⌨️ Outshine PC Review 6/10 "Outshine is one of those games that’s like patting your head while rubbing your belly" ⌨️ @PixelHunted @OutshineGame #IndieGames #GameDev

As someone who spends literally every hour of my working day with my fingers on a keyboard, I figured I’d sail through Outshine. Type words to blast enemies? 

Pfft, whatever’s in my path is going to be absolutely obliterated. 

So, Area 1, Level 1, max difficulty. Let’s go.

About 15 seconds later I was sent scurrying back to the menu with my tail between my legs. Outshine is one of those games that’s like patting your head while rubbing your belly - easy in theory, difficult in practice. Sure, you have to rapidly type random words to defeat foes, but you also have to control your character (the shift keys move you left and right) and smartly prioritise what you’re going to type to take down the most dangerous enemy.

I fled back to the more manageable medium difficulty where Outshine quickly established itself as a Brundlefly-like fusion of early-2000s SEGA cult classics The Typing of the Dead and Rez.

Just as in the bizarre typing tutor/zombie shooting classic you have a screen full of enemies with random words hovering in front of them: “FEZ”, “PREY”, “AID” and later longer and more peculiar ones like “PREPOTENCE”, “NEOCLASSIC”, and “BURBANKITE” (a rare strontium/barium/cerium carbonate).

Tap out the word and boom, enemy down

The Rez influence is in the aesthetics: you’re zipping through abstract cyberpunkish landscapes as an abstract humanoid figure to dance music, fighting enemies composed of simple shapes that explode in pretty colours. You’ve got a shield and an overdrive smart bomb for when things get a bit too intense and a distinctly Rez-like need to balance damaging bosses and knocking their projectiles out of the air.

Outshine nails its nuts n’ bolts gameplay. Making a typo isn’t the end of the world as you simply have to find the next correct letter rather than start from the beginning of the word and it’s deeply satisfying to take down a screenful of enemies in a blizzard of letter-perfect typing. Plus, the movement is snappy and precise enough to let you weave through projectiles and obstacles (though as you’ll be repeatedly tapping the shift button you’ll want to disable Windows’ Sticky keys asap).

But all that good stuff doesn’t make up for Outshine spreading its content much too thinly. Each of the three areas is divided into five stages and a boss, with most of those them, being identical to one another. That, coupled with a limited array of enemy types, quickly makes the game feel repetitive as you zip through the same abstract virtual spaces five times in a row. That the game isn’t shy about repeating the same bosses across each area doesn’t exactly help matters.

Plus, and I know this is super subjective, but Outshine’s soundtrack really lets the side down with a collection of the most generic electronic music imaginable. An on-rails game gives the developer a rare opportunity to perfectly sync the audio/visual elements, but what’s here feels like placeholder public-domain music that somehow made it through to the finished product. Worse, each stage in an area shares the same track, so you’ll be listening to the same dull tune five times in a row.

All the above makes for a frustrating overall experience. Outshine has clearly got the goods when it comes to gameplay and there are rare moments like the end-of-area boss battles where everything comes together and the quality visibly shifts up a gear. But, when grinding through the levels, you can’t escape the feeling that this is too little content spread over too many levels.