Outcasters (Stadia)

It might seem a little odd to publish a review for Outcasters after the Stadia service has already shut down. Even when The Game Hoard has covered games that are no longer available to purchase before, they were at least possible to find and play in some form, but while many companies are trying to find ways to carry on their Stadia exclusives on other platforms, Outcasters became inaccessible when Stadia went offline and the developer Splash Damage has said they will not be looking into porting it. So, while this review will unfortunately not allow people to find and play this mutliplayer game, it can at least preserve it in some form by evaluating what it was during its time with us.

Outcasters is a top-down shooter that can only be played in multiplayer after you’ve finished the single player tutorial. Eight players will compete in small arenas trying to take each other out utilizing what seems at first like a fairly simple energy shot. However, while this blast is a bit slow to fly, where it ends up being rather unique is your ability to bend its flight path. Levels are often filled with plenty of barriers players can stand behind, but after clicking to set your shot line, you can curve it to change the way the bullet flies once it has been fired, allowing you to send shots around corners or loop around obstacles. The speed of the energy bullet is what keeps this mechanic in check, players able to see the shot moving around and avoid it but requiring decent reflexes to do so, and you can try and anticipate a person’s response and adjust the flight path of your attack to hit them. What makes this even more interesting is that you can do more than simply bend the line as you can do tricks like point it back in on itself for an unexpected rebound shot or have it turn at a sharp angle that makes it more unpredictable once the shot has been let loose.

Weaving around these wildly moving shots makes an encounter with an enemy player far more exhilarating than if you always shot forward, both players trying to plan out how to adjust their attacks to finally hit each other. Shots can’t be fired too quickly so you have time to actually make adjustments without worrying about an enemy barrage and that means there is an incentive to be more strategic with your attacks than just firing and hoping, but there is also an alternate fire that does just shoot out a straight blast for those moments where such a quick and simple attack is the best option. Shots can be blocked with shots of your own as well, giving you a sort of defense to basic attacks, further giving reason to try and be clever with your attack approach. Power-ups push this game into even more enjoyable variation, your attacks having new considerations if you can find specific pick-ups throughout the arena. A piercing shot for example will be able to pass through multiple enemies, and with one of the game’s modes encouraging clustering on one point of interest you can do a lot with this ability or the explosive shot. You can carry up to three power-ups at a time and they become stronger as you get duplicates, so something like the power-up that splits your shot on impact with a wall will send out additional projectiles or the simple boost to the speed of your shots can start to make them fairly hard to respond to.

On death a player loses all power-ups and people can even grab one from where they fell and none are so strong they lead to absolute domination, things helped some by each player starting a life with three hits until death while having the ability to get a healing heart off a dead opponent. After losing a heart from being hit, there’s a small period where you can’t take damage as well so players won’t be overwhelmed by a constant assault or group tactics. You can also have a single ability set that needs time to recharge after use, and while you need to unlock these techniques by leveling up by playing matches, they are simple and don’t give you huge advantages no matter which ones you have available. You might be able to shove away all shots and players near you, sprint forward, jump over barriers, or create a wall yourself, but these are more brief advantages rather than game changers and a nice extra power to have in your pocket to lightly change a skirmish.

There are three modes of play in Outcasters. Last Caster Standing is perhaps the weakest, this being a fairly typical battle royale mode where eight players all try to kill each other with each person only having one life. Once the short timer for the match ticks down to zero, a poisonous fog closes in to damage players who don’t flee to the arena’s center, the players forced to confront each other in a tighter space to determine a winner. Up until that ring of fog closes in though, there’s not too much incentive to attack other players, a common issue in battle royale games but with power-ups not really providing an enormous edge, there’s not even the draw of hunting them down to gain some advantages for the final showdown. If you are forced to stand and fight it will still be an enjoyable skirmish, but the game’s other two modes do a much better job incentivizing consistent aggression. Gold Rush is probably the best at bringing players together for some chaotic battles, two teams of four competing to collect coins throughout the arena and redeeming them at certain bank areas. Only one bank spot is open at a time, there isn’t always one open, and there are a few spots in an arena where they can appear, and once one does show up, you can only redeem coins if only members from your team stand in the designated area. This not only encourages teams to come together to all turn in their coins, but players can rush in to block a team from scoring and coins are redeemed rather slowly as well, meaning you have to defend the area well to make some appreciable gains. The match will end either when one team banks 50 coins or the timer runs out, but Gold Rush does an excellent job of bringing all the players together and creating scenarios where many bending shots are flying all at once, making for some exciting and tense weaving through danger.

The last mode, Team Battle, has two teams of four each trying to earn 10 points by killing players from the other team. While there can be incentives to cut and run if you are low on health and don’t want to give up a point, Team Battle still does a good job of bringing all the players together for battle as a number advantage makes your team’s shots harder to consistently avoid and you can do things like try to defend the dropped hearts and power-ups of your fallen teammates so the opposing team won’t snowball to victory. Arena design does help these Outcasters matches be a bit more varied, the different maps including unique objects or concepts so you’re not just worried about bending shots around barriers. Portals that teleport you to the other side of objects, spinning walls whose direction you can change by firing upon them, and cannons that will fire a bunch of blasts that only hurt the enemy team if you trigger them give areas distinct twists that gel well with the shooting gameplay, and the environments are well-themed to boot. Outcasters seems to have a focus on a collection of goofy characters from a variety of genres being thrown together to battle, and so the places they end up encapsulate broad familiar themes. A pirate level, a spooky stage, and an arena based on ancient Greece all align with what a player might expect from such aesthetics, but there are a few more creative ones like battling on top of an area designed like a computer chip’s surface or the disco area incorporating music equipment into its wall designs.

