Just out here looking for a signal...
Outriders is a game you'll likely make up your mind over within the first few hours of playing. It certainly knows what it wants to be, and while the game doesn't take great strides in being wholly original, the sum of its many inspired parts still does make for a compelling and vastly engaging experience, decked out in its low-budget TV quality sci-fi narrative. It's big, aggressive, insanely enjoyable, but only when you're actually able to connect to its “always” online servers.
Now, I’ll stress that while there are many issues plaguing the game for a vast number of players, the experiences of others will not affect my overall opinion of Outriders, nor should it. The following is based on my experience with the game and mine alone. I understand that many people are experiencing inventory wipes, consistent server problems, and various other issues that are currently preventing them from enjoying or even playing the game. But, apart from the first two days of server issues, and a crash here and there, I’ve had a very positive experience with the game on Series X and for the few hours I’ve played on PC. If you are concerned about technical issues ruining your fun, then I would recommend waiting for additional patches to drop, smoothing out the current crop of technical problems.
Developed by People Can Fly, this relatively small team knows how to make a bombastic shooter that can often feel over the top. While it doesn't go the lengths of Bulletstorm in its wackiness, Outriders can feel like a fast-paced explosive variant to Gears of War, a franchise much of this team has dipped their toes into its franchised waters. Over the shoulder and using cover may be the initial impression one sees when glancing at the game, but after sinking around 120+ hours into it, I've come to recognize that the cover isn't for you, it's for them.
Dressed up in the trappings of several live-service games, Outriders feels instantly familiar. That said, nearly everyone I talk to, from friends across the pond to random strangers through Xbox's LFG system, all reference the game's inspirations from all over the spectrum. Everything from Destiny, the Division, Diablo, to especially Mass Effect's short-lived multiplayer, is used here as a backdrop of ideas and inspiration, merged into an online shooter that feels like a Frankenstein of gameplay ideas, fleshed out with a very impressive set of skills, gunplay, and progression systems. While the inventory menu may invoke some strong Destiny vibes, I never felt like I was playing a clone of just one single game, but more of a “greatest hits” of several others in the loot collecting genre.
While Outriders has all the markings of a live-service game, this is a fair bit closer to online co-op games of the past, where the entire experience was available on day one, with possible future expansion packs designed at adding significantly more gameplay instead of being drip-fed small bites content released every few weeks or months. There are no daily or weekly missions, just the campaign, and its rinse and repeat endgame, but more on that later.
Despite being able to play the entire game solo, and frankly, I’ve had a great time doing so, Outriders requires a constant internet connection for everything you'll do. While this is likely to push updates without the need for excessive patches that require certification, or for anti-cheating or piracy, it is also apparently for handling certain gameplay systems that are server-based. However, without knowing exactly why the game is online-only, it can certainly feel annoying to have your gameplay time linked to potential server outages, or having those servers go offline for good just a few years down the road, effectively making your game unplayable. As I am not a gaming engineer, I can only speculate as to why the game is online only and take People Can Fly at their word that it’s what is best for the game. At least, for now.
Now, during the first two days, servers were highly unreliable, down for a few hours each day, and since then, I’ve had largely smooth sailing, only crashing during the occasional co-op session, seemingly more frequent when crossplay was eventually turned back on. In the past week, I’ve had maybe three or four crashes in total, requiring me to either start my game back up, which can take a bit longer than I’d like, or boot me back to the lobby, fixed with a 5-6 second load time thanks to my Series X. Currently, at the time of this writing, the game is running far smoother, and the crossplay beta feature for me to play with my friend on PC seems to be the only issue I am facing, having him drop out after nearly every match. While many games like this often have launch issues, server capacity is rarely the actual reason, and with Outriders, it seems to be bugs that have arisen through their third party server tools, problems that are almost impossible to anticipate when a game launches, and thankfully, People Can Fly have been incredibly fast and transparent via their Twitter on getting the game functional once any issue is flagged. Unavoidable tech problems aside, there are still plenty of problems and issues that plague the game in other ways.
Outriders tells the story about the survival of the human race, as the governments of Earth had come together to form the Enoch Colonization Authority in an effort to save humanity from a dying Earth. This resulted in the construction of two colony ships; the Flores, and the Caravel, the latter of which saw its engines suffer catastrophic failure during construction, causing the ship to explode. Unable to react to this tragedy, the Flores then began its 83-year journey to Enoch, sending down soldiers called Outriders to scout the planet in preparation for its colonists. While surveying the planet, they learn of the Anomaly, a hellish storm that destroys anything it touches, causing the deaths of many. Meanwhile, the ECA begins a hostile takeover of the planet, killing many Outriders and triggering the colonization, despite the hostile storms tearing everything apart. It is during this storm and the coup where your character is mortally wounded by the storms, and placed into cryo, only to be woken up some 31 years later to absolute madness.
