Outland takes you through time in a colourful experience with a decent story. A great mix between Limbo and Mirror’s Edge in a colorful world where color matters and leads you on your way.
You are the lonely hero, bound to be the savior of the world. There are several stories in the game, each and one of them tied to the big bosses that you are going to meet along the way. What they all have in common, is that they’ve lived in harmony with the people on earth, but something got screwed and they turned against the people and then retracted. Now they are back, and you as the hero, have to stop them from destroying mankind.
Masterful and Skilful
This is a beautiful and challenging puzzle platformer that really asks for the players patience and skills. Timing is vital, and boss fights are challenging to beat, mostly because you need to learn the patterns of the characters moves and bullets.
The learning curve is great, introducing you slowly to the the different ways of playing the game, really giving you the feel of progress all the way through the game in a great pace. You start the game with absolutely no way of fighting back, you can only run and jump, but quickly you’ll get a sword to slice through the spiders that you encounter. Soon enough you get the power of sliding, and going into light and dark mode. Here’s whats new. Light and dark power is a switchable mode for the player to get through tricky points in the game – if you are in light mode, you won’t be hurt by light bullets, and you can’t hurt enemies in light mode. Thus forcing you to switch between light and dark mode, making the gameplay more flexible, and this is done easily by twitching your right index finger on the shoulder button, not interfering with your ongoing move, and this is vital – you will absolutely encounter several complex pathways on your way. There’s a bit of Mirror’s Edge in there with the sliding, jumping and avoiding being hit – not to mention that colors guide the player through the game.
Playing with friends
The game includes online co-op. You have to make your way through the same story as in singleplayer campaign to reach the starting points of the real co-op levels. This is in my book not really acceptable. If you’ve reached the spot and kind of activated it in the singleplayer mode, you should be able to start an online game in these short levels. I must admit this is the only thing I was annoyed with in this game – apart from the frustration some of the boss fights made, but on the other hand it made the game challenging.
Graphics are simple, yet beautiful. It takes the simplicity of Limbo with a lot of colors, but without the intense feeling that Limbo pulled off. Sounds is suitable – the snapping from the spiders makes my neck hair rise, and the roars from the first boss is as intimidating as something in a video game can get. Additionally the narrator is very well casted, the voice is perfect fitted for the nicely written manuscript, that really gives you the feel of going back in time and being the hero in an aztec like world.
I love platformers, I won’t deny that. Outland is as much itself as Limbo. If I had to compare these two, they have the same quality and uniqueness, and are similar in many instances. But while Limbo is kind of apathetic, Outland is colorful and vivid with a background story with some epic boss battles, that Limbo didn’t have nor needed.
