Bluntly put, DON'T BUY THIS - the Outcast 1.1 release is superior in every way. Don't believe in the lies about added content (read: a useless room with an Outcast symbol in it, woohoo). It's a terrible, rushed Unity port that the devs didn't try to patch at all. It runs slow as hell too - the most common Unity trait. Here how it will run on your AMD-ATI laptop: you complete the tutorial village sequence (i.e. five minutes of content), you enter the portal and the game will crash. It has been like that for years, so don't expect it to change. What should happen is you get teleported into the other world and appear underwater in a pond. It does work on Intel-based laptops w/ Intel Graphics stuff, though. Again, get the Outcast 1.1 instead that had devs behind that actually cared. The game content is IDENTICAL, meaning you'll be taking in a ton of extra negatives by picking the Second Contact release for no gain. If you really want a more recent Outcast release, download the fan game Legacy of the Yods (2017) that practically tries to be Outcast 2 and allegedly has fully-vocalized cast. Probably works better, too, than Second Contact. You HAVE OPTIONS and no excuse. BTW, a ton of barely-sensical shill reviews with this one. You have to wonder how a game that does not even work on a big chunk of the targeted systems, is somehow 4/5 .
NOT RECOMMENDED, MOSTLY BECAUSE OF THE TERRIBLE LEVEL GENERATION, THE LACK OF GAME CONTENT AND THE OVERALL UNFAIRNESS AND REPETITIVENESS. Most playthroughs end early because there is no generated resources for progression - you end up having to confront a group of enemies your basic gear cannot win against and you get owned like a slave. The game is basically four maps and then it is over. You basically clean-sweep three (3) or so sectors (once you find them) and move on to the next, a slightly different map. All generated maps are basically minimalistic routes mostly no way to bypass anything. That means if the game feels like generating three hull-damaging anomaly sectors in a row, you are going to have a hard time surviving. That is far from a rare occurrence. There really isn't much content in the game. After reaching level 3 or 4, you can finally have ships with enough firepower to not get constantly slaughtered by common enemies. The game is stupid in that you can cheese everything with range, so you probably skip most of the items and get long-range Particle and Nuke Cannons and Lasers to fill the mostly useless small weapon slots. Guess what you have to do to have those super expensive weapons? Farming. You can kill groups of non-dangerous basic enemies that spawn somewhat endlessly from the galaxy portal. If you don't do this and try to get by with sub-optimal stuff, any upcoming skirmish can end your game, especially against Celestials with insanely damaging guns. Even the tough ships get 100-to-0 against those in seconds on Easy difficulty. If you don't like grinding, you probably have a life and most likely won't like this game either. Yes, it features Difficulty Padding - little content stretched thin by making extremely arduous to get through. Don't play this game expecting any kind of sensations of wonder. It is just another number-optimizing games e.g. damage vs. hull i.e. hitpoints. The game has no ending. It dumps you to the score screen.
NOT RECOMMENDED. The only good thing about this is the PC conversion menu music by Nigel Taylor. The controls are clumsy and the hit registration with the gun delayed by at least 0.5 seconds. Moving vertically is very dangerous because of the low resolution i.e. you cannot see enemies hiding five steps in front of you. You cannot really hip shoot because of the cumbersome controls and delayed hit registering. It is in a desperate need of a remake (instead of the usual rehashes). Tower Assault added its own problems such as enemies that take a way too much shooting to kill and timed, trial-and-error-heavy end level sequences. This game is for those who want to deep dive into the dirt of the past. It is a technically obsolete, basic top-down run-and-gun deal with an alien theme. The controls require a lot of patience to put it nicely. P.S. There is a copy-protection prompt in the beginning, though it's disabled and you can press Enter twice to get past it. Here's the PC-version-exclusive menu theme by Nigel Taylor you get with the default settings audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgZZ4FJyWdg
RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE HORIZONTAL SHOOT-EM-UPS. It seems they tried to improve on Pulstar, though managed to lose a ton charm in process. I rank this bellow Pulstar and the very good Ironclad, because the stages are now cheap kind of tough i.e. tons of bullets your ship cannot really dodge / block all of and the bosses take insane amounts of beating before they go down. Stage 6 boss "fight" is terrible as 75 % you just have to avoid insane amounts of bullets and basically have to wait for the actual boss fight to start before you can start doing damage. Sure, you have infinite lives and will jump right back to the fight even if you die constantly, though it's not fun if you are forced to do it. A big part of these games and gameplay in general is learning how to do things well and without dying. Here, you don't have skill, you have luck. The movement handles very weirdly and not very suitable for a bullet hell this one. Also, touching the walls or structures instantly kills you. More characters i.e. weapon schemes, more bullets and resume-upon-death with much less satisfying stage and boss battle design is far from an across-the-board improvement. I would say it is worse, though the death-resume probably makes a big difference in coop gameplay. It still does not have any universe-building character for the players to care about and even the ending paragraph is a terrible Engrish plot-dump. Overall, this game could have been so much better with some better design. E.g. the characters never do anything. I had zero running speed issues (GOG-3, Windows 10 x64 build 10240). This is of the same Neo Geo 25 Year Anniversary release as the Pulstar and Ironclad ones, so there are same bugs (e.g. the menu crashing the game when you try to load and the menu showing wrong keymapping) and also the Neo Geo and game roms for the authentic emulation goodness. It does have the save state feature, though it is not needed when you can just instantly respawn after dying.
