The trailers for Outriders promised superpowers and fights against monsters on an alien world and the full game certainly delivers that in spades, even if I’d prefer more of that than the countless fights against humanoid goons.
Outriders is a new cooperative loot-shooter from Bulletstorm creators People Can Fly. The player stars as an ‘Altered’; a human afflicted with special abilities brought on by a mysterious power.
After seemingly vanishing for 30 years on an expedition to a new world, called Enoch, with the titular Outriders, the protagonist reappears, with no time having passed for them at all, and now possessing those aforementioned strange new powers. What follows is a journey across a hostile planet, squaring up to other Altered and extremely deadly local wildlife.
A team of up to three players can embark on this perilous expedition as one of four classes (Devastator, Technomancer, Trickster, and Pyromancer) that evolve and change as they level up. Each draws a skillset from their powers. For instance, the Technomancer is best for long range combat, being able to create organic turrets, trip mines, and missile barrages, whereas the Devastator class is the close-range tank, able to use rocks both as extra armor and as an aerial barrage.
These abilities work in tandem with the game’s guns, which can often have abilities and perks of their own. These are the usual gun types with modular variety, but by combining them with the ever-growing selection of powers, they can change your battle tactics in a surprisingly flexible and brutal manner.
Whatever combination you do end up utilizing, there’s one key factor tying every approach together and that is that you cannot stay still in an Outriders firefight. Whether you’re facing soldiers, superpowered Altereds, the beasts of the planet, or one of the intimidating Kaiju-sized bosses, the mentality is to keep moving because the enemy will simply not let you rest for long. If it’s not gunfire pinning you down, then it’s elemental powers like fire tornados, or monsters lobbing globs of toxic vomit at you.
The result is a more energetic loot-shooter than most, with the screen almost too busy at times from the sheer bombardment. Early play can be a touch more hesitant as you get used to the pace and screen overload, but once it clicks, the combat is a slick, rapid-fire delight. It’s obviously an important thing for a loot-shooter to have. Being enjoyable to play even after putting in a multitude of hours is a tricky thing to pull off and People Can Fly has done that remarkably well.
A big helping hand in that enjoyment is the fact Outriders throws different enemies at you each time. There’s a big difference tactically between battling soldiers, monsters, and Altered, and that becomes more pronounced when new variants pop up and start combining. In keeping with the relentless pace of combat, you essentially learn on the job what each new foe will do and what you can do to stop them.
The monsters are definitely the highlight for me, and the best fit for the game’s speed. The native creatures are known as Perforo, and they too have been altered by the same mysterious force that gave you your powers. These fleet-footed bipedal nightmares come in a variety of flavors and like nothing more than swarming your team with sheer numbers.
While firefights with human enemies are fairly easy to follow in regards to positioning, the Perforo come from every angle for sustained periods of time, making for a more intense experience. It brings to mind the likes of Aliens, where there’s a real struggle to keep an eye on every enemy. Bad enough when it’s just the smaller ones, but when the brutes show up it just adds to the seemingly unending nightmare.
Then there’s the boss monsters. Some of the boss fights see the player taking on gigantic beasts that dwarf them. One is a huge worm that lives inside a volcano, another is a titan that stalks anyone unlucky enough to wander alone in the forests. These encounters truly feel like worthy tests of your superpowers, adding an epic sense of scale to things.
If only the story was interesting enough to make such encounters feel really impactful. The presentation of it doesn’t help matters much, with an incessantly shaky camera and blunted, muted dialogue that asks you to care about people and things you have little connection to. The world itself tends to tell a better tale at least, and that was my preferred way to embrace the story of the planet Enoch and its freaky inhabitants.
The only other barrier in my last week of play has been lengthy signing-in times and the occasional crash, which is typical of such games in their early days, but annoying nonetheless.
There’s a refreshing lack of grinding to do for the main campaign’s good loot and you can feasibly be done and dusted with it in 20-30 hours if you want, but there’s the lure of tastier loot if you choose to persevere into the endgame’s ‘Expeditions’.
I’m not sure Outriders will live long in the memory, but it’s a damn enjoyable ride while it lasts.
Outriders review code for PS5 provided by the publisher.
Outriders is out now for Xbox One, Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and PC.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/3659202/review-outriders-provides-entertaining-mix-superpowers-gunfights-monsters/
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