The Outer Worlds

The game is really stunning visually imo. Its worth a play at 30 bucks if you have a good video card just to see the gorgeous worlds. I dont think the story is bad at all. I actually liked the cheesy nostalgia and humor throughout. The complaints about NPC's and quests are somewhat valid. I found myself asking do I have to help any of these people? lol Some of it was good as it is hard to tell who is a "good guy" and who isnt. Im actually planning on getting the expansions because I think it was way more good than bad. PROS: Great looking worlds. Lots of neat weapons "Tinkering" system is kinda fun to play around with to make some uber weapons. Unique story and humor for a RPG. CONS: Not enough unique creatures to fill the worlds with. You pretty much fight the same mobs over and over. Quests toward the end seem kinds pointless and repetitive. Companion stories can be drivel at times. Companions do alot of stupid things in combat. They either dont help you at all or go running off at times. Some of the quests finish in ways that leave you scratching your head.

Got a free key with my AMD processor last December. It's hard to believe the game was made by the same studio that made two of my favourite games, F:NV and PoE. It has almost none of the soul. Graphics and sound out of the way, they're both passable. Some interesting colour choices were made, but otherwise they're not particularly memorable either way. The engine is okayish, although the shooting needs some getting used to. Difficulty is determined through equipment and health numbers, not actual AI cleverness. My first gripe is the fact that it's not an RPG as much as it's a FPS with a story and some RPG elements. Think Fallout 4, give or take a few aspects. If that's all you want, the game's a 4/5. My main issue with the game is its ABYSMAL writing. No idea who hired that writing team, but they make their colleagues responsible for the yearly slop at Ubisoft look like little Shakespeares. The quest design starts off meh at first, and then devolves into typical fetch and bring quests around the halfway mark. The overarching theme of the main plot is KOTOR levels of good vs bad with basically zero middle ground or alternative paths. The characters are a travesty. Every single one has no real personality other than "holds up spork" levels of "qUiRkY"ness, because that's easy to write and there are people who still believe that to be comedy gold to this day. It works in Borderlands because it doesn't take itself seriously. TOW does, however, so it absolutely doesn't work. There are characters in free to play browsergames that have better writing. If you can look past the writing, this game is okay to play while in a slump. Crank up the difficulty and it's even challenging up until you get your first lasrifle about five hours in. In any case, do not buy at full price. Wait til mid to late 2022 when the complete edition drops to $30/30€.

This game is really strange. It's made by obsidian, but looks like a bad excuse for obsidian games. Writing is horrible. Satire is obnoxiously obvious -- the game throws in your face right from the beginning. There is no subtlety, no cleverness, no thought. It's privimitive. With that immersion is absolutely broken. There is no life, no world behind these lines of text. It's all smoke and mirrors. Rule system is really strange -- you raise skills in groups, but each skill in group may have it's individual value(or they may all be the same, sometimes depending on attributes, sometimes -- on whatever), so you don't have precise enough control over character development. Combat is pure action, so it is rather a shooter game with rpg elements than anything else. Overall -- a huge disappointment.

In my opinion, this game is deserving of neither the 5 star nor the 1 star reviews that it has. Many people seemed upset when they discovered that this wasn't going to be Fallout: New Vegas in space and labeled this as the worst game ever made. Others seem to treat this like some sort of masterclass of RPG gaming. It is neither of those things. PROS: +High production values throughout. +Excellent music. +Excellent voice acting. +Runs smoothly (at least for me; YMMV). +Great sense of humor. +Interesting premise. +A few interesting quests with multiple outcomes. (Emphasis on "few".) +Borrows heavily from Firefly. (Good if you liked Firefly.) CONS: -Most of the quests are very same-y. Go here, get this, return. -I guess it's technically an "open world design", but the levels aren't very open. It keeps you close to a path most of the time and doesn't reward you for exploration. -98% of the loot is boring. Every once in a while you'll get a cool new weapon or armor, but mostly it's just the same old junk. -There's no Bioware style relationship system with your crew, and nothing to take it's place either. Every crew member has their own quest, but those quests don't really draw your player character into the story. They're just more fetch quests. The result being that I ended up not really caring about any of the characters. -The game runs natively in 21:9 but switches to 16:9 for dialog, even though conversations happen in engine. That's lazy game design. -Gun play is just okay. Nothing to write home about. And other than a few exploding barrels scattered around, combat isn't very dynamic or interesting. -RPG mechanics are pretty dumbed down. Skill points make weapons do more damage or allow you to regain more health from healing items. Nothing really changes the gameplay from one "build" to the next. All in all, I enjoyed my 35 hours in The Outer Worlds. The humor really helps sell the experience, even if that experience isn't a very memorable one.

The high point of the entire game is the opening area. The game is most dynamic during the opening and still only gives you 3 options to resolve things, or a "forth option" of just murdering everyone. You still are forced to use combat throughout most of this game. You can't really be a pacifist. You can only approach things how the game wants you to. Nobody does challenge runs for this game, because you pretty much can't. The character writing is just awful. Everyone is two dimensional. Almost every single female is androgynous. For some reason, there is an overt hatred for all things feminine. This is why they fail to attract a bigger female audience. Personality is sacrificed in the name of "comedy." The writing tries to be qUiRkY at the expense of making any logical sense. This results in a totally unconvincing setting. Pretty much the opposite of any Fallout game. A space colony could not persist while everyone is constantly dying of malnutrition. There are no children in this game. Everything would be wiped out within 20 years. That's just the first location in the game. There is a mega city where everyone is over indulgent rich people because "automation." This contradicts the main plot which is all about resource shortages. Why can't every colony utilize automation? The world doesn't make sense. Character motivation doesn't make sense. All in the name of "comedy." This game isn't worth more than $5.