Source: The Outer Worlds review
Obsidian Entertainment is best known for developing Fallout: New Vegas, which is widely considered one of the best games in the Fallout series. Now the developer turns to his own expansive, anarchic sci-fi RPG shooter in The Outer Worlds.
This isn’t a fallout game, but the DNA is clear. Only instead of a post-apocalyptic Earth, it takes an arch-capitalist space colony as its setting, delving deeper into anti-corporate themes as it allows players to build characters to roam the world of Halcyon at will.
The Outer Worlds is available now for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. You can buy it on Amazon now, or check our where to buy the game guide to find out basically where it’s for sale.
In the game you step into the space boots of a colonist in the Halcyon system. You are one of the residents of the supposedly lost colony ship Hope, revived 70 years too late to discover a solar system overrun by corporatism. It is then up to you to decide whether you want to fight the man and bring down the capitalist structure, create your own niche as a freelancer, or crush the various socialist and anarchist rebellions and prove yourself as a man and/or woman to a company .
At its core, this is a Fallout-esque game. It’s a first-person sci-fi role-playing game in which you navigate the various planets of the Halcyon behind the barrel of a gun. Shooting is the focus, but you can also amuse, bribe, hack, and sneak your way through most of the problems you’ll face, and there’s a lot of emphasis here on player choices.
That is clear from the outset. Character creation not only gives you the necessary physical traits to customize (not that you’ll see them often), but also a whole host of stats to throw points into. High points in the stats give you extra bonuses and abilities, while skimping gives you disadvantages that you will hold on to throughout the game.
You can hand out points and perks – special buffs – throughout the game as you level up, further sculpting your character’s skills and playstyle, with your gear and companions offering more buffs and debuffs. So you can really lean on ranged weapons, melee, hacking, charm or intimidate when you get close, or mix and match for a jack of all trades.
Many games offer this kind of variety in character building, but few do such a good job of cultivating it in-game. Most missions – especially the larger main stories – give you a choice of approaches, and I’ve rarely felt that I had to compromise my personal idea of my character’s perspective on things in order to fit into one of the sanctioned options.
That inevitably means consequences abound. You can kill almost any NPC and fight with any faction, quickly turning entire towns or corporations against you if you’re not careful – which in turn closes some narrative options while you might open others. The main story lasts around 30 hours, making it long enough to feel self-fulfilling but short enough to reward replayability.
The roleplay even extends to the Battle. Not just in the sense that your stats dictate your approach to combat – the game dynamically offers you the chance to take on new bugs based on how you play. I kept getting killed by robots which gave me a chance to get a phobia of them which made me do it even worse in fighting robots – but in return getting an extra perk point to strengthen myself elsewhere and have my character shaped by their antics.
The fight itself is fine, but it’s definitely one of the game’s weaker links. The shooting feels good, and there’s a decent variety of weapons, further enhanced by the ability to mod weapons in different ways and even switch them between different damage types. They can also temporarily slow down time to target specific body parts and trigger various effects, in a system that might as well be described as definitely-don’t-VATS-please-sue-us.
You can also engage in battles from up to two companions that you can command with (very) simple commands, each with a special ability. These abilities are mostly just big damage attacks with a short cutscene that you can’t skip and you will get fed up, I promise.
Really, the companions are more important to the game’s roleplay than combat anyway. There are six, five of which bring their own questline (one is more of a comedy character) and will offer their opinions on the game’s other moral dilemmas.
They’re thinly outlined compared to the Mass Effect series, but each has a strong sense of character and their own charm – although it’s the first two you’ll meet, Engineer Parvati and Space Vicar Max, who have the strongest arcs . There aren’t any romantic options and not much room to develop a relationship with them of your own – romantically or otherwise – but being able to consult with them on the game’s key decision points and them is unexpectedly powerful actually offer more diverse and challenging viewpoints than the Andromeda crew ever did.
These big decisions are multifaceted in themselves. Obviously, the game’s authors targeted capitalism, but there’s more to it than just “corporations bad, unions good”. On a planet, you must choose between supporting the well-meaning leader of a smaller company hoping to reform the Halcyon board from within, or a camp of deserters hoping to violently tear down the entire system, and in this and others Tasks rarely feel like there are easy answers.
It helps that the world itself looks gnarly in the best possible way. There’s always an element of detachment when a multi-million dollar game backed by a major publisher decides to skewer corporate interests, and while Obsidian doesn’t strike, there’s still a light touch, and the attitude is here as somber as it is tongue-in-cheek.
Unexpectedly, when the game takes itself seriously, the writing shines, and its more satirical side tends to fall flat. The early 20th century-style marketing materials and company slogans still feel too familiar after the Fallout series and BioShock games, and for all the jokes, I’m not sure I ever really did laughed.
On a sentence-to-sentence level, however, writing works, and the plethora of memos, logs, and messages buried in terminals and files around the world are usually worth reading. The main story is at its best early on when it’s a loose series of errands designed mostly to force you to explore, but once it hits its twist it speeds towards a conclusion in a way that it doesn’t other than feeling a little disappointing.
That’s at least partly because it keeps you from fully exploring Halcyon, which is mostly a joy to wander around. Each planet or area feels different, from the overrun wilds of Monarch to the glittering townhouses of Byzantium, with just one frustrating common element: you’re overrun by the same mindless loot that clogs every Bethesda game. It’s endless work that keeps you busy with inventory management for no good reason — although at least you’re no longer wasting time tinkering.
Verdict
The Outer Worlds is essentially trying to cater to a very specific niche, and you probably know if you’re in it. The good news is that it really does what it says on the tin.
The writing is mostly sharp, even if the satire gets shallow at times, and the relatively tight storyline leaves enough breathing room for extensive player selection and role-playing, while keeping things short enough to make it easy to go back a second time and do that Game from there see a different perspective.
The Fallout legacy is undeniable – it’s in the OTT looting, overly cheerful marketing messages, and that definitely-not-VATS attack system – but throwing in companions, changing the environment, and delving deeper into the games’ RPG roots helps The Outer Worlds will make you feel like a different beast than Bethesda’s official Fallout games.
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