A fresh take on Metroidvania with an awesome Hispanic theme. Juan’s journey to become a luchador, save his love, and save the world from an army of undead is a fairly short, sweet, and excellent time.

The love this game was made with is oozing out of every pixel. From the Hispanic influences, to the creative characters, to the clear love of video game it just pops everywhere. And when I say love for games I mean they put a parade of video game Easter eggs in the game. Just off the top of my head they had Final Fantasy, Mario, Metroid, Castle Crashers, Goat Simulator, Zelda, Castlevania, and Mega Man. I’m sure I’m missing some but the point is they have an obvious joy of the medium and it shows. That joy is contagious as I smiled every time I saw an easter egg.

The gameplay is fun and can be skilled based but doesn’t have to. You can beat this game easily without learning to use the moves to thier maximum value but if you take time to learn the combos you can become an ultimate luchador killing machine. I was impressed by the gameplay and had fun the entire way through the game.

The characters are fun as well as funny. From Juan, to the literal devil, to an old man that doubles as a goat, they are well written and a very good overall cast of characters.

I loved the Hispanic art and music throughout the game. It is so colorful even in the world of the dead and the music is surprisingly great throughout the entire game.

What I thought would be an ok game became an unforgettable Metroidvania that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys video games. Great game and excited for Guacmelee 2!

Here is where it landed on my Metroidvania list.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/-metroidvanias-ive-played-ranked-/

It also scraped its way into my top 100!
https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/my-favorite-100-video-game-of-all-time/

Overall a good platformer, drags a bit too long in the end. Movement always feels precise and your mistakes always feel like your own. Enemy variety is miniscule, however that's not the main issue. The issue is with these micro projectiles that you can't even reliably destroy with your shing shing katana. The issue gets especially worse with the DLC. Bosses are all more or less great, though i didn't enjoy the down-time between phases or meaningless time wastes like boss intros every single time you reenter the arena.

Ghostrunner took a concept I'd wanted for a while and made it real. Like Hotline Miami, it's a series of touch-of-death, speedrunning, kill puzzles but now in full 3D as a parkouring cyber-ninja. It didn't perfect its own twist on the formula, but it was more than good enough to start and I'm glad we're seeing more, soon.

When you play well, it's smooth and satisfying in a way few other first person games are. When you play bad, at least the respawn is instantaneous and the checkpoints are fair.

When it janks up… it can be a bit aggravating, I won't lie, but thanks to that instant retry it was hard to stay mad. And sometimes the things you do to try and recover are their own entertainment.

I was honestly shocked when I first played the game in a Demo shortly before release that the game controls as smoothly as it does. It's designed from an almost exclusively flow-centric philosophy. Almost nothing is animation based. Input is almost never ceded from the player even when the player control is pushed by something. It's easy to catch a high, responsive framerate.

(Well, maybe that last part was less true in mid 2020 for most people)

It can sometimes backfire a bit: feel a bit slippery and cause some funny physics mishaps for the player. But to me, that's the ideal trade off if you can't yet reach perfection with this concept.

The game's bigger missteps are probably with its attempts to "shake up" the gameplay with the puzzlier sections and the boss fights, and both because they suddenly force the player to go at their speed, not the other way around (with some exceptions).

In my mind, the whole game is a puzzle of efficiency, so having explicit puzzle sections is no issue. It's in fact a great idea to give the player a few low reflex requirement activities to do between the high points. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to involve elements that require waiting for an animation or forcing a fixed move speed while navigating a simple space giving the stuck-at-40mph-on-a-70mph-highway, "Traffic" effect.

Not all of them are like this, and I actually enjoyed a few, but it's a shame the last boss in particular gets the Traffic effect the hardest of them all with its simon-says-esque routine.

It's interesting to compare this now to Hi-Fi Rush (in hindsight) where one of the highlight bosses was even more so a simon-says, but because of the expectations set with the game putting EVERYTHING on a fixed beat from the start, it works amazingly there. So really, Ghostrunner's fault is just in that it occasionally fumbled its player-directed pacing after establishing it so prominently in the core game loop.

The overwhelming majority of the game does not have this problem, however and if you catch with the core game loop, the primary memories you'll get out of this game will be the fun you had there.

…

Mmm. I do feel like I need to state that I love first person platforming games, though. I saw at least one friend on my Steam list with 120 deaths on the last platforming segment compared to my 12. I know the appeal of that kind of gameplay is… niche.

But maybe this is the game that gets you into it? 😅

A fun but very flawed experience. Though the game marketed itself heavily on the heights of Fallout: New Vegas, you would do yourself (and the game) much justice by ignoring that comparison and going into The Outer Worlds with a fresh mind. This is not New Vegas 2.

There are many things The Outer Worlds does poorly:

Mind numbing combat with terrible AI (both enemy and companion); some quest choices feeling very by the numbers/illusion of choice; an ungodly amount of stuff to read that will cause your eyes to glaze over; often boring and bland world designs that make exploration both inside and outside of towns a bit boring; way too much miscellaneous trash that will fill up your inventory; a mostly bland cast of companions (not you Parvati); poor RPG skill/perk system that made character building dull; poor performance; and a near soul draining world filled with some of the most unlikable NPCs I've ever experienced and a message that Obsidian hammer into your head on every world you visit.

Though if you can put all that aside there are a lot of great things in here that make me look forward to the next installment in this series.

There are a myriad of fun quests both in the Base Game and the DLC for you to sink your teeth into, all with a great amount of variety in how you want to complete them. There's all sorts of fun dialogue to give your PC personality and let you role-play and for those who enjoy it, there are also plenty of skill-checks (I hate them myself though) and like any good RPG, dialogue options can evolve depending on what your PC knows (from reading terminals, speaking to other NPCs, etc...) which will often lead to you getting a secret third choice outside of your binary good guy, bad guy choices. This game rewards exploration and willingness to go off the beaten path and try stuff that isn't just outlined in your quest journal.

