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Outwars
Posted by Davrinsky sky
Posted on 11 July, 2013 at 11:52AM ↑ 0 ↓ 0
Outwars

I traded a CD with some kid neighbor for 2 "shoot em up" CDs.. full of multiple demos of games.. some examples include: Star Fighter 3000, Quake, Doom, Hexin, Space Girl, Raptor, Take no Prisoner, Worms 2... the list goes on. one of these discs had the Outwars demo on it, and that game was all I played for a good while. The single player demo only consisted of 2 missions. It also lets you play with another demo player on a local network via IP address. this was the only way i was able to play multilayer with my brother, it would be just me and him flying around killing each other or just doing what ever it is the map would allow us because we would get bored. At least I would discover every aspect of those maps when he wouldn't be around to join me. I was in elementary school for that time.. I managed to receive the full copy of the game a year or so ago. (probably 10 or so years later) and I played as far into the campaign I could get, The very last mission would keep crashing on me, so I never finished it. It was a thrilling and challenging adventure though.

The Outwars story is kind of similar to the movie, "Star Ship Troopers." There is a war between the humans and a bug like aliens referred to as 'skulls'. the main difference between the movie and the game is that the human soldiers, or "elite CDF Marine Jump Corps," use jet pack armor and never use bullets. Instead they use laser guns, grenades(shot from rifle), timed mines, missiles (imbedded in suit), and napalm grenades(shot from rifle). There are more weapons to name off but I can't remember them all. There are three types of suits, light, medium, and heavy. There is probably no real difference in the armors other than being able to use different kinds of weapons. If there is a difference, I bet it would be: The light takes less fuel but you armor is more fragile, you move faster. medium, good protection not as good speed. heavy follows the pastern where you the most protected but have the slowest speed.  I normally played with one armor type so im not very sure about the armor types.

every time you jump in the game, you are actually lifting off with your jet pack. your can get a great height but the fuel goes down whenever it is in use. the fuel does regenerate or fill back up when not in use. Basically, if you try to jet off with out letting go, your going to run out of fuel and you would start to fall as soon as your fuel reaches zero, and if you are still trying to hold the jet pack to help it soften your fall? it seems like it might help because of the bursts of it trying to work with you, but you will ultimately suffer fall damage. you basically have to lift off and fall and jet for long or short bursts at your discretion for the next platform you are trying to get to. Later in the game however, you can use a glider where you can just reach any height and activate the glider, which is basically big kite wings that pop out of your suit and you can just glide. point down to go faster, pull up too much and your going to have an issue. you can also use your jets with the glider. the direction of the wings always comes out the angle the 3rd person camera is facing, so sometimes the wings come out looking funny with the character your playing as.


When you play on a mission, you have 2 other CDF Marines who follow you. You can give orders to them to engage (this always gets them killed), hold position (if you actually care for their life), and regroup. there are other commands but those are the main ones. They seem to have infinite fuel which I never understood. They can also just stand in place in the air on top of just having no worries of running out of fuel. I guess you are just cursed with a shitty suit or something in the game. You can attack your teammates and after enough damage on one of them, they will attack you and you would basically be fighting your own team mates. One of the teammates sound southern and its really just hard to take them seriously. They're like some cowboy rowdy players or something.


I will just mention right now, that fighting the other Marines is a bitch. Having infinite fuel, they just fly all over you attacking at multiple different angles. They mostly rush you. In most situations though, it all depends on where you are. If you just stand there, they will just stand there shooting you. You can both stand there and shoot each other, you could win but your going to be almost dead. In the training missions, you would be fighting the Marines, I never try to fight like they do because flying and shooting at another flying moving target is just too hard.. I normally fly across the ground to move faster to get out of line of fire while trying to shoot at them. There are multiple methods, but I tend to stay cheap since i am awful against them. (usually ends up me just standing and shooting though)


The combat against the skull however is a whole different story, the majority of them are ground based and slow moving. They just shoot thorns at you from their tail, there are others that shoot grenades at you. On rare occasions, you will get flying ones that are slow and easy. The most common skull is a ground thorn and ground launcher (grenade). The skulls that are ground based are 3d, but when ever a skull creature dies, or anything dies for that matter, they explode in sprites of the limbs flying with the picture/animation of an explosion. The majority of the game is kind of sprite yet, it still has models you interact with being in 3d, such as the platforms, the enemies, and your allies, and ships. Everything else seem to be sprites, pictures of tress facing your direction at any angle, the flame thrower having over lapped pictures of flame. There is a conflict between the map in the game and the skull models. Sometimes, it happens where you can see the skull though walls or platforms that are over you just because of the sprite/3d model conflict. That is the biggest bug in the game I could find.

 

Allot of the missions consist on you to be in a hurry, this is because at a certain time in the progress of the mission, there would be a pickup ship to pick you and you team up. The ship meats at a certain place that you need to have secured before the ship gets there for extraction, so the first part of the mission is to secure the ship. Be there and kill everything there before the ship gets there. If the ship won't pick you up yet after saving its ass, you still have a mission to do. Its not every mission you have to beat the clock with the ship though, other missions include just tasks to not die on, such as bombing certain areas. There are very many interesting scenarios the game puts you through with these 2 game types via level design, there can be an enormous vertical room where the skull spawn above you when you activate the elevator you need to use to progress and you have to fly all over the room and take out the bugs in each platform who jump all over the room. its fun to fly and dodge thorns but there are some skulls that shoot a bundle of quivers at you and its half of your armor. Makes it all the more exciting to doge them. whenever I can, I normally stay cheap and just stay covered while I pluck them off from a distance. I like to stay safe and save ammo. This is because you cannot save your progress in a mission, you can only save the mission you are on. If you die, you have to start the level over. The 1st laser choice always regenerates up to 12 shots anyway. There are also gliding missions where you glide for long distances and fight on the way to patches of high land and establish and neutralize.


dispite the corney sprites, and the better fuel on teammates, this game is a fun 3rd person jet pack alien war shooter. fast paced ariel attacks, It is in the list of games I will preserve from my child hood in my personal games folder.

Comments
Billy
11 July, 2013 at 4:35PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

Nice review. Welcome to the site!

Lazlo Falconi
14 July, 2013 at 7:44PM ↑ 0 ↓ 0

Good review, but you should have OPENED with 3rd person jetpack alien war shooter.

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