Outlaws

The Good
While "Outlaws" is overall a huge disaster, it has its bright moments. The credit sequence, that is part of the introduction, is an example therefor. It's quite a cool rip-off from the opening credits of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" - the famous ending to Sergio Leone's "The man with no name"-trilogy, that made Clint Eastwood a star.

Yep, "Outlaws" is a video game, more exactly a first-person shooter, that's trying to be a homage to a cult movie genre, namely the Italian Western. The opening credits are one of the rare examples, where this experiment shapes up as a success. Another one is the soundtrack, written by Clint Bajakian, who stuck to the musical works of Ennio Morricone, that emblazed many famous Italian Westerns. While the quality of the pieces isn't anywhere near those composed by the great Maestro, Bajakian managed to deliver a decent imitation. All the elements of Morricone's epic Western scores show up: the whistling, the choirs, the trumpets, the guitars, the typical rhythmic and melodic figures. One could call it barefaced plagiarism, but who cares? The music enhances the atmosphere greatly.

When it comes to gameplay, "Outlaws" is your standard-shooter with weapons a little different. The designers chose a rather realistic approach here: you don't have any rocket launcher to your pleasure, but mainly different guns and pistols as well as some additional gimmicks like throwing knives or dynamite sticks. What's more you have to reload every single bullet manually. If you forget about that, you will make the experience of standing in front of your enemies, while your shooting device will not make "BOOM" but only "click". I found this annoying at first, but came to appreciate it as authentic little detail after a while.

Last but not least, there is a good variety in the settings, that are used as levels in "Outlaws". Speaking of levels, the game features only nine of them, but they are quite spacious and will keep you occupied for a while. You will fight in a ghost town, a mine, a canyon and on a moving train among other.

The Bad
Be warned, that I have a lot to say in this section. To shorten myself a little, I will let the game's visuals aside, although they certainly deserve criticism, as even contemporary games tended to look a lot better. But I still could have lived with the graphics, if the game had been able to catch my imagination. But this is not the case. Story and atmosphere – exactly those things, others praised all the time – offended me the most. Many critics stated, that "Outlaws" would be a great homage to the Italian Western and would resemble the movies of Sergio Leone. I happen to love those movies and therefore I know, that this is just not true. I hope, I can make my point clear by explaining the differences.

A hallmark of the Italian Western is its unique way of displaying violence. I'm talking about those famous, well-known duels, where the key to survival lies more in keeping the nerves than in anything else. In those scenes, the actual act of violence erupts suddenly and is a matter of split seconds. Much more important than the flying bullets is quite actually the prelude: for example the duelists feelings, their concentrated expressions, as they stare each other into the eye. The violence in "Outlaws" is almost exactly the opposite. You won't have the time to take a look into your enemies eyes. And even if you take the time, which normally leads to immediate death, you will only get the impression of a mushy heap of pixels. The actual gameplay is very simple: you're constantly moving, moving, moving (because you must not get killed) and shooting, shooting, shooting (because you must kill). That constant moving and shooting is only occasionally interrupted to make way for some of the games "clever" little puzzles, that have you doing things like using a crowbar on a locked door (I figured this solution out without consulting a walkthrough and I'm still mighty proud – ha, ha, ha). Seriously now, the actual gameplay is your typical brainless shooter stuff. I discovered nothing that would make this in any way superior to "Doom" and the like.

Even when the locations quite frequently change, "Outlaws" is a very repetitive game at its core: it's just firing and killing and almost nothing else. In fact, not even Loco, that merciless headhunter Klaus Kinski once played in "The Great Silence", would have ever dared to dream of sending as many people to hell as Marshall Anderson does. By the way, I act for the theory, that the game throws so many enemies at you, because LucasArts realized, how dumb their AI was. Those stupid gunslingers run around like deranged Lemmings begging for bullets and would hardly provide any challenge, if they wouldn't come in such enormous masses. Exterminating these zillions of foes can even arise some philosophical questions like: where do all those bad boys actually emerge from? And how comes it, that I'm the only brave soul in this whole Wild West society, while all the others are criminal, child-kidnapping bastards? I found no answers to this questions, but one thing I'm sure of: a mindless nonstop mass killing like this does in no way resemble a Leone movie. Period.

Let's put the actual gameplay aside and come to an even more overhyped aspect of "Outlaws": the story. Just as anything in the game, the story aims at resembling an Italo Western and just misses its target. Think only of the protagonist's motivation for forcing the action: while Clint Eastwood just does it for the dirty dollars, Marshall Anderson embarks upon his record-breaking killing spree to save his oh-so-sweet little daughter and her oh-even-sweeter little dolly... OUCH! Can it get any worse? Oh yes, it can. The whole story is just an awfully incompetent, disrespectful rip-off from the plot of "Once upon a time in the West": Anderson's wife is killed and his daughter kidnapped, because his land is in the way of an unscrupulous businessman's railroad-plans. This worn-out idea is presented without any skill or imagination. Not only are the characters flat and uninteresting. Also everything was cut out, that made the arrival of the railroad such a brilliant motif in "Once upon a time in the West".