Again this is a very flawed experience and it's definitely not for everyone but if you typically enjoy Obsidian games I'd say to give Outer Worlds a try. There are some good proof of concept systems here and a fun experience to be had if you can get past the flaws.

Get an OP weapon that will let you skate past the god awful combat (I chose the Salvagers Helper which you can find fairly early on Groundbreaker); don't play on Supernova (lack of fast travel + survival mechanics = bad time); and resign yourself to being the big brother/sister of the crew and marrying ADA since there is no romance in this game... still hung up about that.

The thing about The Outer Worlds is that it got announced back when I beat Fallout: New Vegas for the first time, and since I loved that game and my appreciation for it has only grown with each subsequent playthrough, my excitement for Obsidian's next action RPG was through the roof. Despite the strength of my anticipation for this game, I never ended up buying it, and I'm not sure if it was because of the game's middling reception scaring me off or something like that, but I was still really excited to play it years later. When I went to the video store last week and picked up DVD copies of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Severance, I also came across the Nintendo Switch port of The Outer Worlds, and after noticing how much cheaper this copy of the game was than its price on the PlayStation store, I thought "Why not?" and decided to buy it.

For me, the highlight of Obsidian's games (and, by extension, Black Isle Studios' games) has always been in their writing, and The Outer Worlds is no exception. The Halcyon system and its planets were as interesting to learn about through exchanges and terminal logs as they were to explore, and the hypercorporate space colony setting is populated with a whole slew of interesting, funny, and eccentric characters that you can choose to either befriend, rebuff, kill, or ignore entirely. Speaking of which, the companions that can join you aboard the Unreliable were easily my favorite characters in the game, as helping them reconcile with their mistakes, desires, and views made the team that I had built throughout the game feel like a real found family. Unlike so many other games that let you make good or bad decisions, the choices here in The Outer Worlds have actual moral weight to them, and there were several moments where I felt genuinely bad about doing what I had initially thought was the right thing due to their horrible consequences. The game's relentless and blunt satire on greed, capitalism, consumerism, and bureaucracy is front-&-center in every one of the game's planets, missions, and even items, but it all struck a delicate balance by being entirely unsubtle while also never coming off as annoying or overbearing, and this meant that The Outer Worlds actually benefitted from its in-your-face approach to delivering its themes.

One of my favorite aspects of Fallout: New Vegas would be how your skills and perks were just as important in conversations as they were in combat by giving you the chance to let others trust you or give you what you want, so I was really glad to see that feature make its way to The Outer Worlds, and while I was disappointed to see the exclusion of the intentionally bad dialogue options that would show up if your skill level for that specific choice wasn't high enough, it still made conversations feel really dynamic. The writing was easily my favorite aspect of the game, but the combat here in The Outer Worlds was pretty fun as well, as the varied selection of weapons and multitude of ways to upgrade your arsenal and abilities allowed me to really personalize my playstyle. Despite how much fun I had with The Outer Worlds, though, I will say that I kind of regret going with the Nintendo Switch port rather than just waiting for it to go on sale somewhere else. Don't get me wrong, this game looked and ran pretty well on my Switch, but if you have the option to play it on something else, then I recommend you do so. Even with that in mind, though, I was still able to appreciate The Outer Worlds for the great game that it was, and although I was a little disappointed to see its sequel get announced as an Xbox exclusive, I am a little hopeful that it'll eventually get ported to other systems like some of their other exclusives.

The only Obsidian game I ever played where I just dropped it entirely less than midway through, this is Obsidian's nadir. Super glad I just played it on Game Pass at launch. An utterly shallow game both narratively and mechanically, so terminally vapidly centrist it gives Bioshock Infinite a run for its money. Disco Elysium had just came out like a week before and it just made this game look exponentially worse in comparison in every way. Still will never get over how Parvarti was Rainbow Capitalism personified as she never stopped licking the boots of people who enslaved her and separated her from her mom. Just appallingly tone deaf writing.

Fricking sucks we're getting a sequel to this pile while Alpha Protocol and Tyranny will be forever lost to rights hell.

The one thing I never expected an Obsidian game to be was terminally uninteresting but that's exactly what The Outer Worlds is. A collection of shallow systems, characters, and quests that sort of affect the illusion of a proper RPG with depth and consequence but in reality offers nothing of the sort.

The almost cartoonish lack of depth in the gameplay is mirrored in the story, which is a smarmy and infuriatingly smug monument to Enlightened Centrism that wraps itself in a veneer of anti-capitalist rhetoric so thin that it would struggle to appear meaningfully leftist even to someone who gets all their political opinions from Breadtube. Faux-empathetic South Park politics for the Rick and Morty generation, where picking an actual side is always fucking stupid and you should always strive for a meaningless compromise in order to preserve the status quo.

Genuinely astonishing that this came from the same studio that released Pillars 2 just prior, a game that, for all it's issues, actually had the guts to grab you by the neck and tell you to pick a fucking side, to get some god damn ideology, and actually let you meaningfully change the broken world it presented. That game was the real New Vegas 2 you've all been clamouring for, but no one bought it, so I guess we're stuck with this.

Nothing else to really say because there's basically nothing else in here. An utterly empty and vacuous game that doesn't even manage to surpass Fallout 4. A snake oil salesman promising you a miracle solution to bring back the Fallout you remember, but get past the fancy logo and uncork that bottle, and you'll find nothing in there but dust and echoes.