Outcast in an alien world

Outcast

*****

PC Infogrames

$99.95 M15+

Review Peter Eley

The holy grail, sought by games developers, is to create a product with seamless, film-quality graphics in a truly interactive 3D environment.

Outcast hasn't achieved this but it's the closest any game has come to date.

French company Infogrames has used state-of-the-art graphics technology to create stunningly detailed characters and landscapes.

The result is a sense of realism with alien worlds, strange beings and terrifying exotic creatures almost coming to life on your monitor - really.

All this is achieved without resorting to 3D hardware acceleration, although the recommended system is a Pentium 11 300 with 64Mb Ram and a 4Mb video card. Initially I had some trouble with a similar system and had to update my video drivers to get the game to work.

Outcast is an adventure game with some first-person shooter elements, although the ability to solve puzzles and find clues is far more important than being quick on the draw.

Adventure games are storydriven and Outcast's plot is a gem. American scientists, who have discovered a parallel universe, send a probe to one of its planets, Adelpha.

But it is attacked by aliens and sets up a time warp, which threatens to suck Earth into a black hole. Enter Cutter Slade, a Bruce Willis-style character who's sent off to Adelpha with some scientists to sort things out.

So far, pretty ordinary - no Pulitzer Prize here.

But once Slade gets to Adelpha, the story blossoms into a rich, immersive experience heightened by the splendid graphics.

Things go wrong for Slade straight away. The scientists disappear and he gets attacked before being rescued by Zokrym. From him, Slade learns that Adelpha is populated by a race called Talans, who are waiting for a charismatic leader from another world to come and rescue them from their god-ruler and ... guess what?

Adelpha is made up of six regions - the world of snow, the world of temples, the marshes, the city, the forest and also the mountains.

All are markedly different and beautifully detailed and Slade can move between them using portal gateways called Daokas.

If you've seen Stargate you'll get the drift - in fact, much of the plot has overtones of this movie.

The gameplay is fairly standard for an adventure game, although there don't seem to be any of those silly clues which defy all normal rules of logic.

It's non-linear, which means it can mostly be solved in any order, and there's more than one solution to many situations, which gives it some replay-ability.

The action part is standard fare for first-person shooters, too, although the range of weapons and visual effects is truly impressive.

Finally, the music. It's almost a cinematic soundtrack - more than 30 minutes of superb, haunting, classical music performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and chorus.

It adds the finishing touch to what is a very special game.

* Send your comments by e-mail to peter_eley@herald.co.nz