Review: Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster (Nintendo Switch)

There was a time in my youth when pretty much all I ever played were first-person shooters. That’s partly because those are the only games that got ported to Macintosh, but also because of their inherent absurdity. As technology advanced and the games became…grittier, I lost interest. Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster has me interested again.

I’ll suggest at the start that if you’re an FPS fan who loves the “realism” of today’s entries, this review is not for you. I’m looking at this game purely through a nostalgic lens that’s heavily warping my view of the genre. But I’m also viewing Outlaws for the first time, as I didn’t play the original release in 1997.

I was only moments into Outlaws before the memories of the period started flooding in. The cutscenes may have been remastered, but the LucasArts stamp is still discernible. Here, we learn of retired marshal James Anderson as he shares with his wife the type of loving banter that you know means something’s about to go horribly south. And it does. There’s a group who’s angry that James won’t sell them his land, so they do the kind of thing that people do when everyone’s allowed to carry guns wherever they want—they kill his wife and kidnap his daughter. Thus begins James’ revenge/rescue mission.

The main adventure takes place across nine levels, each of which drops you just outside of the action. How you enter that action, then, is up to you and your choice of difficulty level. At the easiest setting, you’re practically a bullet sponge who can charge in with guns blazing. At higher difficulties, a couple shots can kill you, so you’ll need to take a stealthier approach.

Everything about Outlaws is indicative of the era in which it was released, but with some modern touches to make it accessible. Weapon swapping, which I imagine was originally mapped to F-keys, is now handled with an easily accessible wheel. Gyro controls can enhance your aiming. Textures have been smoothed over.

Thankfully, though, the developers were smart enough to not gloss over the game’s original charm. Barns and houses are still gigantic, as if designed specifically to afford guests plenty of room to dodge bullets. When you walk around the body of a gunslinger you just killed, that body spins to ensure you can never see it from a different angle. The living have only a few things to say, and they’ll repeat them incessantly until you shoot them dead.

Getting to the goal of each level is about determining the best way to clear the path, but that path is also guided by the puzzles you need to solve. Early on, for example, the house you need to enter is locked. Enter through a window? Don’t be daft; you can shoot people through it, but you can’t climb through it. Rather, you need to access the hidden tunnel through the barn, and you’ll need to find the proper key to get that entrance opened. Of course, there are plenty of health packs and ammo refills to keep you going as you investigate amongst the hordes of malicious cowboys aiming to protect their boss.

The scenery changes across the main story and expansion missions. Being set in the wild west, expect plenty of shades of brown, sure. But there are levels that require you to swim. There are shootouts on top of moving trains. You can fight with your fists and knives when appropriate. The gameplay and settings change up just enough to remain interesting for the three to five hours it’ll take to complete the main campaign. My approach was to beat one level a night, and only the sawmill kept me up past my bedtime (the pull-up map is slick, but not always helpful for puzzle solving). Again, though, you’re playing Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster for the nostalgic charm, not the level variety, and it is charming. You can even flip between the original and remastered graphics, although I didn’t find the difference made a…difference.

What else works? The gameplay is smooth and bug-free. The music is fantastic, calling to mind the best of westerns that were its inspiration. The voicing is perfect, with the actors delivering the corny cliches with the seriousness required to sell the story. There’s a multiplayer feature for those interested. I wasn’t. Part of the reason I lost interest in first-person shooters is because they lost interest in giving me compelling single-player campaigns.

The question, though, is whether five to ten hours of nostalgic content is worth $30. Nightdive Studios did a great job with this remaster, but there’s only so much to be enjoyed.

Considering that, I reserve my recommendation for retro fans willing to pay that to discover (or recall) why Lucas Arts is so revered amongst gamers of a certain age.

Now, if we could just get a remaster of Full Throttle.