Controls are messed up, camera glitches occasionally getting stuck or turning randomly. Really poorly done controls wise, cannot change to controller for some unk reason. i run rtx 3070ti w 32g r on w11, so it is on epic settings no turning them down doesnt help. good story though, needs a lot of fine tuning.

Overall pretty good game, would recommend.
Above all, the writing carried me. The VA for Butter Spade did a fantastic job, had me chuckling left and right. The others were good too but you obviously get a lot of him and his cheekiness.
The visual were fantastic and the cutscenes were also great, those teams were putting in some serious work.
Once you have all the movement upgrades it feels really nice, super versatile.
I appreciated the story, the twists were nice, especially at the end.

Again, I would recommend it, it's like a slightly lower budget Horizon Zero Dawn but feels a little more fulfilling with the characters you interact with, but same open world vibe with lots of small tasks to do all over for the sake of upgrades.






Spoilers + Cons below that I'm adding just cause I need to scream it into the void:



The game is janky at times, especially anytime Galenta was involved. I'm assuming there were limits about what the game engine would load to save processing but it made things awkward. Like if I flew to an Orym trial then the blue trampoline flowers didn't have collision. If I flew to a gork then sometimes not all the monsters would spawn and I couldn't complete it. One time I flew to an essence shrine and the starting obelisk wasn't loaded in. So Galenta was just for getting me to convoys and nothing else in case it broke the game which happened quite a few times. Oh and the convoys sometimes just didn't exist at the location on the map. Or one convoy wasn't on the map but 'existed' except had no collision and no weak points or enemies so that was weird to fall through.

The game is super repetitive. I did it, but I hit a point where I questioned why I bothered. Monkey Brain like when nominator equals denominator on completion stats I guess.

Sometimes the audio for the voice lines wouldn't play so we'd watch random movement in silence. Or one time the audio was spoken in computer-generated voices that I assume were placeholders for the real audio. Or a few times the audio couldn't decide if it was playing voices OR sound effects, but not at the same time and would switch back and forth every couple seconds. Sometimes what was being said didn't line up with subtitles at all.

The movement before getting all the upgrades is awkward, it's just 'Jump too high' then try to awkwardly inch yourself forward as you fall.

The intro + tutorial felt awkwardly and uncomfortably rushed, like they wanted to speedrun the exposition. The pacing was just off. The pacing for the ending was also weird too.

The game was trivially easy on regular mode, I just face-tanked every shot. Then suddenly the Elite boss fights hit like a truck. Like fine, I'll dodge and use my shield, but where the heck did this come from? 0 to 112% in two seconds.

Why don't I get to use my super ultra rifle at the very very end? Yes, we're aiming for pacifism but come ooooon I spent so many points on it, I was proud of the dang thing.

The absolute final boss was kinda lackluster. He'd attack once, maybe twice for each of his health bars, otherwise we just stood there while I shot at him. And I'd get hurt while flying around for no reason, almost like the fire below me had a hit box through the ceiling or something.

Camilla saying Daddy at her age was definitely a choice.

Also what the frick was with alien woodstock?? The cutscene was so uncomfortable to watch. 'Awkward' doesn't even begin to cover the dancing in that cutscene, I was stuck between cringing and laughing my head off. "As we watch that Talans in their natural habitat attempting to communicate. The men peacock for the females in a strange ritual. Clearly, mating season is not going well. Oh no, I've been spotted."

The colonel didn't deserve that. Camilla was too slow. Rude.

I already assumed from the nice Digital Foundry video that I would like the second Outcast. First of all, it is almost unbelievable that it was created at all. The first game became a classic, but during the development of the sequel, the studio went bankrupt and closed shop. A decade later, the kickstarter of the remake failed to raise the target amount. A few years later, thanks to Big Ben's financing, it came out anyway (and was pretty good), but it was a commercial failure. And it still didn't mean the end. Yves Grolet somehow managed to convince THQ Nordic that a sequel was a good idea. He put together a new Appeal, got to work, and four years later, here we are. And again, it's a commercial bomb.

Deservedly? I don't think so. I spent a very pleasant 40 hours with the middle-aged returnee Cutter Slade. He is newly dubbed by the lovely Luke Roberts of Black Sails fame and his sense of humor and pop culture references suited me. From the Talan Yods (replace the Y with a G), he received immortality and the ability to speak Talan language (although we players can hear English) on his return to Adelpha, which in practice means perhaps too "human-like" dialogues, although filled with misunderstandings because the Talans don't understand Cutter's idioms (not to mention pop culture references). So in New Beginning, Cutter travels around Adelpha, helps the Talans with their problems (fighting back against humans, organizing a sex festival, raising flying whales...), explores Adelpha, and sometimes checks off some open world filler when he feels like it. That alien whale can be ridden, by the way.

Immortality plays a role in the story here, but paradoxically, it is not reflected in the gameplay itself (reload follows after death). I quite enjoyed the story itself, but it has one significant drawback for those who remember the first game - it changes the relationship between Cutter and Marion in retrospect, so much so that it smells like a retcon - not sure why devs felt the need to do this. I finished the first game (well, its remake) only once and I didn't remember much of its plot, so this aspect of the story only mildly annoyed me after finishing the game, while reading the plot of the first game. Second slight annoyance was that the central mystery (who are the Yods, how did they revive Cutter..?) is not clarified in any way (not even a hint). But that's actually probably a good thing.

However, despite these criticisms, I give a high rating and there is a reason for that. I really enjoyed my stay on Adelpha. This time, it is constructed as one continuous map with a huge emphasis on verticality (and the word huge doesn't quite describe it in places). There are beautiful forests, villages, alien ruins, deserts, mountain passes, all underlined by perfectly atmospheric music from the returning Lennie Moore, and Cutter now has a jetpack that can be used to jump and fly, on land, under water or in the air, according to levels of upgrades unlocked. This is an aspect that is worth mentioning, the progression here is quite pleasant and the gameplay is refreshed every now and then with a new skill that Cutter can unlock. Battles against the Adelpha's fauna and human robotic helpers are fought here with a pistol and a rifle, both of which can be radically changed depending on the installed modules, of which there are several dozen. It is possible to turn them into a shotgun, or perhaps a tesla coil combined with a grenade launcher. It's a bit of a shame that the fights are not particularly tactical, the game is quite easy on medium difficulty and it's not even possible for Cutter to accidentally shoot a civilian - combat zones are quite strictly separated from civilian ones.

Eventhough it looks like, based on the commercial failure, that the New Beginning will be the Definitive End, I'm glad that it was created. It was a nice adventure. And who knows, maybe Yves Grolet will do the impossible a third time.

8.5/10