RECOMMENDED ONLY IF YOU ARE OKAY KILLING THE SAME ALIENS OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Most people: skip this one. It has the most clichee alien invasion content out there. It is basically Alien Breed with a bigger budget and half the direction and the originality. The music is all over the place and cannot stick with one overall theme or style. The graphics don't matter in this genre and the gameplay is repetitive AF. Still, it is much better than SG Survivor that was a half-assed and awful across the board.
RECOMMENDED. The difficulty is very reasonable and easy is easy, though you lose stuff with every hit, of which you can take many. The stages are the easier part in comparison to the bosses that get borderline unfair (the stage 3C drill guy with almost unavoidable attacks can suck it). This shmup has branching stage paths with different end bosses and actual characters to fight, for a change. The sound has a lot of strength to it and the graphics are a bit forgettable. In other words, it is almost a perfect opposite of Pulstar on all levels. Ironclad ultimately defeats it by having some incentive to replay it. The original Neogeo and Ironclad roms are included with the release (much like with Pulstar) and it has the same menus, save states and even keymapping errors as P did (Z as A button instead of X as shown in the menus). That's a good thing as the P release was technically adequate. The gameplay is the usual horizontal shoot-'em-up deal, though there are no side pods (AKA 'options' in Gradius) and the front / shield module has a lot of different functionality. In comparison to Pulstar, the main ship weaponry is very standard stuff with basic homing missiles and strictly horizontal weaponry. The front module is the complex one as you can do a lot of stuff with it: charged special attack it, use it to boost the basic ship attacks, let it float away from the ship and shoot at enemies from a particular screen position, etc. Apparently Last Resort had something like this and a lot of people liked that one. All in all, you are not forced to doing things one way to not risk dying, so there is more of that free-and-fun stuff here. Unless you suck at boss fights, that is. Pulstar was all about finding the safe zones where bullets would not hit. This one is about maintaining constant movement and finding the gaps to avoid stuff. Not exactly a bullet hell, though.
NOT RECOMMENDED. My game experience strongly disagrees with the "fun arcade racing" part. Every game element seems to be laid out F you in the A. It's more of a one-time puzzle game than a racing one in that once you have solved all the quirks put there solely to screw you over, the annoyance probably tones down to a boring slog to the finish line. You don't understand this if you don't play it yourself and try the strange controls and experience the being awkwardly jerked across the screen when steer. A list a puzzle elements: -stage-specific road hazards that require very accurate timings and prior knowledge of them -every other competitor gets a flying start while you start with bicycle speed just to give the enemies an edge and make it all an arduous climbing up every single stage -passing enemies is quite challenging - they are big and often zigzag around to make it much more difficult, especially the top 4 dudes, to the point if there is 2 competitors together, they are so big you cannot pass them and every time you bump into them, you lose a lot of speed -you lose a ton of speed if hit a road hazard or a roadside object and get absolutely brutalized by a five second respawn if you hit a stopping object such as a bridge, greatly increasing your chances of losing the race -etc. All in all, this "memorize everything just to have a chance at beating this humor-dry game" is borderline torturous. The game isn't even that long, so quirky difficulty padding is pretty much the opposite of fun. Making tons of mental notes for every short track is more like unpaid work than fun to me. Even if you can play it, you won't because a cup is only 15 min long. Watch a longplay video instead of playing it. That's a much better experience w/ minimal annoyances.
RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE SUPER DIFFICULT HORIZONTAL SHOOT-'EM-UPS OR ARE OKAY TO WITH USING THE INCLUDED SAVE STATE FUNCTIONALITY. This game seems to designed for arcade use and has a lot of kill-the-player design. Granted, you can pass all that with minimum challenge by loading states after you have found those newbie traps and most projectiles can be absorbed endlessly by a shield module, it is not impossibly hard. Beating it "legit", good luck passing stage 2 / 8, even with infinite coins / continues. One thing done slightly wrong can kill your chances of not dying. If you have played arcade or TurboGraphx-16 version Gradius 3, the difficulty is very similar. It takes a lot of enemy position memorization to a single state. Maybe G3 was slightly more difficult - that first level with fire is insanely difficult. Just being compared to G3 should tell you enough about the situation. Casual players can beat it if they master using the load and save functions. Not any DotEmu issues with this one, which is strange. Usually there are slowdowns, coupled with input drops and other patience testing. Could be that the data payload is small, who knows. The inputs are somewhat wrong, though all you really need to do in the game is move the ship and press Z to fire. And load-save the state from the menu if you are not Korean. Shmup fans probably like the level design, the challenge and the bosses (not particularly hard, detailed, a lot of Gradius style snakes). It is hard to come up with things to improve besides the usual "add more stuff." The weapons are pretty cool: a laser ricocheting off the walls, the gun pods you can rotate every 45 degrees and shoot everywhere with and the purple homing missiles that lock onto enemies. That's quite a lot of stuff for an hour-long game. Well, the gameplay is very samy / deja vu, esp. after Gradius ones Give it a try. It's worth a look. Might not be the best SNK shmup, so look up Blazing Star and others if you just want the best one.
NOT RECOMMENDED. HAS ABOUT 4.0 HOURS OF CONTENT AND EVEN THAT IS ALL ABOUT REPEATING "SHOOT A MONSTER" AD NAUSEAM. There was not a single moment of wonder in the game. It's like a Alien Breed clone many years too late and without its charm. The "Survivor" part adds sections, where you wait for enemies to come out of exits to instantly kill them. That, like everything in the game, drags on and overstays its welcome. There is not a single redeeming factor AFAIK. Multiplayer makes any game tolerable, though that here is just more of the same boring shoot-an-alien that gets boring in five minutes. The music is okay-not-great and the physics are interesting to play with for two seconds. The plot is absolutely terrible. The pre-mission narration further emphasizes how soulless the characters are and how ass plot is. Whole plotline is ultimately about activating some sentry guns to kill more aliens. This one-note goal is the only trick in this game's bag. Kill aliens, Alien Breed - there is the all you need to know. It even manages to capture the 1991 AB's boredom involving killing the clones of same alien enemies over and over and over again. CONS: It's only four hours long and extremely boring. PROS: It's only four hours long. Grade: F this game.
RECOMMENDED. It's a more about reacting and timing than having to be any good at puzzles. F* it - THE BEST PUZZLE GAME FOR THE PEOPLE WHO HATE PUZZLES. The only puzzle part is trying to shoot things so that their explosions combo i.e. touch and THAT'S IT. It has a lot of Japanese flavor and their goofy VA style, so that's to be expected. Why Five stars? This is the only puzzle game I could imagine coming back to and replaying multiple times every time. For comparison, I would never touch a Match-4 such as Puzzle Bobble - too boring, diligent and slow. Besides the DotEmu issues, the content itself is very much fun, to the point I don't really care if it technically impaired. The characters are pretty original (a lot of groups, one "chara" is composed of three guys, LOL) and music is particularly good synth stuff. Tinker & Linker's and Memory's theme particularly great. The graphics were pretty insanely high-res for 1996, though that's what you could do with dedicated boards and arcade hardware back then. The difficulty ramps up during the last two stages, the first being somewhat beatable with godlike reflexes and the latter being the usual SNK boss that drains all the quarters from your pocket. You don't really win it, it just sometimes decides die and let you win. The levels are randomly generated and the AI is very random, so even the CPU matches stay fresh. This goes so far that once enemy killed itself in 3 seconds. Once. There are some issues, though. Luckily, very recently, SNK has been replacing these DotEmu ports with much better ones. Ain't gonna lie, this DotEmu one probably runs worse than the original ROM on MAME. Here's some I noticed: Sounds disappear randomly The game has slowdowns, often coupled with input drops The inputs are delayed by something like 0.2 to 0.3 seconds, making it mandatory to plan your inputs. Poor optimization, runs badly even on decent systems Etc.
