Outriders

An incredibly fun looter-shooter that just misses greatness.

Demetrius Atkins

April.11.2021

There are a handful of looter-shooters for people to play and they each have their strengths. What Outriders brings to the table is a very sound core gameplay loop of satisfying progression, fun gunplay, and the ability to build your character to how you play. Progressing through the game keeps a healthy balance of keeping things challenging without being frustrating while also giving you the ability to turn down the difficulty if things are getting a bit too hard.

Outriders begins its story on Enoch, a planet that humankind has traveled to, escaping from a dying Earth. Very quickly things go South. While the raging storms that begin kill most of the people on the surface, it gives you your powers as an Altered. While the premise is fairly straightforward there are some twists and turns in the story that make it interesting and had me want to see how it all played out. That's not to say that the script and voice acting is anything to write home about. It has a very B movie feel to it that left me wondering if that's how they meant to write it or if that's just how it came off. While the direction of the voice acting sometimes marred otherwise great moments in the story, it wasn't so bad that it made me hate it.

The core gameplay is very fun with a mix of focusing on your gear as well as how you should use your skills. For most of the game your weapons will feel very standard ranging from your normal automatic firearms, shotguns, and sniper rifles. It's not until you start getting some of the better mods for your gear that your build starts to feel truly unique. Calling down lightning with your shots, binding enemies for damage-over-time; these are a couple of things that make your weapons really stand out. Other mods can also help make your skills stronger and do specific things. Giving you the ability to use a skill twice before cooldown or using a skill to not only damage an enemy but heal you as well helps create diversity in a class. Mix that in with a large skill tree across four classes (Devastator, Technomancer, Trickster, and Pyromancer) that truly feel different from one another and the customization just goes farther.

When you get through the game (which fortunately was longer than I was expecting) you will then get into endgame material called Expeditions. There are 15 of these Expeditions that you'll be able to play through. They also have ever-increasing Challenge Tiers where you can consistently turn up the difficulty (if you so choose) to get better and better loot. As you turn up the difficulty one of the things that I noticed was that the enemies get much more bullet spongey. It's something you see in a lot of looter-shooters but it's also something I wish that somebody would find a better way to handle to increase the difficulty. Honing in on perfecting your build will definitely help alleviate this, but if this is your first foray into this type of game and understanding of the mechanics, it could be a bit frustrating. The positive to this though is the crafting system in this game does allow for really working towards extremely strong builds, it just takes time to find exactly what you're looking for.

There are a lot of things that Outriders does so well but there are flaws all over the place that don't ruin the game but does take away from it. You'll notice this almost immediately with oddly shaky cameras during cutscenes as well as a mediocre script. The tone of the game jumps all over the place a bit from extremely serious to humorous depending on what mission you're taking on. It doesn't ruin the story but did make me wish they could take another stab at it. There's also some gameplay quirks that are odd such as the sheer amount of small cutscenes. Fortunately I was playing this on a PS5 so the load times were very small and it wasn't too bad, but it does break up the flow of gameplay a lot. Real-time interactions are much more preferred in that instance.

The graphics aren't terrible but aren't great. When you compare them to other top-tier games they lag behind, but they're not so bad that they ruin the game. I also got some framerate hiccups when things got really intense but nothing terrible. Going into your inventory takes longer than you would expect and is fairly clunky especially if you come from a game like Destiny where the menus are incredibly smooth. There's also issues where the wayfinder won't work correctly and the map isn't designed in a way to tell you exactly where you are when something like that happens. Things like these do hinder the experience a little but the game is still incredibly fun and does a lot right. It's the type of game where I hope they come out with DLC to continue on with the story or even create a sequel because I think they have something special, but I do wish they would improve some of the kinks in the game.