Outriders is a game that when it hits its power fantasy feels great; gives you the Fast and Blast that peak Path of Exile or Diablo have where you’re just destroying waves of hapless foes and feeling all mighty for it. It is quite a shame that these moments are few and far between until you’ve almost beat the story and heavily gear locked; if your numbers aren’t big enough then no fun for you. The core design is Diablo with chest high walls (which you mostly get to ignore come late game) coupled with one of the worst, most misanthropic stories I’ve seen in modern gaming. Terrible writing and voice acting abounds with jokes that hit maybe twice in the whole game and would otherwise be embarrassing for a 13-year-old boy to author.

The character ability customization and build variety are evidence of a developer who hasn’t put much time into researching what others are doing in the space nor to find out what works and what doesn’t in a similar vein to Anthem’s screwups. The armor mod system is wonderful where you can swap out one of the two abilities on your armor or weapon for anything you’d previously unlocked. Sadly, the substat system means anything but the most basic of “make gun hit gud” build is extremely finnicky and reliant on the perfect set of stats and mods while still often not being as effective, turning the game largely into a shooting gallery instead of fun power testing ground. You also barely have enough class points to make any sort of decisions about your build, as the vast majority of your points just go to getting to your necessary capstone ability.

This isn’t even mentioning how buggy the game is, what with inventory wipes, crashes, and a non-functional multiplayer environment. Even the working parts often seem like they should be called bugs in any other game, where attack hitboxes don’t match up to the red circles on the ground, or said indicators are covered up by terrain or simply non-present. Telegraphs as to what to do to avoid attacks are often missing, the interrupt system is half baked nonsense, and the general vertical field of vision where you need to watch the ground while shooting evil birds in the air hardly works.

There’s potential under all this; when the game clicks and you start dropping meteors on burning enemies from your legendary shotgun it can feel wonderful. Even then the payoffs in terms of fun are too small and everything that surrounds it simply fails. Hidden nerf mechanics such as “downscaling” which punish you for gearing up, insane balance decisions from the developers, and the fact that basically everything else in the game is total garbage makes this a hard derec, don’t waste your time.

So it's Monster Hunter which means it has sucked far more hours of my life than just about any other genre but it's also definitely one of the weaker entries of the post-Tri series.

There's plenty of good; getting around the map feels pretty great; Wirebug spidermanning just works out of combat, you can ride your ninja dog like a horse or yoshi him for extra height, and wirefall recovery gives you a way to get up with your weapon sheathed, something I've wanted for over a decade now. Narga and Ziggy are the coolest they've ever been and I enjoyed the hot new cat Magnamelo as well. The problem is that other than those three and newcomer Goss Harag the monsters just aren't very good; bad hitboxes abound and there are several weird shared telegraphs. The final boss giants are probably the worst the modern series has ever seen and the new Rampage mode, monhun tower defense, is an abomination unto good taste. The fact that the two worst parts of the game are the easiest way to farm charms almost makes me miss rusty shard farming in 3U.

There are plenty of other upsides; armor set skills are designed much more with purpose now instead of being a mismash. Switchaxe and Gunlance are the best they've ever felt to play, with the former using the actual morph aspect as a meaningful part and the latter having actual chasedown and fast punishes. Hunting Horn got a total rework into being the super invincible machine instead of a bad hammer, and LBG lets you go full gunfu on monsters, which is pretty cool.

The biggest downside though is that the game just sort of ends at what would normally be the 70-80% mark or so for a monster hunter game; it feels like 8 quests just got cut from the game; for comparison World went to 9 on launch instead of Rise's 7*.

There's also some serious camera issues; monsters are just bigger and I think the camera might be more zoomed in, but it's far harder to keep track of everything compared to previous entries, like they took G's Plesioth as the new standard where you spend the whole time staring at his weird little feet.

Again though, it's Monster Hunter, it's fun, Long Sword is even more broken than it was before, and it's got one of the easiest LRs for getting you into the game, but I'd still recommend waiting for the next big content patch to get in if you're not a big MH fan.