Outriders Review

Outriders is a curious game. Outriders is a third-person looter shooter that's both challenging and entertaining, despite the flaws in its story. Even though I experienced multiple crashes in the same session, it was still a fun game and I felt ready to get back into the world Enoch.

Outriders thrives when it comes action and gameplay. Combat is the game's most important aspect. Each of the four classes in the game require that you stay in the middle of combat and use your abilities to the fullest extent to heal any injuries. The Devastator and Trickster classes can heal from close encounters with enemies, while the Pyromancer can heal from damage caused by fire-breathing enemies. The Technomancer is the most aggressive class and has a better life leech ability that allows them to heal simply by dealing damage.

You might think that Outriders was using the same cover-based shooting techniques as Gears of War or The Division to link it to another looter shooter. The perception is exacerbated by the fact that encounters are often littered with waist-high walls. Outriders has more DNA than the DOOM games, although it is less well-constructed. You can use the instant health packs to help you fight tougher enemies in most fights.

As a Trickster, Outriders was at its best. I could teleport into the game, kill five enemies using a Temporal Slice, then fire away until everyone in my vicinity became a mulch. You feel like the god the story portrays you to be, with hordes upon hordes falling at your feet.

Outriders is a dark sci-fi story that holds a lot of promise. However, it seems like it has been squandered by bland characters and poor voice acting. Earth is in peril and humanity flees to Enoch to begin a new life. Once you land, however, you are caught in the Anomaly storm, which kills most people and gives you superpowers. Also, you are frozen in time for 3 decades. Upon awakening, humanity is doing what humans do best: blowing each others up.

You must find a way to pass the Anomaly Storms and locate the source of a mysterious message. The story is a bit dissonant, but there is a good payoff. You spend most of your time trying to reduce the number of survivors of humanity, despite it being a game about them.

Although the story says there are only a few hundred thousand people left, by the end of the credits, that number will have dropped by around 2%. Your main character is as trigger-happy as you can make them be, even in cutscenes. But who has the time to consider that when loot keeps increasing? Maybe I'm harshly judging a game where you dole out large amounts of damage using big weapons. But there's a section in the final-game that walks through an internment camp. Genocide can be done by someone else, but it is not if it is in the pursuit of loot.

The main character seems to be trying to be a smart-cracking, one-liner machine. He makes dry comments and comes back with comebacks that I would have found interesting if I was 15. Many side quests feature desperate and disheveled characters, often war refugees or other homeless people, asking for assistance. The player's response is usually something along the lines "maybe I can help you if you have time, you geek". It's easy to get the impression that they would bully the NPCs for their lunch money. If the main character weren't such a pathetic dickhead, Outriders might work a little better.

Outriders' genius is still evident in their endless quest for better weapons, and other gear. The game is yours to control and you can choose the build you want. This makes it a looting experience as rewarding as the combat. While random loot isn't always the best, Outriders allows you to customize the game's experience and build your character in a way that other games don't.

First, crafting is simple and intuitive. Players can level up and modify their gear in many interesting ways. Modifiers require you to disassemble equipment that has mods that you don't own. This means that there is no useless loot, at least not in the beginning. The mods that can be obtained by disassembling the gear make it more useful than the one you have.

You can modify any of your gear slots indefinitely as long as you have enough iron or leather. This allows you to tailor your weapons and armour to your situation. You can swap out a mod you don't like in your current setup without needing to purchase a new weapon or modify it to your liking. Although it would be great to modify both slots on high-end gear and even the one, it is still nice.

Mods can often be game-changing and increase your healing, damage, and health pool. You can also use mods to inflict status effects. These can be combined with mods that trigger specific interactions between certain statuses. Mods can also deal additional damage on top the base damage of weapons. Outriders is a winner once you have a cohesive build.

The other major factor is World Tiers, which are scalable difficulty modifiers that increase the levels of the enemies you encounter and the level of your rewards. World Tiers will increase with your level, making the game more difficult. However, you can disable the ability to automatically increase World Tiers, which allows you to choose the difficulty level that suits you best. A low World Tier will work if you are just trying to get the story across, but higher Tiers will bring more rewards and better gear. Finding that balance is what it's all about.

If you are the type of person who is addicted to the loot grind you will be happy to know that the game has a healthy endgame. This allows players to go on expeditions to collect high-end loot. These expeditions are designed to be completed as quickly as possible in order to increase your loot chances. This is a core principle of Outriders' gameplay. You might find yourself playing the endgame if you can get two friends to join you.

Despite the lackluster story, the gameplay still manages to keep Outriders alive, even with the patchy launch period, which has seen many hard crashes, disconnects, and other glitches. The gameplay is limited in its ability to carry Outriders, and the number of bugs, crashes and other problems that I encountered as I got closer to the end felt increasing. It's frustrating to try to finish a difficult section in the final game, only to have it crash again is not something I enjoy. But, Outriders made this more frequent than I was used to. It was difficult to avoid throwing the controller through the TV screen.

People Can Fly has confirmed that a patch was in the works. This should fix some of the crashing issues and other glitches like the HUD disappearing. This should help to eliminate a lot more of the frustrating aspects of Outriders. Outriders will be smoother and easier to recommend in a few weeks. Right now, however, Outriders is still a mess.

Outriders is one of those "rough-around-the-edges" games that's brilliant in its core, but is dulled around the edges by some less than stellar elements. It's the poor story and problems with the launch build that are the problem in this instance. Outriders can shine if they do more work on the game and make some updates.