Giant Bomb Review
40 CommentsOutland Review
4- PS3N
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by Brad Shoemaker on
Housemarque's latest download is bursting with uniquely challenging action and visual panache to spare.
Outland stops short of rendering its entire playable area on one giant graph-paper map, but the game's five areas are loosely tied together by level exits and teleporters that feed you fairly smoothly from place to place. You don't quite get the feeling of continuous exploration that you'd want after playing games like Shadow Complex or the latter day Castlevanias, but it's close enough. Though Outland is more linear and requires much less backtracking than those games, there are still areas you won't be able to access till later on, when you've acquired abilities that let you slide under things, launch into the air, or bust down walls with a charged shot.
The sword combat is more involved and thus more satisfying than you'd expect on first glance. In addition to a basic three-hit combo, you can slide into enemies to daze them or slash upward in an uppercut-like motion to pop them up into the air. You can incorporate all of those moves into a single attack on an enemy, sliding into them, popping them up in the air, then leaping up and finishing them off before they even have a chance to hit you. It's a ton of fun. Both the fighting and the platforming are snappy and fluid, allowing you to get around the levels and fight enemies with speed and grace.
The game ramps up the difficulty of these two-tone scenarios gradually--it's the better part of an hour before you can even assume both colors--but by the end of the game, you'll be looking at some downright grueling challenges that force you to navigate enormous clouds of mixed bullets while fighting enemies that change their own coloration randomly and will shock you if you hit them at the wrong time. Oh, and you're standing on platforms that disappear out from under you when you flip colors. For the most part, you'll get through these sections with patience or trial and error (or both), but some frustration is inherent in the later levels.
As demanding as the action is, the game's presentation could be a little clearer. The camera tends to pull out to such a degree your character is sometimes only a few pixels high, making it tough to see exactly what's going on if you don't sit especially close to your TV. And someone made the needlessly confusing decision to have your character flicker blue and red when you get hit, which sometimes made me do a knee-jerk color change that made me get hit again before I realized that it was a bad idea to change color in the first place.
Outland's main campaign will probably run you about six hours, the high quality of which more than justifies its $10 asking price, and there are collectibles, speed-run levels, and some decent two-player cooperative challenge rooms if you want to lengthen the experience. I suspect this game is going to fly a little under the radar with so many high-profile titles releasing lately, but even a passing interest in 2D action demands that you at least give Outland a look.
