Review: Outriders Is a Surprisingly Fun Looter Shooter, When It Works

At its best, Outriders is a looter shooter that’s surprisingly generous with its loot.

Outriders
Photo: Square Enix

For much of its first hour, before any real gameplay kicks into high gear, Outriders feels like it could be a pretty new mod for Mass Effect: Andromeda. Humans escape an unlivable Earth and travel to Enoch, hoping for a do-over, only to find out that this promised land isn’t as safe or welcoming as it seemed. And after a series of unfortunate events where your custom player character gets thrown back into cryosleep for another 30 years, humans essentially turn feral, at which point Outriders starts to invite comparisons to Doom, Destiny, Gears of War, Dead Space, Borderlands, even BioWare’s failed Anthem.

Which is to say, Outriders feels like a compendium of the governing ideas from the last decade of shooter games, and, at its best, it refines many of those ideas. The game is a looter shooter that’s surprisingly generous with its loot and the resources to upgrade them. It’s also one where every weapon—pistols, machine guns, shotguns, and sniper rifles—is basic but still feels so powerful that it doesn’t really need a makeover. Even then, dozens of modifications can be found throughout the game’s world to make each gun feel truly unique and dangerous.

At a glance, Outriders even looks like a cover-based shooter, but in practice has more in common with 2016’s Doom, because offense is king here, and finding ways to kill with speed and style is the only way you recover health. That approach is augmented by the four physics-breaking classes of superpowers that you choose from at the start, all of which exhilaratingly cater to specific styles of play, and none of which are effective at playing Outriders like a typical cover-based shooter. More than that, the experience is deeply customizable, with the difficulty working on a Diablo III-style tiered scale that can be adjusted at any time, even during combat, and handsomely rewards those who can hang at the highest available levels.

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The asterisk on every one of those factors, however, is “when it works.” Outriders is also one of the buggier live-service games to ever release, which says a lot in a post-Cyberpunk 2077 world. Characters routinely fall through floors, enemies get stuck on scenery, NPCs glitch around in cutscenes, and applying the latest patch may wipe out your entire inventory. That’s made worse by the fact that the game’s balance is so obviously tuned toward having two or more people spread across killzones, and beyond the occasional brutal chokepoints that become downright aggravating if you’re trying to tackle them solo, having a second person in your crew only makes the glitches more likely to occur. Outriders needs so many elements to work flawlessly to function as an always-online experience, and as of the time of this writing, two weeks after release, they don’t. Will that change? Probably. But this isn’t an Early Access game. It’s one that’s sitting on shelves right now, and it clearly isn’t fully baked.

That’d be less of an issue if Outriders were more laser-focused on its single-player experience. When the game is functional, steady, and balanced—which, in fairness, is quite often—it very much feels like a tonally accomplished piece of work. This is a grim game, set in a series of varied and increasingly hostile environments, from corpse-filled trenches of war to clear mountain peaks teeming with snarling alien life. But perhaps owing to its Eastern European developers, there’s a sort of gallows camaraderie to the world of Enoch—most born on the planet lived in abject poverty and contended with violent revolution—that’s weirdly charming.

Many of the game’s characters, the missions they send you on, and the establishing cutscenes strewn throughout paint a world that’s been at war with itself for so long that it’s settled into a new normal where a happy day is the one that ends with a pile of bodies outside your home base instead of inside. There are plenty of bad days, which is underscored by an overarching plot that addresses colonialist impulses in meaningful ways. All of that goes a long way toward papering over Outriders’s more mundane flaws: a distinct lack of enemy variety, the samey-samey feel of the killzones, and a couple of infuriatingly overpowered bosses. It’s not enough to stop you from wondering when you can play the thing for more than 10 minutes without a technical hiccup stymieing your progress, but it’s enough motivation to keep trudging on.

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This game was reviewed using a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.

Score: 
 Developer: People Can Fly  Publisher: Square Enix  Platform: PlayStation 5  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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