Outriders Review

Guns. Armor. Armour with guns. Guns with amor. Guns with guns. Armour with armor. Materials for said guns and armour. All of this and more can be yours if you jump into the now extensive world of looter shooters. Where Borderlands perhaps set the trend for games that centred largely around the farming of loot in a shooter, we’ve had a bunch of other titles expand the genre to live service shenanigans we so enjoy today. From Ubisoft’s The Division to Bungie’s Destiny, there’s been a breadth of style and takes on looter shooters that have certainly given some guidance on what to do and what not to do to impress and retain your player base. Enter Square Enix with Outriders, a 3^rd person looter shooter ready to go to battle with a sea of other titles vying for your hard-earned doge coins.

Outriders cover the journey of humanity’s mostly collective escape from Earth in search of another planet to call home and hopefully not turn it into a smouldering heap this time around. En route to your destination, things get messy and only one of the ships manages to reach its destination – the planet Enoch. It was a long 83-year trip, but there was no time to waste so the first of the Outriders are sent to the surface to scout things out before the rest of the colonization process is cleared to begin. Their tasks are numerous but primarily the first sent to the surface are required to find and collect the data from the probes sent ahead of time that determined it was even safe enough to send anyone to the surface in the first place. It’s here where you get your start and begin learning the ropes, meeting some characters and getting your tutorial on.

It doesn’t take long before things go sideways, of course, and while seeking out a particularly intriguing signal from a probe, the planet’s flora takes matters into its own hands and infects those strolling through the woods with an unknown contagion. Things get crazier still as some sort of anomaly storm kicks up, and its full-blown retreat mode engages for the entire expedition crew. In the scramble to save your character from their injuries, they are placed in cryogenic sleep with the assumption that when they are brought out, there will be medical aid capable of treating them. Nearly 30 years later you are brought out of cryo almost accidentally, only to discover that things have gone far worse than imagined, with human factions at war with each other and the world mostly torn asunder by increasingly powerful anomaly storms and evolving fauna. What’s more, not everyone who was struck by the anomaly was killed, and those who survived gained superpowers and of course are those who mostly founded the warring factions.

All of this is delivered via a particularly scatterbrained cutscene series that doesn’t do much of this plot justice despite it not being particularly original or nuanced, and this sadly is representative of the story delivery from beginning to messy end of Outriders’ campaign. The writing, story, and characters are mostly as confused as those of us trying to follow along. The tone of the various cutscenes and dialogues are a rollercoaster without end. It constantly feels like Outriders doesn’t really know whether it wants to be serious, comedic, melancholy, inspiring, or some odd mix of everything. You’ll experience more than a few points of whiplash as the cutscene takes you from serious to slapstick, deadpan, expectation-subverting “humour” that might have you crack a smile but probably not for the reasons intended. None of this is aided by the writing, which is derivative at best, and outright bad at its worst.

Furthering that is the poor voice acting, at least in English, but it’s a case in which much of that is likely due to VO talent working with the writing they’re provided and the direction provided. Characters will often talk to others as if they were reading from an encyclopedia instead of having a conversation, and in general, rarely sounds appropriate for the scene. One such scene that stands out to me occurs closer to the end of the campaign, and for some unknown reason, your character gives their entire dialogue as if they were severely winded and distressed. This might make more sense if anyone else was acting the same, or if your character at any point before expressed this kind of emotion but for both cases they don’t. All of this is a shame, really, because, despite Outriders’ story not being particularly unique, there’s a perfectly serviceable plot here that’s just not been executed well in its delivery.

Nevertheless, after taking an unfortunately well-placed piece of rebar to the chest, your character soon discovers that they have also been altered by the storms, and have become particularly hard to kill. This, naturally, is the perfect point for you to choose your character’s class and so you do just that. There are four classes in Outriders, filling various roles but all seemingly capable of soloing the campaign if that’s your thing. Devastators are close-range tanks, Pyromancers are mid-range fire-wielding conjurers, Technomancers are long-range supports with gear like turrets, and Tricksters are close-range hit-and-run specialists that can distort space-time. Pick whichever of those sounds like it tickles your fancy, and off you go to try and figure out how everything went so wrong while you napped.