Affected by the storm and left to die by unknown forces, it is here where your character begins their transformation into what is called an Altered, a being that is granted special powers by the storm. These powers are based on your class. There is the Trickster, Technomancer, Pyromancer, and the Devastator, each with unique abilities that range all over the place, giving a ton of variety and gameplay styles that don't feel like mere palette swaps of one another. Should you want to create another character, you can skip the prologue to the point where you are given your powers, allowing you to simply jump right back in at that point.
As your character comes to grips with awakening some three decades later, seeing how this once beautiful planet has been made into a hellish landscape by the storms and the evils of humanity, you're tasked with tracking down a signal that was echoing into the ether upon first landing on the planet. This mysterious signal is the plot of Outriders, and your journey to discovering its origins may feel a bit predictable by the time it's revealed, but the journey there was actually intriguing, often fantastic, complete with a few moments of genuine heart. Now, that said, there are some expectations to go in with here as Outriders is more akin to something like Defiance, or Killjoys in its level of sci-fi writing, and less of something like The Expanse, or other higher caliber sci-fi narratives. The story can get fairly predictable at times, and much of the dialogue isn’t great, but the story still remained at least engaging enough to remain interesting, and much of that is due to a few of its characters.
Outriders has you meeting back up with a few members of its cast after the time jump, making it keenly aware that the past three decades have not been too kind to them. The rest of your team is brought upon by your need to discover the truth of the signal. Each character serves a general purpose in your camp as well, from driving your truck from camp to camp, handling your storefronts, exchanging various currencies or resources, or the upgrades you’ll make to your gear. Jakub, a Polish Outrider you knew back on Earth is easily the most entertaining and fleshed out of the bunch, and carries much of the supporting narrative, as does Zahedi, a lead scientist for the ECA who aids you in discovering the source of the signal. You also have Bailey and Channa, who join you in Trench Town, the former being a mercenary for hire, and the latter a woman who has been given psychic abilities from the storm. Now, there is also Tiago, a man who has a deeper understanding of the planet than most, but he just isn’t given the same level of depth or progression as the others and feels like he is there to simply be an intermediary to that of another character you’ll meet much later on.
Now, the classes themselves are the star of the show, offering up four different playstyles each with their own unique brand of abilities. I still find it odd that Outriders has four classes but only offers three-player groups, but I digress. The Pyromancer and Technomancer offer much of what is on the tin, with the former offering fire-based warfare and the latter with their tech-infused abilities that can also channel both frost and poison skills. The Trickster has the ability to warp around and assassinate, as well as dropping down a time bubble to slow their foes and cause bullets to almost freeze in the air. The Devastator is the tank of the group with skills that have them wreaking havoc with the very ground beneath them or leaping into the air for a devastating ground slam.
Each class can equip three abilities out of eight, allowing for a bit of creativity in developing a build suitable for its campaign. These abilities range from the Technomancer’s freezing skills, the Devastator’s bullet reflecting energy shield, the Pyromancer’s fire capabilities, to a backstabbing teleport dash as the Trickster. Finding an assortment of skills that work well together can be enjoyable, especially when you start mixing and matching mods for your weapons and gear that complement those skills. Another treat is seeing those skills work alongside others, setting up enemies in a way that your teammates can take over on, causing even more damage to them. I’ve seen other games attempt to set up something similar, but Outriders actually pulls it off, making team play a crucial part of why the gameplay is so absolutely satisfying.
To add even more depth to your character’s abilities is a skill tree that allows you to funnel skill points towards certain class builds, such as the Assassin or Reaver classes for the Trickster, or the Warden or Seismic Shifter for the Devastator. Each path for the skill tree connects at certain points, offering a wealth of bonus damage or skill power, or bonuses that affect their core abilities. Thankfully, you can alter your points at any time with no consequence, allowing you to customize your build for the mission, or alter it should patches see certain abilities get buffed or nerfed.
