Available for: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows (via Epic Store)
Reviewed for: Playstation 4
Hooooooooooooo boy....
Every year there's at least one...
Without fail, every year there's a game that critics and gamers alike praise from whatever rooftops are in the closest proximity...that I didn't like at all. Perhaps the most famous example of this is 2013's Bioshock: Infinite, followed by 2014's Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. In 2019, it's The Outer Worlds.
Like, really....this is the game you people have been screaming about? This...uninspired, uninteresting, unmemorable, poorly-designed, utterly inconsequential, measly little crumb of a game? The word I really want to highlight in that previous statement is "inconsequential." The Outer Worlds isn't a game changer, and no games are going to say they modeled themselves off of it. It does nothing unique, very little better than other games, and what little it does well is drowned out by its many missteps...
But here's the thing...it took me until near the end to realize this. You see, I had my frustrations about the game at first, but I was sure that what I was playing was a preamble to better mid-to-late game content. Surely the lackluster storytelling, bland/boring worlds, and frustrating gameplay would get better with time! That's the mindset I had during this game's microscopic campaign, and then I got the "hey, you'd better make sure you've done everything you want to do, because this is the last mission!" message, and then I realized the truth. Everything I had been playing up until this point was...it. What I had been playing wasn't an unfortunately poorly-balanced, poorly-conceived couple of opening hours...it was the entire game. We'll get more into this later (oh believe me we will), but for now...I don't even have a witty closing line to this introduction. Just sit down, shut up, and let me deny your biases while I tell you why The Outer Worlds sucks.
I have to admit, dear reader...my conscience is such that I have a hard time going down evil routes in games. I've been able to do it in the past, but I typically have to do the good path first. Not so in The Outer Worlds. This is due to a number of factors:
1) If your game is about evil corporations, I'll help the corporations because I know it'll make millennials squirm. This game does corporate commentary better than...well...anything else I've experienced, and in a later paragraph I'm gonna give credit where credit is due, but it's still the least creative premise for a plot ever.
2) Phineas Welles is Rick Sanchez if Rich Sanchez were a good, selfless person...in other words, he's boring, and you don't even get the cringey entertainment value of fake intellectuals (who flunked out of every science/math class they ever took but take every opportunity to scream "SCIEEEEEEEENCE") identifying with him.
3) This one is actually a point in the game's favor, oddly enough. I was prepared to possibly have no choice but to go along with Welles' plans, but I figured I'd be able to do so in the most profit-driven, total-scumbag way possible. However, early on, you get the option to start the process of turning Welles over to the corporate higher-ups, and I absolutely leaped at the chance.
4) The guy who asked me to turn Welles over had more personality than Welles ever did, so the evil playthrough had the unique allure of "our path doesn't suck!"
So, in case you haven't picked up on it yet, I played The Outer Worlds as the most straightforwardly profit-driven scumbag I possibly could. I played this game as someone who constantly killed the weak, demanded money from old people already on the verge of bankruptcy due to medical costs, and consistently posed the question: "Human rights? What are those?" There are a couple different ways to play the game, so it's possible that my notes will differ from yours...however, a good game tries to make any playthrough good, and The Outer Worlds is not a good game, so...my story experience was pretty lame. I've seen people saying that the campaign here is between 20 and 30 hours long (side note, up until publishing this, I'd written "minutes" long...freudian slip?)...and I can't help but wonder what game these people are playing. My playthrough lasted all of maybe 8 hours, and that's with multiple deaths and multiple opportunities I took to complete side content! How can one possibly get 30 hours out of this? I didn't rush through things, that's for sure, and as I already stated, I took the time to do side content, but this story...*sigh*
Screw it. I'm spoiling things now. If you don't want story events to be spoiled, move on to the gameplay paragraph.
Are you ready?
Here we go.
