Outriders Review
Played on Xbox One (base)
Developed by People Can Fly, Square Enix
Released 1st April 2021
People Can Fly are a Polish development team that claimed their fame from the infamously fun Bulletstorm. With the backing of Square Enix's publication power, the development team grew from 40 to 200 people, as they strived to prove their ability to tell a mature story while denouncing any live-service claims and expanding their vision as much as Square suggested. My experience with this game showed me that People Can Fly are simply incapable of making a successful game of this sort.
Story
The story is a huge disappointment. The game follows the player's custom-created Outrider, an elite soldier part of the Enoch Colonization Authority (ECA) who is also one of the first few people to set foot on the new worthy-of-human-colonization planet. As in every game that features a new planet for the humans to colonize, things go bad quickly, resulting in our protagonist, who doesn't seem to have a name except "Freak", "Boss" and "Outrider", gaining supernatural powers. This concept and beginning hooked me very well, delivering a very impactful and impressive start to my 25-hour journey, a far cry from the 40-hour campaign the developers promised. However, the story only gets worse from there as halfway through I found myself not caring about what's happening due to its lacklustre and unentertaining cast of characters, and by my final session in the game, I found the narrative to be just straight garbage. This was disappointing to see as the developers and publisher clearly had experience in making strong, mature titles, as seen from their works on the gritty Gears of War and the fantastic Life is Strange.
I can, however, praise the story and world-building to a certain extent. The sidequests that I played at least offered some great, detailed world-building and had narratives on the same interesting spectrum as The Witcher 3's sidequests. While the game is riddled with sci-fi cliches, it doesn't follow my most disliked: the hiding of the fact that our protagonist is ridiculously overpowered. This also fed into the great world-building once more and had me somewhat intrigued during the god-awful sections. As for the directing of the cutscenes, they are odd. The janky camera shake for each one and the out-of-place cuts and edits make me question whether the cutscene is terrible or unique.
Gameplay
The gameplay is painfully subpar. While the difficulty spikes were worrisome and the looter-shooter-based system displeased me, the usage of abilities and the unique way I could slay enemies was fun. One of the things I immediately loved was the selection of a class. You can smash and crash as the Devastator or, as my friend called it, "Rock-Monkey", burn enemies with eternal flames as the Pyromancer, sit back, relax and snipe foes as your gadgets and turrets do most of the work as the Technomancer or play as the short-ranged, backstabbing Trickster. Each class offered several abilities you could toy the enemies with, however, you would be limited to having three equipped at any time. Most of the abilities for each class are unique and special to their playstyle, while some are simply alternative versions of each other. However, that doesn't change the fact of how fun it is to freeze all enemies simultaneously or plague a tough enemy with an AOE toxin.
The shooting in this game is decent. While the guns barely give any kickback to every shot fired and the cover system feels redundant for the majority of the game, the power behind each kill feels gratifying and amazing as I had upgraded some of my loot and gear to be so powerful that enemies would die when just standing next to me. The hitbox of enemies was so inconsistent that they would either be unfair to the point that you would be hitting headshots that count as misses, or too generous as some body shots would count as critical hits. The difficulty spikes mentioned earlier are another problem. The game's difficulty is dependent on the world tiers that you progressively unlock through levelling up your progress with them. Instead of unique and innovative ways of challenging the player in the 15-hour journey with the world tiers, the game decides to increase the enemy abundance and their level causing some frustratingly unfun encounters that took around an hour to beat.
The looter-shooter of this game is quite bad, just like in nearly every other looter-shooter. The only game to have mastered the looter-shooter formula is Borderlands and while this game attempts it, it doesn't succeed. Every few moments you'll unlock an unsatisfying weapon or an ugly gear piece that is better than your currently equipped one, which disgusts the player away from the crafting/upgrading workstation unless the item equipped is a rare legendary. This also results in the players equipping weapons they don't inherently want or that don't fit their playstyle but need to, otherwise, they'll spend hours on the monotonous shootouts of this game. The gameplay also gets repetitive as early as 3 hours in; clear this area of enemies out, interact with an item, clear this area of enemies out, interact with an item, etc. Having to do that for 15 hours straight is plain torture and unfun when combined with the difficulty spike, and the 50% chance you'll have gear that you just hate using or having equipped.
Bossfights
The bossfights are not to be favourited in this game. While not only is every boss a bullet sponge, they always seem to have one attack that is frustrating to deal with - easy but frustrating. Not only this, but it seems that the more important bosses of the game serve as lacklustre and boredom-inducing fights that feel like filler, while the least significant bosses serve impressive imagery and attacks, even if they are repetitive and generic.
Characters
The characters had a promising start but soon relapsed into garbage, similar to the game's story. Throughout the whole game, the dialogue spoken was intriguing, not cliche and actually fascinating, however, these weren't the same case for the voice acting. The voice acting was hot trash for the majority of the game. Shira, Tanner and Jakub had decent if not great voice acting but not only could it not be heard sometimes due to the oddball directing of the scenes but also because the characters either die or disappear for the rest of the game. The protagonist was a wildcard by either delivering the lines great or making them feel less impactful than how they were probably meant to be said. Every other character was plain and just a cliche mess while some even stooped to the level of me hating their existence (and not in a "narratively intended" way).
Atmosphere
The atmosphere of this game is mixed. The technical performance and errors I encountered were very troublesome. They may have been fixed now, however, that doesn't mean my opinion of this game changes or that it is forgiven for being released in such a state. The rendering, lip-synching and audio of some scenes were delayed or not working in the way they should've. The game was a huge connectivity mess which ended up discouraging my friends from further playing this game as every 10 seconds some sort of lag spike, crash or freeze would halt our experience, however, unfortunately, I persevered until the end solo. My game crashed a total of three times, however, ever since the first week of launch, the game has been updated to a more manageable state. The creative side of the game is mediocre. The sound effects of each blast and ice enshrouding sounded good but not amazing, and the beauty of this game was sometimes great. From a sci-fi world war aesthetic to a mix and match of tropical trees in a harsh desert, it's unfortunate that there was no photo mode. The music is very generic, if not almost a replica of Square Enix's Avengers, and I could barely spot the difference especially as the credit's music felt like the Avengers: Endgame theme, note for note.
Story- 5/10
Gameplay- 4.5/10
Bossfights- 3/10
Characters- 1/10
Atmosphere- 4/10
Awful
It's disappointing and almost sad to see how utterly shit this game ended up being, despite its hints at an intriguing creative approach.
