I really, really, really wanted to like The Outer Worlds 2.
From the pitch, it sounded like it would be right up my alley. I went in mostly blind, with an open mind, and quite excited…
Only to bounce off the narrative again and again and again. The story, characters, and setting all fell completely flat. The premise is interesting enough if a bit derivative, but it meanders and waits too long to raise the stakes. Almost everyone you meet is a thin caricature parroting a faction’s schtick, and that extends to the companions as well. The backdrop is a war between powerful factions, but each of them basically boils down to “<thing> bad” and they really only differ in set dressing.
It leans on the humour to carry the day, and that humour just didn’t land for me at all. Tone-wise it’s in a really weird place where it’s too silly to take seriously, but too dismal to be fun. I never really cared about what was happening, or felt I had a good reason to care either in or out of universe. The characters aren’t likeable, the factions are unsympathetic, I don’t understand what problem we’re trying to solve let alone my part in it, why am I even here?
The gameplay is at best competent if unremarkable, at worst tedious and frustrating. I’m not a fan of hard skill checks over soft ones, the look-but-don’t-touch way they’re presented, or the balancing between skill check difficulty and skill points granted, but that’s mostly down to preference. I do feel the bullet-spongey enemies do hurt the feel of the combat, which otherwise is decent with a few neat tricks.
There was clearly a ton of work and a lot of love put into this game, and at times it does shine through. But I can’t help but feel there’s no unique selling point, no differentiator, no raison d’etre. It wants to be Mass Effect, it wants to be Fallout, but it misses out on what makes those brilliant. At the high asking price, it’s inevitably asking for comparison to other games that it doesn’t reach the level of and never was going to reach the level of.
Eighteen hours in I finally admitted I was forcing myself to play a game I wasn’t enjoying, giving it “second” chance after “second” chance in the vain hope that it would eventually click. There were a few genuine glimmers of brilliance, but at the end of the day I’m not willing to keep slogging through for the notion of a payoff that may or may not be there.
If this seems unusually review-like, it’s because it’s adapted from what I wrote as a Steam review. I don’t know if I’ll do a full postmortem on just why it didn’t land for me, but I already had this shorter piece ready to go.