good cutscene that has held up shockingly well. It’s a pretty standard setup for a Western – John Anderson is a former US Marshal who has gone to the store to pick up groceries for his family. An evil real estate tycoon who’s buying up the area wants his land and has sent an unhinged lunatic to convince Anderson to sell his. This results in said lunatic murdering Anderson’s wife and kidnapping their daughter. It’s typical but very effectively put together. Most levels end with short cutscenes as well, but the opening was especially impressive for the time.
Nightdive has once again gone to great lengths to increase visual fidelity while remaining faithful to the original game. All textures, sprites, and the HUD have been improved markedly. There’s far more detail on every single surface, the cartoony sprites are now much higher resolution and closer to how they were drawn, and the HUD’s design now extends across the entire border and not just on part of it. You can even switch back and forth between the original graphics and the new ones with the press of a button, which I always enjoy. The new art is mostly shockingly faithful, but I did notice that the new textures can be less colourful than the originals.
Aside from that (and high framerates being on the menu), the Outlaws Remaster is very much the same game that it ever was. The campaign is made up of nine missions, which is still very short for a game like this, as it can be completed in just a few hours. Of course, this also includes the Historical Missions, which adds five more missions (with one of the missions containing five maps of its own that task you with subduing a bounty). With this, the game has the same number of missions as the developer’s previous game, Dark Forces.
The opening levels fare very well in Outlaws Remaster. The second, in particular, is the best level in the game, as it sees you blasting foes in a Western town that’s filled with personality. But the level quality across the campaign is incredibly variable in a way that I didn’t quite notice as a kid. The third level is set on a train, so it’s a mostly boring, short straight line. The fourth level puts you in a somewhat bland canyon that isn’t all that great, but some subsequent levels are downright torturous. One is set in a mill and is a convoluted mess of operating levers and opening up new pathways.
It’s incredibly easy to get lost, and the game’s signposting can be non-existent. Dark Forces also had the same problem, but the general level design in both games is far below the standard of the id Software games they took inspiration from. At one point in the mill level, you’re meant to track down gears and use them alongside a larger gear to activate a small opening that’s kind of hard to remember. Getting to the gears requires you to let the current wash you along in narrow waterways by shooting switches. One of these areas is oddly designed, and the current often can’t push you over a gap, making things more frustrating.
Later on, Outlaws Remaster takes you to a mine that’s so dark that you’ll need to keep your oil lamp burning the whole level. The game requires you to actually find oil to fill it, and it’s possible to run out, which will leave you wandering in the dark until you find more. The game has a bunch of sections like this, only not all of them are generous with oil, so many players will find themselves wandering here. But wandering is par for the course in this game anyway, due to the lack of clarity in much of its level design.
The game appears to be a standard “grab the keys and use them to open doors” game like Doom and its derivatives, but keys aren’t always necessary for progression. Multiple levels just use them to guard secrets. Outlaws Remaster instead drops a boss enemy into the map at some point, and you need to kill it to end the level. Doors aren’t colour-coded, and the keys are iron, steel, and brass, so where you can go and whatnot can be kind of confusing. Sometimes you’ll need to use an item on the environment to progress, as if it’s an adventure game, and this is poorly conveyed.
In the aforementioned awesome second level, you need to use a shovel to dig your way into a building. This isn’t signposted in any way, and I remember having tons of trouble figuring it out as a kid. Of course, it was burned into my brain, so I didn’t have the same problem this time, but compounded with the fact that, if you don’t read the small text in the corner telling you you’ve picked up a key item, you probably won’t know it until you see it in your inventory. This is something that should have been improved upon, as it’s an issue across the entire game, including the times you pick up a crowbar, which is needed to open stuck doors. At more than one point, I didn’t even realise I’d already picked up a key I needed.
Outlaws Remaster can’t help but be a pretty impressive remaster of a game that just isn’t all that great. Not only is the level design often subpar, but the fact that you solely go up against guys with guns with little variation (who can see you clearly in the dark even though they have no light sources) also leads to monotony. I still mostly enjoyed playing it again, but I was surprised by just how frustrating it was compared to most of its contemporaries. Long-time fans will no doubt love having a better-looking version of the game that runs well on modern systems, but new players will likely mostly find frustration. The game’s £23.99/$29.99 price tag, alongside its short runtime, also doesn’t do it any favours.
Outlaws Remaster: Another impressive remaster from Nightdive, albeit of a game that hasn't withstood the test of time nearly as well as its cutscenes have. – Andrew Farrell
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