In the evil route, the story after the introductory area is as follows: Pull together 8000 bits to buy back a corporate seal for an executive (a feat accomplishable within an hour), go to Byzantium (the major corporate city) and talk to the adjutant to the chairman of the board (one fast travel and a short walk), kill a cartographer who has outlived her usefulness (a short walk followed by another short walk), plant a tracking device in Welles' lab (a fast travel and an even shorter walk), return to Byzantium and talk to the adjutant again (a fast travel and a short walk), go to the planet Monarch and stop illegal broadcasts from happening (a feat which took me maybe 4 hours of play, this is the longest segment), then return to Byzantium and talk to the adjutant again. Let me take a break here to talk more in depth about what happens next. When you talk to the adjutant again at this point, you learn that the colony is on the verge of death due to food shortages and that the board is planning on putting a majority of colonists into cryosleep while they work on a solution. To this end, the board needs you to return to the ship you came from and lightspeed jump it to the planet Tartarus (for no discernable reason), as the members of the hope will be needed to help with concocting a solution to the food shortage and malnutrition crisis. That mission can take about half an hour, I'd say.
"Ah," I thought, "this is where the story is gonna take a different turn. This is where my goal will change from straight up helping the board to working with some new characters to ultimately solve the food shortage crisis in a way that maximizes profits or something like that! And that's probably what the...idk, 5 other planets on the fast travel map will be used for!"
But then...I got the "you'd better make sure you've done everything you want to do, because this is the final mission" message. Welles had escaped captivity and taken the adjutant hostage on the prison planet of Tartarus and started a massive prison riot, and that struck me as a good turning point to take the story forward: possibly, Welles ends up killing most of the board, and from that point on it would be my job to guide the colonists of the hope as we fixed the problem at hand. But nope. This was going to be the final mission. At that point, I thought, "wow! I really skipped over a lot of side stuff! There's still like 5 planets I haven't explored!" So, I decided to leave the mission be for the time being and go to explore all that I hadn't seen yet. Surprisingly, none of the planets were allowing me to fast travel to them except one. I went to that one planet to find that it was a bite-sized asteroid with literally nothing to do on it. "Ah!" I thought, "naturally I need navkeys so that I can land on the landing pads on these planets! I needed to get navkeys to get to the planets I've already been on, so maybe that was priming me to do the same thing for additional side content!" But I couldn't find any...so I took to google and found that none of these other planets listed as places on the fast travel menu were actually traversable. We'll talk about this a bit more when I get to side content, but for now, suffice it to say this was the point where I went from "I have my frustrations, but when this game picks up it's gonna be great!" to "The Outer Worlds is worse than Anthem." Anyway, after realizing that this game has nothing interesting in it, I went to do the final mission so that I could just stop playing. I thought, "well, at least this will give me one last sadistic corporate thrill as I mercilessly gun down these prisoners who were locked up for refusing to be slaves," but the mission itself is absolutely terrible and it took me about 2 hours due to constant deaths and poor checkpoints. Then the final boss of the entire game was just a bog standard robot, except this one had a shield.
Then the epilogue came, and I realized just how inconsequential the story was. I hadn't actually accomplished anything throughout the course of this story. All I'd done was a bunch of unrelated crap that only served to set up the future events that would be described in the epilogue. By the end of, say, Fallout: New Vegas (a game I hated the ending of, mind you), I'd at least taken over a region by crushing my enemies! In The Outer Worlds, however, by the end, I'd only laid the groundwork for some vague end result relegated to a still image and a narration. Like, it would've been one thing if the journey leading to this had been even remotely interesting, but it wasn't! The simplistic breakdown of the story I gave earlier is all there is to the story! Go here, go there, buy this thing, press the square button by this computer exactly once, go here, etc.
Is it possible that going the good route and helping the most immediately uninteresting character known to man gives you a better, more cohesive, or at least more impactful story? Of course.
Is a game good if one of its two story routes is objectively terrible? No.
From a story perspective, The Outer Worlds is somehow worse than Obsidian's previous mess, Fallout: New Vegas. And sadly, this isn't where the negatives stop.
NO!
