Outward Definitive Edition

So, you would like to play outward.. Outward is not a simple game: it is challenge, adventure, desperation and fun. For most of the game you will not do much more than walk through desolate lands, running away from enemies too strong for you and trying to survive in a hostile world...at least at the beginning. Your traveling companions will be diseases, extreme temperatures, hunger, fatigue. Everything you will read about the game's defects is true: the graphics are antiquated, the combat is difficult and the interaction with the world around you is very limited. But once you have learned the mechanisms of how the system works, you will not be able to stop. You will want to experiment with skills, weapons, strategies until you can manage all the challenges that await you. Outward does not forgive lapses in attention and each challenge will require study and preparation but in the end, when you have learned, the satisfaction will be great. Playing multiplayer is also a lot of fun. A piece of advice: try it and find the way to play that best suits you. In the end, the sense of accomplishment will be incredible.

Old school type RPG with eurojank combat, whats not to love and hate? I enjoy pretty much everything in this game, other than the three brothers, yuck!

I wanted to play this because I liked the "you are not special" idea, but it's just not for me. Starting with the good. It's kinda silly, but I liked dropping my backpack to fight and then grabbing it back from the ground after the fight. I also like how you don't die, you just get captured/imprisoned or something and then have to make your way back to normality. Or maybe you're just miraculously saved, that's nice. Now the bad. The maps feel _very_ big and empty, and you have to walk _a lot_ (which is annoying when you gotta avoid all the enemies you see because you can't fight them). And the rewards for exploring are: (1) finding an enemy you can't defeat and (2) some nice items that you can't carry because your backpack is already full. Okay, yes, "you have to prepare for combat and chose your fights", but it's not fun when you basically have to chose not fighting every enemy you see (a chicken killed me). Simply fighting two minor bandits required me to layout traps and try to overcome how clunky combat feels. And even when I got better gear, some insects were dragging my face on the sands of the desert. Maybe I do want to be special. 🤡 Oh, final note, the characters felt _very_ bland, I didn't feel like caring about any of them. Oh, and female enemies grunted with a male voice.

Short version: I have a difficult, fulfilling job, so I don't need to spend my free time doing tedious crap to feel like my life has meaning. Now for the long version. I played about 5 or 6 hours -- long enough to get a feel for what this game is trying to accomplish -- and it just did not do it for me. At its heart, this is a game about exploration and learning the hard way, which I normally enjoy. For instance, I've sunk waaaaay too much time into Kenshi, I did the whole Dark Souls and Nioh 2 thing, and I enjoyed trucking through Battle Brothers and Darkest Dungeon (until the BS with the final dungeon and pointless grind it introduced). I don't have an issue with challenging games. I almost got the hook in this one: sure, the start is an unfair load of crap that just punishes you (far worse than ANY Soulslike) for not already knowing how to play the game. But there IS a moment where you start making progress, you clear a dungeon, your gear improves, and it feels like you're ready to strike out. Then something steamrolls you and you spend -- not kidding -- 30 to 45 minutes just trying to get back to home base. I put up with that once or twice, but by the third time, the design decisions sapped my enjoyment. For example, when you hit Esc, the game doesn't stop, it just brings up a menu. You have to click another button to actually pause it. That's stupid. The map doesn't show you where you are. I'm an Eagle Scout, but I have a dogwater sense of direction. Being lost isn't a challenge, it's what happens when I get delusions of grandeur and don't use my GPS. This world is not designed well enough to get away with that. To be clear, no issue with the lack of quest markers or quests requiring you to keep track of stuff on your own, but give me a dot on the map that's me so I don't have to waste time. If I was still in high school, I'd have the time to dig the fun out of this game. But I'm not, and I don't. There are better versions of this out there.

Reading many reviews here i think that the general answer is ''no''. First of all, this game is not a RPG: it's a survival action with some (small) RPG elements. The core is simple: you are a weak nobody in a hostile environment and you need to survive facing starvation, climate, diseases, monsters, bandits etc. You survive only using your gear, yes, because you are not the Dragonborn, the Witcher or some Kratos: you are an average man like us. You need to hunt laying traps, you need potions if you want to fight the biggest enemies and you need to flee if the enemies are far superior than you: have you ever seen real life? Yeah, something like that. You can achieve some perks to improve yourself and they are useful but not enough to win, you can't grind here. The crafting is excellent and deep and the exploration is rewarding (if you are patient and clever); graphics are old but acceptable, and some sceneries are majestic. The plot is not very original but it's not that bad, at least it's realistic and you have choices. For instance, a guy told you that a bunch of bandits wants to sack your village: this is not a Tes, if you don't care about that the village will be really sacked and you will lose your house and your belongings. Thank God you don't have the GPS: you must use the map, the compass and the sun and this feels so real. The only great problem is the autosave system which is too harsh (and some times doesn't work at all): for this reason i don't give 5 stars, the rest of the game works very well. If someone doesn't like the formula, or doesn't have the time to play it i can understand, but it's not fair to bash a game only because you expected something else.