The mixing and matching of abilities and skills can be exciting to see in action, but there is a downside to having all this freedom. While the campaign can be played with all this creativity in mind, as you can change the difficulty on the fly based on world tiers, which have certain buffs, stats, and rewards to them, the endgame has its own set of tiers as well, which must be advanced in order to unlock the final location. While early tiers can be completed with little to no fuss, anything after around challenge tier 5 or 6, requires you to start working on specific builds, eliminating a lot of combinations that don't focus purely on DPS. This has also lead many to kick Devastators out of random groups, as many simply don't have the DPS to compete, which is often the fault of the build and not the class, as I play alongside a Devastator that can clear rooms faster than almost any build I’ve seen on any class. To further add to this annoyance of DPS reliance, several LFG groups have “high DPS or be kicked.” in their posting, rarely even allowing certain players to even show off their efforts before being booted.
While I had a great time with the build I used during the campaign, I had to adjust accordingly to the harsher challenge of the endgame's Expeditions, the true challenge of Outriders. I researched and found a high DPS toxic build, an arrangement of skill tree selections, and mods that made me a killing machine. While I remain a bit of a glass cannon, I can melt enemies in sometimes a single shot, refilling a portion of my ammo clip on each kill, effectively giving me infinite ammo if I play my cards right. But again, this is at the cost of the creativity we are exposed to during the campaign, something that feels largely lost in this endgame. Sure, I enjoy my class far more because of the build, but many abilities and mods seem largely pointless because of it, instead of the creativity you had during the campaign, which for a time, was the game’s real strength.
Part of what makes Outriders a blast to play is not just in the wild abilities you can wield but in the variety of loot and mods that can drastically change your experience from run to run. From earning additional health back on a kill, casting a lightning strike on every shot, or causing their bones to explode on a kill, thus damaging nearby enemies, there is a vastness to what you create as a build that I just haven't seen in a shooter to this degree. The creativity in your hands here is staggering, often overwhelming, but almost always cool. While some of this can affect how you outfit yourself for the campaign or endgame, there are so many mods that complement one another, or stack in a way where you’ll always have incredibly high defense, or in my earlier example, near-unlimited ammo, that you’ll often discover something new around every corner. While a few mods are currently glitched, there are still fascinating combinations that can lead to some clever builds that make you nigh indestructible.
Outriders follows the traditional loot rules by having various tiers that can also be upgraded further as you sink resources into them. However, you cannot upgrade items into the Legendary tier as that is reserved for the Legendaries themselves. This upgrading allows items to have a vastly longer shelf life, especially if the stats and mods on them suit your build. Items can be sold for scrap or broken down into resources as well. Breaking down items also adds their mods to your library, which is helpfully indicated by an icon next to the mod, allowing you to know which mods you have unlocked so far. Each item also has three stats alongside those modes, which range from boosting your health, cooldown timers, anomaly power, and so on. Finding an item that has stats you want, plus the mods you need, is effectively the god-roll you’ll want to chase down.
This loot system allows for a tremendous amount of flexibility in your load-outs, and while the endgame challenge of producing a strong DPS can make some mods and combinations feel limiting, there are still new pairings and combinations that continue to pop up on build tier videos on Youtube or Reddit, consistently showing the creativity and growth of what this system offers. Every time I figure I have my build set, I learn about a new mod that changes everything. Now, as for mods, these come in three available tiers, with the highest tier coming from Legendary weapons themselves. Mods can be swapped out to your unlocked slot freely with a small cost of resources, but mods can only become part of your library if you’ve broken down an item that contains that mod. So, if you find a legendary gun you don’t want but love the mod, break it down and slot it into your favorite gun, changing it up to suit your build.
Now, Outriders does follow a tried and true formula in its gameplay, sometimes to the game’s detriment, but regardless, these gameplay designs have flourished for a reason; they work. You’ll know exactly when combat is about to happen, and given an environment’s design, you’ll know if it is the various creatures that run amok, or the human threat, outfitted with various powers and guns. Oddly enough, these types never co-mingle in a single environment, much to my disappointment. Against the various human factions, you’ll duke it out in cover-based locations, but due to AOE attacks or grenades, you are rarely ever behind cover, largely because most classes require that you consistently do damage or kill to earn back health. Sure, there is some partial health regeneration across a few of the classes, but many only offer you back health upon killing or doing damage; making you the aggressor consistently during battle.
Outriders is far more aggressive of a gameplay experience than I was expecting, seeing not only enemies bullrush you constantly, but your own need to keep the action going just to survive. The game has a kill to survive and survive to kill mantra going on, and can often make Expeditions, for example, feel like you are speedrunning the game, keeping on pace to earn rewards based on your times, thus unlocking higher tier loot if you hit certain timed milestones. Making sure to tweak your build for survivability is great, but often you may need to favor damage over survival, as the latter can often take care of the former for you.
