Outlaws Preview
In Outlaws, players take the role of the archetypal Mysterious Loner who rides into town seeking revenge and before long is embroiled in the evil schemes of a railroad tycoon and his renegade thugs. Outlaws will utilize both the 3-D engine from the popular and successful Dark Forces and the INSANE engine from Rebel Assault II in an attempt to combine all the elements of 1960's Leone-esque Westerns in a single game. A very ambitious project, the title is at once a cinematic adventure game and an action-intensive multi-player game - the latter of which was something that otherwise enthralled fans of Dark Forces have been screaming for. In multi-player mode, players can choose between 12 distinct gunslinging characters, each with his or her own characteristics and combat advantages.
In the straight-ahead adventure game component, players take the role of ex-marshal James Anderson, whose life is shattered by vicious desperadoes. Inspired by such films as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars and - oh hell, just about every Old West film Clint Eastwood ever made - designers wished to craft a tale of personal discovery and the personification of evil, wherein the protagonist could face redemption or corruption, in the best squinty-eyed Clint tradition. Like I said, ambitious. No less ambitious than the game's visual presentation - edgy, raw, hand-drawn artwork full of gloomy ghost towns, wind-scoured faces, stark, shifty eyes, and ravaged, weathered building exteriors. Exactly how LucasArts intends to fuse the hand-crafted visuals with the 3-D action of a first-person shooter like Dark Forces is unclear at this moment, but the company has had a run of successful adventure games in the past, and at this stage of the game (so to speak) the savage, lean graphics of Outlaws are as alluring and gritty as a rocky, craggy pass that might just be concealing an ambush.