It's all boring and tedious! I'd end up talking to someone in a town who looked interesting, then they'd vaguely hint at some absolutely uninteresting problem they were having, and I'd realize, "oh no, this jerkwad has a side quest for me." I'd then begrudgingly dig deeper only to find that the side quest was once again some variation of "go out into the wilderness area and find yet another boring building that looks like every other boring building in this game, try to find the thing I'm fetching you to find (because it's literally always fetch quests), discover that it's behind some kind of skill check you can't meet, then scour the boring area for the magic key that'll unlock the area for you!" I can name exactly one side quest that brought me joy: an early-game quest that has you shaking down workers in town for the money they owe for their gravesite rentals. That one, at least, was different. Other than that, I'd legitimately groan every single time I got the sense that some jerkwad in town had a quest for me. I'd think, "Gaaaahd, I'm not going to do your boring mission, dude!" I'd sometimes get a side quest from a companion I was with, and even then I wouldn't be interested. At one point I was traveling with Nyoka (who I'll go on to talk about in just a bit), and she stopped me to give me a quest, and I started to listen because I wanted to see more of this character. But as she started describing the quest, I felt my eyes start to glaze over and I though, "yeah...I'm not in the mood to be completely bored to tears, so we're not gonna do that, Nyoka." I will say that outside of the grave rental quest, I did indulge exactly one character in his side quests for a time. It was in the span of the main story in which you're on Monarch and are having to shut down two illegal broadcasts. I'd already shut down the one from the religious group that talks about humans being worth more than their productivity...by way of gunning down their leader in their own camp...and I was on my way to the next guy to murder him in cold blood too. But then, he turned out to be this gently egotistical Indian guy with an obsession with documentation and meticulous detail. I found myself smiling and laughing with him, and I thought, "you know what? I like you, Sanjar! I'll do your boring side quests!" So that's exactly two exceptions to the boring side content. I mean...you don't even really have interesting companions to take with you to make the slog enjoyable! You've got Parvati, who is your bog standard quirky engineer character. You've got Felix, the redditor (of the skinny and mangly-haired variety). You've got Nyoka, who serves as your surly drunk character with the twist being that she's black and has bright pink/red hair. You've got the Vicar, who I never recruited because I didn't care enough about him. You've got...the butch redhead whose name I can't be bothered to look up and who I didn't recruit because her location is one of the more boring areas and I didn't want to spend any more time there. Finally, you've got SAM, a cleaning robot who is the best companion in the game because all he says are pre-approved corporate advertising lines. I found none of these characters interesting save for SAM, and I never found one line of banter between them amusing or heartfelt. I get that there are supposed to be romantic subplots between some of them and that there's definitely more under the surface...but the surface was just so friggin boring for all of them. What's more, it's like none of these characters have opinions on anything! Parvati struck me as the type who has a lot of value for human life, yet when I told a group of striking workers living in the wilds that I was taking their power (and by extension, their ability to grow food and live independently) away, and that they could either get right-the-f*** back to work or starve for all I cared, I didn't get a word of lip from Parvati. Furthermore, it really seemed like Felix and Nyoka were not the biggest fans of corporations, yet they just went along with every pro-corporation anti-human-rights decision I made! I remember in Fallout: New Vegas when I was going around murdering NCR soldiers (as I often did just for fun), if I had Boone in my party, he'd give me maybe two chances to stop, and if I murdered one more NCR soldier, he turned hostile and I'd have to kill him. In The Outer Worlds, however, I went against the philosophies that these companions seemed to live by on more than one occasion...they knew the board's master plan to freeze all the commoners and live in prosperity while workers worked on fixing the food shortage crisis...and yet nobody every said more than a passing "I hope you're going to oppress the common man this way, and not the way they did before."
Well, none of the side quests are interesting, and you don't have interesting companions to share the ride with...are the environments you explore interesting, at least?
NO!!!
Planet #1 is a boring, uninspired sci-fi world. Planet #2 is exactly the same kind of boring sci-fi world! They don't even have different enemies between the two! It's the same first-draft-of-the-concept-art alien monster designs and bog standard marauders every single time on both of these planets! Beyond the planets, your environments include a spaceship and an asteroid. The spaceship is a spaceship and spaceships are always the least interesting environments in games. The asteroid is an asteroid, and there's no content to be found up there, though there is one enemy type and it happens to be unique to the asteroid.
Like...legitimately...how can people like this game so much?!
Kinda.
It's kinda better.
It's...fine...perhaps a little below average in terms of first person shooters, but that's forgivable given that this is more an RPG than a shooter and therefore more factors are involved than just pulling the trigger.
