The Outer Worlds

Right, if you haven’t heard of Outer Worlds, where the heck have you been? You know what, just check this out.

 

All done? Good, lets continue.

The basic premise is simple and not too different from something you might have found in other games.

You play a protagonist, woken from 70+ years  in suspended administration.. er, animation, you awaken in a world ruled by corporations.

As you adventure through the Halcyon system (oh yeah, this is a star system, you get to explore different planets here) you find people opressed by a system wishing for nothing more than a little freedom from “The Board”, the collection of ruling-class corporations within Halcyon.

I won’t give you the over-arching plot, but I will give you a run down over one of the many quests which I feel encapsulates the general feel of the game itself.

 

You come across one planet which has been cut-off by the Board, essentially left to rot.

Within this planet there are two major factions, one attempting to force the planet back into the Boards good graces, the other seeks freedom with an almost religious fervor, as you explore the questline you can favour one faction over the other, but ultimately you come into posession of a super weapon that both sides want, one will use it to force their way back into the Corporations, the other will take freedome at gunpoint.

Which side do you pick? This is generally a recurring theme, you can either pick the corporate stance on everything, or choose against it, but I will tell you now that it never comes across quite as simple as one side being right or wrong but you will need to see this for yourself.

 

Right, so lets talk about the things I liked and the things I didn’t.

General themes? Loved it, the selection of weapons? Heck yeah, new planets? Done and done, companions? Yeah! The NPC’s? Generally a positive.

 

So where do I feel it fell short?

The companions seemed to come with little effort, in fact I felt like there was only 2 that took any actual effort to get, and one of those I had already collected the item needed well in advance.

Weapons, right, so you can upgrade your weapons and armour, a mechanic I am not overly fond of at the best of times, but in a game where you’re collecting new items almost constantly, I absolutely hate upgrades as I feel like I am wasting my upgrade modules when ever I use them (pro-tip devs: if you’re going to include upgrades in a lootershooter, don’t make them modules you need to collect for a one time use).

The planets had different creatures on them, but it didn’t feel like an ecosystem, instead feeling like we had “Planet of the Mantisaur” or “Planet of the Raptidon”, like a classic 50’s scifi film, I imagine it was done for ease of development, but when we’ve got multiple planets of apex-predators, but no ecosystem to support them, it would have been nice to see critters hunting other critters, but this doesn’t affect the gameplay so much.

I did encounter a gane-breaking bug towards the end, getting close to one NPC (and I believe a cutscene) caused the game to crash repeatedly, had an easy solution but annoying.

 

So lets pull all this together, I loved this game.

Lets face it, I don’t have time to game so much any more, but over 2 weeks I have pulled together enough time to get this game completed, it had that retro-futuristic feel without feeling like it was leaning too much on other games with the same premise  (I am purposefully not making these comparisons), am I going to go back and see more of what the world and my NPC comrades have going for them that I haven’t touched upon yet? Heck yeah, I may even go back and replay the core game to see how the arsehole game plays out.

If we had to do an “Out of ten” rating, I’ll give this one a high 9.

 

Oh and if you liked Firefly, not only does the soundtrack have similar tones, but the ammo for your energy weapons is worth taking a look at.