Outshine

If you were to ask me what my favorite genres are, you might expect to go on and on about classic shoot ‘em ups, epic adventure games and pretty much anything involving a fake plastic guitar. One genre you might not expect me to say is typing game, but I’ve been a big fan since the early days of Typing of the Dead. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to loop back around and review Outshine, a recently-released action game that is a mix of typing game and Rez, with a little Amplitude mixed in for good measure. It’s an addictive and often mesmerizing affair that shows just how much can be done inside the typing genre. This is my review of Outshine.

Now here’s a refreshing take on both the typing and shoot ‘em up genres. Picture, if you will, a man-shaped figure made out of electricity running down a five-lane highway full of hills and sharp corners. Instead of cars, the highway is filled with colorful robot enemies that can only be destroyed by typing out the word they’re carrying. The faster you type the word, the sooner you’ll be able to move on to the next bad guy, this one threatening to drop a bomb or laser the entire lane of highway.

This is how you play Outshine. The goal is to jump between lanes dodging enemies, all while frantically typing out words in order to shoot the bad guys down and keep the path clear. You play a character named Hue, who escapes from captivity and sets out on a revenge mission against the oppressive rulers of this futuristic world. Along the way we learn the history of these people and how a single decision simultaneously saved and doomed them.

Outshine is split up into four sections, with the first three containing six stages. After busting out of the prison, Hue will need to fight the onslaught in the city, escape through the forest and then take on the ultimate evil in the temple. We get a small taste of the story between each stage, building up to some epic reveals that will reshape the way you view Hue and his journey.

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Like I said at the top, this is a typing game that seems to be influenced by some of my favorite games. You run on what feels like the note highway from Amplitude, while at the same time shooting down enemies like Rez by using Typing of the Dead tactics. That’s three great flavors that I love all coming together to create one of the best and most exciting typing games I’ve ever played.

Part of what really works about this game is that they are constantly adding new obstacles and enemies as you play through the 19-stage campaign. You’ll suddenly need to type out more than one word to defeat a tough villain or spell out a much longer word to clear a blocked path. Speaking of which, there will be parts of the five-lane highway that have been destroyed or are blocked, and you better watch out for the single-letter walls that may look easy to kill, but can be a real inconvenience when trying to clear the path.

The game really shines when it comes to the boss fights, especially when it comes to the main ones at the end of each world. That said, the stage bosses are no slouch either. While I was disappointed that they repeated a lot of these stage bosses between worlds, they were fun to fight every single time. They do a good job of making you spell much longer words, all while shooting bullets at you that you’ll need to quickly knock down with your keyboard. These mini-bosses look great and really put your typing skills to the test, which is exactly what you’re looking for from a boss.

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That said, these end-stage baddies pale in comparison to the cool main bosses that show up at the end of each world. These are massive beasts full of cool looking technology that will reshape how you look at Outshine. One of my favorite bosses will shift the camera angle from 3D to side-scrolling in order to show us all three parts of its frame. You’ll have to pay attention to the full screen in order to type every word and knock down all of the incoming bullets. And that’s not it, because even when you defeat a part of it, the boss will shift the camera back into a 3D angle where you have to dodge falling obstacles. The presentation is wonderful and I absolutely loved fighting the boss, even though I had to repeat the process a few times because I kept dying.

I think it’s safe to say that Outshine is the best-looking typing game I’ve ever played. The four different sections of the game all look completely different, and even the stages within those sections will evolve and open up over time. There are a lot of cool visual effects at play here and the enemies are fun to blow up. I noticed a hiccups and frame rate drops here and there, but I suspect that has more to do with my setup than the game itself. Thankfully, the majority of the game ran smoothly and never ceased to impress.

My only real complaint about Outshine is that the lane-changing mechanics take a little getting used to. You can use either the keyboards shift or control buttons to move left and right, which makes sense in theory, but can be a little tricky when there are a bunch of robot enemies attacking you at once. You’ll get used to it, but it never feels as natural as the typing elements. In fact, I spent the first half hour instinctively reaching for the arrow keys to move my character, but that never worked.

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The other problem I ran into is that I would occasionally need to press the shift button enough times to trigger a Windows pop-up. Apparently, if you hammer the shift button a bunch of times, Windows will ask if you want to change the Sticky Key option, which I didn’t even know about. This pauses the game and will send you scrambling to get rid of the pop-up box. You don’t get that if you choose to use the control buttons, but I found those harder to reliably hit. This may be one of those issues where your mileage may vary.

Thankfully, Outshine gets pretty much everything else right. The game will take you a few hours to beat it, and you’ll definitely want to go through it more than once using the higher difficulties. What’s more, you can add extra modifiers to make the game more challenging and compete with the competitive leaderboard. Couple that with the great music and the action-packed gameplay and you have a real winner that fans of the typing genre should not miss.