Let me step back a bit from my rage and talk about this objectively for a second. Unlike the things I've talked about thus far, there isn't anything inherently broken or seriously wrong about gameplay. Really, the only times that gameplay are bad is at the beginning and in the final level, and for the rest of the game, it's uninspired at worst and functional-plus-sometimes-enjoyable at best. There was more than one occasion in which I had fun with the gameplay, but the whole experience is so lopsided that it's hard to keep these occasions in mind. If I had to boil it down to the bare bones of the experience, I'd say that The Outer Worlds is a good gameplay sandwich. See, the first couple hours of gameplay are bad, as is the gameplay in the final mission...however, the gameplay in between these sections is enjoyable, if unrevolutionary. Now, this basically means that the majority of the runtime is fun from a sheer combat perspective, so...what now? Well, the beginning and end of a game of this short length are likely to be the sections that stick in the player's memory faster than anything else. So in spite of the fact that most of the game is fun, the portions of the game that stick in the ole' memory are bad. Now, if The Outer Worlds were a good game, it would aim to make as much of the game as fun as possible...but it doesn't, for a couple reasons:
1) The game only balances out the middle-of-the-game content so that it's fun.
2) The Outer Worlds is a bad game, and therefore it doesn't do what good (and therefore, not bad) games do.
I've been talking from a high level here, so let me break it down in more moment-to-moment terms. The base of the gameplay here is that it's a first-person shooter, but because it's also an RPG, there are a number of statistical points that determine what guns do what kind of damage as well as other, more subtle effects...and if you've ever played a Fallout game before, you know what I mean.
As for me, I went for a more science+dialogue build, so I had a decent amount of skill with weapons, but my main focus was always with accessing places and talking my way out of things, because I've played games from Obsidian before, and I know that you aren't allowed to have fun in their games unless you can instantly unlock everything they try to keep from you...or unless you enjoy constant roadblocks! So, when I played without companions, I got obliterated by even the smallest hostile army, yet when I had two companions with me, I could just sit the whole thing out and still win. Critics have hailed this game by saying "no matter what build you go with, you can survive," and I defy these corporate-controlled (talk about irony...) critics to try my build in the first couple missions and the final mission!
Now, I'll say this about gameplay: It does have an interesting idea when it comes to ammo. See, there are only 3 types of ammo: light, heavy, and energy. There are 4 weapon slots available to you, so the implied use case is that you have one weapon that uses each type of ammo equipped as well as one melee weapon. Why is that creative? Well, for example, light ammo can apply to pistols, shotguns, and (I think) one or two assault rifle variants. Likewise, heavy ammo can apply to most assault rifles and heavy weapons, plus (I think) one or two shotgun varieties. Finally, energy ammo can apply to weapons of several varieties. So, the emphasis isn't exactly on the types of weapons you equip, but rather, the type of weapon for each ammo type you equip. For instance, when all was said and done, my light ammo weapon was a tactical shotgun, my heavy ammo weapon was an assault rifle, and my energy ammo weapon was a large plasma cannon that would count as a "heavy weapon" in any other game. So, it forces you to think about your weapon loadout a little differently than you normally might, and that deserves some attention...
buuuuut...
The Outer Worlds manages to screw even this up. Why? Because for all intents and purposes, light ammo weapons are worthless. See, light ammo can't break through "armor," and the intent of that idea is to force the player to switch to different ammo weapons when they're met with armored enemies. On paper, that's a great idea. But if you're gonna have a system like that, you need to clearly define which enemies are "armored." Like, yeah, the scientists in a lab are obviously not armored, but the marauders in the wastelands are all wearing what looks like armor, yet not all of them are technically armored. Now, I tended to only rely on my light ammo gun when I was trying to conserve other ammo types, so it isn't like this was a huge problem, but in the early hours of the game, I found myself constantly dying because you only have reliable heavy ammo once in a blue moon until you're past the first couple areas. Beyond this, the only other things to discuss are more on the technical side, so for the time being, I'll save these points until that paragraph...
Let's start with the technical positives for now. People have naturally been comparing The Outer Worlds to Bethesda's Fallout titles from a technical standpoint...and from that perspective, The Outer Worlds is the obvious winner by a longshot. In my playthrough, there were no crashes (hard or soft), there was no texture pop-in, no animation or sound glitches, very little in terms of problems you'd naturally attribute to modern games...