The characters are all tied to the same arena themes and can actually be found grouped together in the Collection screen where you can unlock outfit pieces for your customizable playable character to wear. Items come in character sets like a vampire, a punk rock gingerbread woman, the Greek hero Achilles, and a neon pink kitty cat, the variety wide but the unlocking process a bit slow. You need to earn tickets through completing daily and weekly challenges which include tasks like using certain power-ups in certain ways during matches, and when you do spend the tickets, you select one of the characters and you’ll get a random piece of their outfit with the price for the next random piece increasing. You’ll often have quite a few characters to select from at once and unlock more sets of them in the Collection area, each batch of characters tied to a little “world” matching their genre inspiration with such worlds gradually becoming available as you acquire more costume pieces. The characters are all pretty cartoonish and more importantly, you can mix their many outfit pieces to make a character of your own design, a few things like dances even unlockable simply by playing more to level up your personal profile. Considering the different characters all play exactly the same it is just a cosmetic element and where Outcasters tried to monetize itself after going free-to-play, but you would need to put in a good deal of work and have some luck if there are specific outfit pieces you desire. The designs do keep the action light-hearted and colorful though and some long-term goals give you reason to play more matches which is always important in a game based purely around a multiplayer matchmaking system.

One wise thing about Outcasters is despite needing eight players to play online, the game only required two human players to start a match if it failed to find anyone else. Game controlled players would fill in the remaining spaces and they used consistent identities so they aren’t hard to identify, but for the most part they are fairly competent opponents both in earning points and surviving the aggression of players and other bots. There was more than one occasion where I spotted a bit of artificial stupidity though, either a bot running into a wall it couldn’t seem to navigate around or in one match a few were standing in place and waiting for people to come to them before starting to fight. They didn’t feel like easy pickings in Team Battle most importantly where each death is a point given to the other team, and while some of the thrill in a multiplayer game is obviously facing other real players, there was at least a compromise to account for potentially wavering player numbers.

THE VERDICT: Outcasters has a simple twist to how you shoot at other players that ends up making for a exciting game where quick strategy is rewarded but responsive play remains possible and important. Bullets move the right speed so you can watch and dodge them but bending a shot properly can still catch an opponent unaware, and with the power-ups shaking things up even more you get small bursts of chaos that still emphasize thinking about how you shoot rather than blasting away. Map design matches the concept well and the aesthetic is appealingly goofy even if unlocking new outfit pieces is a grind, but Outcasters matches are quick bursts of action-packed fun that at least would justify putting in all that time.

And so, I give Outcasters for Stadia…

A GOOD rating. Outcasters isn’t an experience with a lot of frills, even the arena gimmicks are pretty straightforward, but just the simple addition of the shot curving already spices up the shooting action a good degree and the power-ups add that extra needed layer to keep things variable. Even once you get used to weaving around shots that change direction you have to consider new strategies like people deliberately targeting walls so their split shots saturate an area with danger or bouncing shots deflect off a barrier. The mixing of the power-ups also means it’s not just about committing to one attack type and there are visual clues on the energy shots so the opponent isn’t just guessing on how to respond to an incoming blast, there being a fairly smart balance in regards to many of the small but crucial elements. Bullets don’t fly too quickly because otherwise bending them wouldn’t have much meaning, but they’re not so slow that everyone will easily dodge them. Last Caster Standing does feel a bit weak compared to the other two modes since there’s not much synergy between its style of play and the power-ups though. Gold Rush’s focus on the bank spaces means certain power-ups can wreak havoc, but perhaps removing the three power-up cap or adding other rewards around the arena could incentivize more aggressive play in Last Caster Standing. You can get a fourth heart above your starting life of three, but risking life to get it isn’t quite enough to spur the type of dangerous risks a battle royale mode thrives on. Even a skirmish between two normal players in any mode at least has that quick mind game of trying to anticipate each other’s behavior and make quick adjustments to your shot to try and come out on top. The somewhat stingy cosmetic system is an easy enough pill to swallow as a price for the game being free, but even just having a few more defaults or some more cheap options would probably hook players into engaging with the system a bit more.

For a bit I wondered whether or not I should phrase my evaluation of Outcasters’s systems in the past tense, but I’d like to believe this isn’t the last we’ve seen of it even though Splash Damage has said it is somehow too tied to Stadia to live without it. It is a shame we know a good game is truly gone though, inaccessible to even interested players no matter what lengths they might be willing to go to. Such is the sting of Stadia’s death and a business model where games only exist for streaming rather than ownership, but that is not a mark on this game made for the service. Outcasters is an energetic and snappy top-down shooter that is designed rather tightly, not having any extraneous elements so you can focus on the interplay between adjusting your shot lines and integrating power-ups with them well. Too many more variables and it would have likely become cluttered, but Outcasters is clean mechanically and thus it draws a lot out of a few strong ideas.