When it comes to the raw feel of combat, shooting and working in your powers all compliment each other as everything feels vastly satisfying to use. Guns have a nice weight to them, and shooting feels incredibly precise, and immensely enjoyable when your shots turn enemies into a red mist. My only issue is that it can be rather hard to see some of the area attacks while aiming down sights, such as the barely-there blue flame effects that Brood Mothers can leave in their wake. Still, the shooting combined with your abilities, especially enhanced with your mods and build capabilities, can make for a truly engaging experience from encounter to encounter.
Other things to keep your interest are various journal entries and logs, detailing more of the world, its characters, and story. There are also several hunts and bounties that reward you a slew of weapons and gear for your troubles, accolades that work as a checklist system, detailing your kills, revives, abilities, and gun stats that reward you customization options such as emotes, and decorations for your truck and fast travel flag. As you move around the map, you’ll unlock these fast travel locations, making it easy enough to move around the map as you find them. While you can press UP on the D-pad to have a directional line show you to your objective, I’ve found that using fast travel can often cause this line to direct you to travel back to the fast travel location instead of the objective marker you have set as your waypoint, And, at the time of this writing, this is still a problem.
Another odd issue is the inclusion of transition loading animations of the game having a short cutscene to show you jumping a gap, or opening a door, which oddly enough can just be skipped entirely, making me wonder why they exist at all. I don’t think these scenes are the end of the world like many make them out to be, but they are an odd inclusion that could have been removed entirely. As for another issue that plagued my entire playthrough, several cutscenes and bounty hunts would have this camera tugging that moved from place to place, often obscuring the action and making me miss much of what went on. Thankfully, this only happened once during the campaign, but affected every single one of my bounties, never letting me see the kill shot even once.
From a visual point of view, Outriders is both impressive and disappointing at the same time. While environments and their enemies can often be remarkably good for such a small team, its human faces and animations are incredibly poor and just feel at odds with everything else that actually looks fairly good. Now, that said, there are times where the facial animation is good, passable even, conveying some very subtle expression, but this is so few and far between that you’ll notice the oddities far more than the nuance the game occasionally throws at you. For every single good face the game has for you, and the animations to pull it off, there are 4 or 5 that simply look bad, without sugar-coating it. I understand that the team is relatively small, and I’m not expecting something akin to The Last of Us: Part 2, a game made by a studio with more than double the staff, but it’s still disappointing to see such an odd mixture of great assets and poor ones, often sharing the screen at the same time.
Issues aside, Outriders is a game that I thoroughly enjoyed, sinking in just over 120-hours so far and likely going to continue for a great deal longer. I fully understand a lot of the frustration surrounding the game’s technical problems, the inventory wipes, the server issues, but my experience has luckily been very positive, with most of the game’s issues only affecting my first few days, and given the few dozen players I’ve played with online, many shared in that same positive experience. The cross-play might be finicky and is currently “in beta” but I’ve since played over a dozen hours with a friend on PC, and nearly 60 hours with someone on another Series X halfway across the world. Again, I can only speak to my experiences and while I can acknowledge and discuss those problems, to at least make you aware of them, my experience with the game is just that; mine.
Outriders is incredibly fun if all too familiar in much of its design, and yet, it hits all the right buttons for me as someone who is a fan of every game it is inspired from. From an engaging loot and progression system to wild and crazy powers that shake-up combat, I haven’t even begun to get tired of trying out new builds, playing as the other classes, incorporating new mods and weapons into my arsenal, to running some Expeditions for the 30th or 50th time, trying to race through them for a chance at better gear. Sure, there are some frustrating issues with snipers having some cheap shots, the excessive knockback that is applied to every enemy, or the bullet-sponge health of some enemies, but in the end, how you outfit your mods and work alongside your teammates to inflict status effects like bleed or weakness, can often reduce those annoyances to mere dust, making for a run that makes you feel like a fucking superhero. Outriders has its share of problems, sure, I’ll give you that without hesitation, but fun is not even remotely one of those problems. This game can often kick-ass, it simply just needs a lot of TLC.
Developer - People Can Fly. Publisher - Square Enix. Released - April 1, 2021. Available On - Xbox One, Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC, Stadia. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X (120+ hours), PC (6+ hours). Review Access - Outriders was downloaded via Game Pass Ultimate by the reviewer and also via a gifted Steam Code.