The Outer Worlds review

    Country roads, take me home, to a place--oh wait, wrong game. Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand. Ah, yes, that's much better. Outer Worlds is one of the three games I've been looking forward to with the others being Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. Basically, the video game industry has all but killed my love of gaming with some recent disasters that seem utterly determined to remove anything resembling storytelling and nuance from the genre. I don't know what happened that caused so many developers to come down so hard on games as artistry but they've done an amazing job of squeezing it out from the medium.

I liked his original Doc Brown look even more.

    If you'll forgive a short rant: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Fallout 76, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and the increasingly theme park Assassins Creed games just left me feeling cold. Those are also games that I bothered to play. Ghost Recon Wildlands may have been a generic game but it at least had a plot that involved politics of some kind unlike Breakpoint. I didn't go in expecting the Outer Worlds to be the redemption of video games as a medium but that's what I got.

    The premise of the game is you are one of a generation ship's colonists, similar to Mass Effect: Andromeda, that have been frozen for decades. Awakened by an eccentric scientist, Phineas Wells, you are asked to help him free the other colonists that need a special collection of chemicals to waken them all up safely. I can't help but wonder if the premise is a bit of a jab at Fallout 4 but virtually the entire game feels like an extended "this is how you should have done it" to Bethesda. Frankly, while, I defended Fallout 4, this is well-deserved.

    It's difficult to describe what the plot is after this because you have an incredible amount of freedom post-awakening. You can turn in the scientist who freed you by the second hub and immediately go to work for the evil megacorporations that you've seen can't run a salted tuna factory without killing people. You can kill all of the NPCs, utterly derail the plot, and betray every faction you've aligned with multiple times until everyone hates you.

Its a beautiful system.

    The game world is a beautifully rendered, vaguely comedic retro-future that resembles a 1930s-esque vision of the future with corporate rulership mixed with Flash Gordon aesthetics. If I had to give an explanation of what it looks like, imagine Bioshock: Infinite's Columbia with none of the racism and all of the corruption but set it in space instead of the atmosphere. Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky didn't adopt a retro-future feel for the original Fallout games (that's more a Fallout 3 thing) but they take that here and run with it. It's like Firefly's Western feel updated by about thirty years.

    Each of the locations are well-done with lots of quirky townsfolk, fun little missions, and humor. There's a bit of a Borderlands 2 feel to the place with everyone some manner of idiot or insane but that makes sense since that was strongly influenced by Fallout. The maps are a bit cramped with none of the other games wandering and everything over the next hill but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Your character can also be a complete jackass with some incredibly witty dialogue from the protagonist. The fact they're a silent protagonist does little to take away from amusing they are.

The secret ingredient of saltuna is...people! No, not really.

    The Companions are quite well done with most of them resembling off-brand versions of the Serenity crew mixed-and-matched. You travel with a Vicar, a mechanic, a space pirate, and a couple of other fun characters that certainly liven up the game. There's no romance option in the game and I feel that's a shame. My favorite character is easily Parvati, the sweet as pie mechanic who is socially awkward to the point of being unable to even speak in the presence of her crush.

    What surprises me is that the game is as relentlessly political as it is. The corporations running the Halcyon system are horrifically bad at it. They cut corners on basic survival matters, deny scientiffic facts, and attempt to misuse the local religions to keep the masses quiet. They're also incompetant at running things so that the entirety of the colony project is on the verge of mass starvation. Not because they're being evil. No, it's worse than that. The fundamental problem is the skills of making money are different from caring for people. Charismatic slogans and victim blaming do not solve the problem. If anyone has read any of my books, no points for guessing what I think of these views.

I love The Unreliable.

    Gameplay-wise, this is basically Fallout: New Vegas with shooting and looting as well as skills plus perks. Given that Bethesda did away with all the RPG elements of their RPG shooter series, it's kind of ironic that this is basically an idealized version of the RPG-shooter that many fans initially complained about with Fallout 3. Given Fallout: New Vegas was awesome, though, I have no complaints. I also appreciate they've just completely done away with hacking and lockpicking minigames. If you have a high-enough skill for it, you can do it. If not, then you have to find another way around it.

    This is a game you have to take a slow and methodical approach to. The quests aren't easily marked and the game doesn't hand hold you to find them. A lot of people have speed-run through the game and missed hours of content. Overall, I think the game is about 15 to 30 hours long if you vary between a main-quester and completitionist. This is a smaller game than I'd hoped but it's got more content than may be initially apparent if you do bother to ask around and do every little bit. 

    In conclusion, The Outer Worlds is an incredibly fun game and extremely good. I'm not going to give it a 10 out of 10, though, because it feels pretty small for an interstellar game. The tight budget constraints and development time meant this is a AA game rather than a AAA game. That's not a bad thing and I got more than my money's worth. I just hope they do a bunch of lengthy DLC expansions and have a bigger sequel. This is a great single-player experience and its relatively modest size means I wouldn't mind buying a lot more in its style.

9/10