I doubt many people instantly recognize this franchise but the first installment is a game I’d rank highly in the category “way ahead of its time”. Outcast was a massive open world Adventure Game (though a bit more RPG than say Tomb Raider) made possible with the rather shortlived Voxel tech (as opposed to polygons). It had an Elder Scrolls sense of scale while delivering (for the time) great graphics and supported 3D movement. The act of combining those three in one game sounded like a fever dream in 1999 but they did it. It was quite buggy back then but still won a lot of awards and blew even more minds.

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Oh wow, I never expected a follow-up to this. Like ninjan said - it was peak software rendering. It essentially drew a metric buttload of sprites to show a lumpen heightmap. It even abused that for a few special effects, like a scanning grid that would’ve been nightmarish to recreate before shaders existed. Games barely had z-buffers.

But this was right when everybody bought a 3D accelerator card. Quake 3 Arena came out six months later and required one. Unreal Tournament supported software rendering up until UT 2004, but even with Michael Abrash optimizing so hard that removing instructions actually hurt performance, a cutting-edge Pentium 4 could get walked by a Voodoo card.

This soft reboot looks appropriately silly for what made the original fun.