Fighting through the campaign can be done on your own but it is encouraged that you team up with two other friends, or queue up to play with others also looking for some fun. Playing with others allows you to experience what nuance the combat system has to offer in terms of combining the various classes’ abilities to maximize your damage output and survivability. That isn’t to say there’s an enormous amount of nuance to the combat, however, because honestly, it’s almost entirely down to doing as much damage as you can and making sure at least one team member stays alive should the others get downed.

This is because the enemy AI and general unit composition for each encounter is pretty one note and is designed entirely to gate you almost entirely based on your damage output. That’s because the combat scenarios almost exclusively revolve around hard-hitting long ranged units and skirmishers laying down constant fire on your position while bigger, healthier units walk or run toward you without stopping until you’re hard-pushed into the corner of the playable zone. As such, you’re usually forced to prioritize taking out the bigger guys first unless the zone allows you to adequately kite them while you take out the smaller units. As you can imagine, this is a quick way to discover whether you do enough damage to clear a zone. Annoyingly, the enemy balance is also often poor, resulting in you being able to all but one-shot smaller units, only to be killed by the two or three big boys remaining because you simply can’t do enough damage to them specifically.

Thankfully, they’ve accounted a bit for all of this difficulty variability as you can turn down the difficulty of mobs via reducing your world tier. World tiers unlock as you gain experience and progress through the campaign, but with each new tier the enemies become more difficult and some of the jumps in difficulty can be severe. The loot does get better with each tier, so it’ll be up to you how much you want to get a better shot at higher-tier loot versus the difficulty of combat that comes with it. Of course, your character also levels with this experience, and provides you with skill points to spend in your class-specific skill tree, as well as allowing you to wear and use higher leveled gear. The skill trees all contain three main paths that diverge from one another but meet at certain points to allow for some extra variability in your builds. Getting all the way to the end of any one of these three branches unlocks the final boons for the class archetype. A very welcome addition here is that you can reset your skill tree for free at any time. I appreciated this especially as it allowed me to adjust my build based on what my team required which can change frequently.

Your build may also need to change based on the gear that you use, which brings us to the real reason you’re playing Outriders – all that sweet intergalactic loot. The great news is that the looting in Outriders is its high point. Weapons cover the usual gamut, but of course, have a huge variety in stats and mods. There are loot rarity levels that determine the level of mods an item can have by default as well as how many mods it can have equipped to it at one time. Dismantling weapons and armour grants you materials that can be used to upgrade other pieces and also grants you permanent access to the mods the deconstructed piece had equipped. Swapping mods is then as easy as choosing from those you’ve harvested before, but you do have to choose wisely as you can only select one mod slot to swap in and out with the other becoming permanently locked should it have two mod slots as is. Materials received from deconstructed items are generous, and while you might not want to invest heavily in early-game weapons, you can do so without feeling like you’re permanently putting yourself at a late-game disadvantage. All of this comes together to allow for quite a large variety of builds you can experiment with and it was the highlight of my time with Outriders.

Combat itself, at least mechanically, shares a fair amount with most recent tactical 3^rd person shooter games like The Division or even Gears of War. You will be making use of obvious cover, from which you can pop up from, vault over, and move away from to other cover to keep protected. At least that’s the intention, but the reality is that between the cover mechanics being a bit janky in some spots, and most enemies fully sprinting into your face, cover is only really useful in the odd long-range engagements you’ll have with enemies who set up shop and don’t move. Guns mostly feel good and despite some weapon types being blatantly more useful than others, they are all capable of doing the job. You’ll most likely pair your class abilities with a weapon class and mod additions that complement each other. This is because abilities and weapon mods will often be the main driver of your damage so as long as the weapon can paint the target (ideally in their critical zones) and isn’t made of paper mache. Personally, bullet sponge games have never been my favourite, but Outriders isn’t the worst of those I’ve played – not that it’s the best, either.