It is important to understand, that Italian Westerns are no simple action movies. Although they are not exactly talkative, they are always telling you something. It is well known, that Sergio Leone was absolutely crazy on tiniest little details – and when you watch his works carefully, you can notice that. Every scene in his movies makes sense in some way, that not always has to be related to the main-plot. His Westerns were also remarkable for bringing on a cinematic view of the West, that was very different from that of the American Western. When directors like John Ford were virtually romanticizing the Old West, Sergio Leone was systematically deconstructing this rather naive, sentimental view. Think only about his disillusioned vision of the American Civil War in "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly" or of the Mexican Revolution in the often underestimated "Duck you, Sucker!". His movies were quite often dealing with difficult themes and thereby showed no fear of breaking conventions. His quite sarcastic, immoral revisionist picture of the Old West is an integral part of all his Westerns.

How does "Outlaws" stand in this tradition? The answer is simply, that it doesn't even make an attempt to make any greater use of its setting. The Old West is just a battleground for Marshall Anderson's private war. There is no attention for details, no interesting story, no interesting character to be found. Actually it is quite difficult, to establish any interesting character, when the protagonist immediately kills every person, he comes across. As the story of "Outlaws" works this way, the player is left with Marshall Anderson as the only character, he can relate to. And what a flat one he is! His creators must have thought, that anybody who doesn't talk much but smokes all the more, would have to resemble a typical Italian Western hero. What they obviously forgot (or didn't even notice), is that those characters, that Clint Eastwood, Franco Nero or even Bud Spencer embodied, also had distinctive personalities. What made them cool and despite their brutal and selfish nature in my eyes even likable, was for example their humor. The protagonists of the Italian Westerns were anti-heroes: they were greedy, filthy and cynical, but (when we leave Bud Spencer aside) they were also clever. And here "Outlaws" fails again: if the Marshall wasn't such a gun fanatic, he could easily bore his enemies to death by talking to them. Actually it would be much more painful for them. The Marshall's remarks are blatant nonsense, "humor" seems to be a foreign word for him and his head appears to be empty except for his lust for vengeance. He is the guy who raises his eyebrow and says: "I've never met an innocent man". It's so pathetic, so dumb, so sad.

I also remember countless people slobbering over "wonderful cut-scenes" in reviews of this game. And indeed they are made in nice comic-style. Even I have to admit, that they are quite pleasing to the eye, after having suffered through the in-game-graphics for a long level's duration. But what do they tell us? Well, here is a little synopsis: Marshall shoots villain, villain goes down and babbles stupid last words, Marshall makes equally insightful remark, villain dies, Marshall gets on horse and rides to next level. This petty little scheme is reproduced in almost every cut-scene until the very end. There are only few exceptions and they aren't any better. There is no substantial story-telling, no noteworthy content to be found in this entire game. And as if they were applying to some sick rules of dramaturgy, the people at LucasArts saved the most disgusting movie sequence for the finale. There, in a sugar-coat romantic image, the Marshall rides towards sunset, together with his oh-so-sweet little daughter and her oh-even-sweeter little dolly. If anyone dares to say, this ending would in any way capture the spirit of the Italian Western, I insist, that we immediately meet and shoot it out. (Not literally, of course)

It is amazing, how far "Outlaws" is away from what it's trying to be. Sometimes this is according to differences between the media. In my eyes it's extremely doubtful, whether a video game can ever accomplish something similar to Leone's movies. For example, his slow-paced, individual art of direction is very hard to emulate – especially for a first person shooter. But still, "Outlaws" is a disappointment not only by fate. If it wasn't such a thorough misconception, it could at least have failed a lot less miserably. I sometimes was really enraged by the careless and silly ways, this wanna-be-homage treated its subject with.

The Bottom Line
As "Outlaws" still has a good number of fans, maybe I'm not making new friends by writing this. But anyway I really don't understand, why this game was (and still is) praised so much. That question gave me a hard time and finally I can only come up with the uncertain theory, that people were so used to raving at everything wearing the LucasArts logo, that they, regardless of what was served, just couldn't drop that behaviour. Nowadays it is near to common knowledge that this once so creative company sank to mediocrity, but the beginnings of that trend were mostly overseen. I think, in games like "Outlaws" it already showed. When I consider that "Duke Nukem 3D" and "Quake" were already released, I don't see how this pseudo-western had deserved any nice word by critics when it came out.

I do not intend to repeat myself about how miserable the game is at imitating the style of the Italian Western. But let me tell you that: even if you don't give a damn about things like story, atmosphere or Westerns and if you really just wanna shoot, there are numerous better games within the genre. "Outlaws" is neither pretty nor is it innovative – if you're looking for great ideas, you should search elsewhere. Only when you don't care for creativity either and really just wanna shoot shoot shoot, then I guess, this game might be right for you. It's your average, primitive bloodshed – this time with a cool soundtrack.