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.
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.