Once you’ve cleared the campaign, you’ll be opened up to the proper end-game content that Outriders seems to be mostly created for. It’s the proving ground for you and your teammate’s character builds and cooperation as you are charged with clearing raids while being timed with faster clears bringing better loot. Every run will earn you loot but also points that you save up to put toward unlocking the ultimate end-game raids. These raids are repeatable, and rewards for completing them can also be put toward acquiring legendary weapons and armour from a shop should you not be getting so lucky with the RNG loot drops themselves. This endgame loop’s value rests entirely on your enjoyment of the combat system and looting you’ve experienced in the campaign since it doesn’t exactly change in any dramatic way. I’m sure it will satisfy the grind-hungry, loot crazy folks out there for a while but I’m skeptical about how long that will last given the lack of intricacy in combat compared to the character builds.

Perhaps the absolute lowest point in Outriders (other than the myriad bugs at launch and server issues) is the oddly placed and poorly executed audio. Nothing in Outriders sounds particularly good, and nothing is mixed even remotely well. It’s so poorly mixed in fact, that even if you try to use the various audio volume sliders to compensate, you’re unlikely to find a happy medium that lets you hear everything clearly while not going deaf. It’s not even the explosions that are the issue, here, or much of what you might expect to be loud to begin with. One of the worst offenders was the sound effect for the Technomancer’s toxic rounds skill. It sits so high in the audio mix that it overpowers everything while also being one of the most grating and awful sound effects I’ve heard in a game in ages. This was a pain because it was one of the best skills I found for the class, so while I sort of learned to tune it out, eventually my hearing was legitimately fatigued. The dialogue will change volume at random, the background music takes the background descriptor a bit too seriously, the general folly/sound effects in cutscenes are erratic and mismatched, and it’s not uncommon for audio to completely fall out of sync in cutscenes as well. The entire audio package is with few redeeming qualities, if any.

Visually Outriders is unremarkable and looks dated. There’s an uncomfortable haze that makes everything blurrier than necessary, even when moving up to well over 100% resolution scaling. The character models are respectable, if not sometimes painful to look at. Some of the environments have nice set-piece areas that genuinely look great but they’re few and far between in a game that is reminiscent of games from 2017. Cutscenes have very odd camera cuts throughout them, with some having low framerate animations in a scene otherwise running at double or triple the framerate. Annoyingly but almost comedically, Outriders has Resident Evil door opening style loading for all sorts of zones, even when it seems completely unnecessary which ends up presenting you with more than a few loading screens to load a loading screen situations. One area, for example, has you load a small bunker with three doors, two of which open with one of these cutscenes only to have the room be permanently open to the main bunker once loaded which would almost make sense if the entire bunker was five times its size. My frame rate would also randomly lock to 60fps despite everything, including the cutscenes, being set to 120fps. I would eventually figure out that opening the escape menu and then closing it would immediately reset it back to 120fps but that’s just the tip of the buggy iceberg that has been Outriders up to this point.

To say that Outriders experienced a rocky launch might be an understatement, and while some things have improved it’s still not smooth sailing. Perhaps the most well-documented is the server connection issues which have seen many (and still for many, as of this writing) players either disconnect frequently from the server or simply never be able to connect at all. While I thankfully didn’t experience this, I did experience a co-op partner only partially loading into a zone multiple times, whereby his screen said he was still loading despite still being able to use skills and appearing invisible to myself and others. We also had other various connection oddities but were some of the lucky few to only get occasional issues. It seems the consoles were hit harder by this stuff than the PC players, but I can only speak to my experience on the PC. I didn’t have the opportunity to test the cross-play functionality, but I suspect it’s just as susceptible if not more so, to these connection issues. There are other minor bugs sprinkled throughout, some of which I’ve mentioned already, but nothing game-breaking. That’s not saying much, though, as honestly, Outriders presents as an unfinished product that thankfully focused on the most core aspect of the game to get it functional while everything else didn’t get enough attention in the time they had.

Outriders in general is a game that just needed more time in the oven. You can sort of see where they wanted to take the campaign but couldn’t, you can sort of see where they wanted combat to feel more tactical but couldn’t quite get there, and the audiovisual package was obviously not a priority when it came time to polish the game up for launch. Though the combat is passible, and the looting and class building great, everything else about Outriders is not up to par with what’s currently available in the looter shooter genre. While there may be a future in which Outriders irons out the many kinks currently holding it back, it’s hard to recommend a game based on hopes alone. If you’re a looter shooter fan you may be able to look past Outriders’ many shortcomings and enjoy it for what it is. For everyone else, this might be one to hold off on and see how it develops down the road.