That being said, there were a couple of framerate drops in my time, and some technical aspects hold the gameplay back. For instance, there's no real sense of feedback when you shoot at an enemy. They don't seem to flinch in any way that indicates they've been shot, there's no damage numbers, nothing. This is further compounded by the fact that the guns feel paper thin when shot. As I've said, gameplay itself is fine, but it doesn't feel great to play because of this. Furthermore, there's a time slow-down ability you have, and this is supposed to be comparable to the "VATS" system in the Fallout titles. However, it's useless. Some might argue that it helps with aiming, but it really doesn't. As a result, I used this ability a couple times in the early hours, then not once ever again for the rest of the game. Is it possible I wouldn't have died as much in the final mission if I'd used it? Of course. But, you see, I'm not in the habit of utilizing bad gameplay abilities, so my hands are tied!
Beyond how the technical side of things affects gameplay, there's also the fact that this is just an ugly game to look at. There's no interesting visual design for...anything here. At best, the aesthetic is poor visual Firefly fanfiction with none of the charm. The color palette is quite varied and does make the environments look alien, but these colors aren't utilized in a way that makes it pleasant to look at. Perhaps that's the point, and the ugliness of the game does actively contribute to the technical power the game has, so no points off for that.
The last thing to note is the soundtrack, which is a bit of an ironic statement considering that the soundtrack isn't noteworthy. It's there, it's in the background, and it doesn't stand out.
Firstly, the corporate commentary in The Outer Worlds is the best that has ever been done. Most takedowns of corporations in media essentially amount to "waaa they have more money than me!" Not so in The Outer Worlds. To give one example, during the gravesite rental mission, it's revealed that one person who owes money actually committed suicide. You end up collecting the money from this person's supervisor/next of kin/I forget, because suicide is considered destruction of company property, and therefore someone has to pick up the tab for it. That, right there, is brilliant, and it's an example of how to take current corporate culture and effectively age it. Another example that comes to mind is the constant need for people to tout their company lines no matter the situation. I can recall running into somebody in a cave somewhere. After he told me about how his group had been attacked by monsters, shaking in his boots the entire time, he ended the conversation with "oh, and, um...it's n-n-not the b-best choice...it's s-s-s-spacer's choice." Even after looking death in the face, the corporate thralls of the Halcyon colony still have to end their interactions with their company slogan. Again, brilliant. One last example I'll give is the fact that there is no God in the Halcyon Colony...only the law. "Law protect you," and "thank the law," are two sayings you'll hear often in The Outer Worlds. I'd argue that this isn't really an effective commentary on corporations, rather on the hyperconservative social contexts in which they thrive, but that's neither here nor there. It's rare to see a corporate commentary piece that doesn't hypocritically call servitude to legislation a better option, so it's nice to see corporations and government criticized in the same setting.
The other thing to give credit for is the writing. The writing in this game is top. friggin. notch. It's hands-down the most well-written game of this year. Even though few characters were interesting to me, they all (even the smallest of the small) had distinct "voices," that made them seem like less of an afterthought than their side quests would suggest. It may sound like damning with faint praise, but I legitimately believe that writing an uninteresting character well is much more of a challenge than writing an interesting character well, and few of the characters on display here are interesting. That just shows how talented the writing team for The Outer Worlds is, and though I disagree with all the positive press this game has gotten, every compliment towards the game's writing is well-deserved, and Obsidian should be proud of that. One example I'd like to share is your interactions with a character named Percival, a shrewd male secretary working for the adjutant. In any interaction, you have a variety of dialogue options to choose from, but the interactions with Percival stick out. For instance, after describing the paperwork he's filling out on your behalf, you have the option of saying, "You're a doll, Percy!" to which he responds, with no joy in his low key Cole Porter-esque voice, "I'm flattered beyond what words can say." Another option that appears later is "Percy, you're a man of the world. Got any advice?" You might not even meet Percival if you don't go down the evil route, yet the writing team gives these interactions that much thought! It's a shame that it's all pretty much wasted, but I digress.
It's bad.
It isn't good.
Now, let us review:
Inconsequential, microscopic story - 1.0
Boring, uninspired locations throughout - 1.0
All side content is uninteresting - 1.0
All companions are boring - 0.5
Bad combat at beginning and end - 0.5
Technical impact on gameplay - 0.3
Light ammo useless 90% of the time - 0.3
The final score for The Outer Worlds is...
5.4/10 - Mediocre
Better luck next time, Obsidian, better luck next time.
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