The first thing that became clear about Outriders, even before launch, just from playing the demo was that it was going to be a game of contradictions. It’s a looter shooter where the guns are the least vital aspect of your progression, it’s a cover-based shooter where you’re encouraged to use as little cover as possible, and it’s a game that was made as an answer to the cynical foreverness of live-service games while somehow still has all the technical problems of a live-service game.
Launch Day Troubles
For the first three days or so after launch, Outriders was essentially unplayable. Near-constant server issues made it impossible to get into the game, and if you did, it wouldn’t be long before you were kicked out. The thing that kept me patient and waiting was the “we got this” attitude demonstrated by the developers and community managers at People Can Fly (seriously, shout-out to community managers, they have one of the toughest jobs in game-dev). But if you’re worried why a narrative-focused single-player game that’s not a live-service needs always-online servers, I’m wondering the same thing.
The server issues were virtually non-existent within a week of launch, only to then give way to potentially more damning technical issues. The much touted and anticipated cross-play feature simply did not work for a long time, people on PS5 were falling through the floor, other people’s entire loadouts were disappearing, rendering 40+ hours of grinding completely void. Stuttering issues on PC, a hilarious bug on consoles that made a button prompt fail to appear in a main quest, completely barring any story progress beyond that point (that one happened to me).
Now, a little over two weeks from launch, the servers are rock solid, the inventory wipe bug has reportedly been rectified, and multiple patches have improved technical performance across all platforms, but I still can’t progress beyond that one mission on PS4.
If you’ve read my reviews before, you know I tend to start with the good stuff and leave the bad stuff for the end. I’m trying a different approach here because through all the server shutdowns, technical issues, and inventory wipes, I still enjoyed the living hell out of it. And I wanted to get all of the caveats out of the way before telling you why Outriders is easily the best game I’ve played in 2020 so far.
Rip and Flare
It all begins with the combat. Leading up to launch and through early impressions from the demos, Outriders was garnering some rather unfair comparisons to Gears of War (a series that People Can Fly have previously worked on). And while the game does resemble Gears in a quaint sort of way with the grey-brown colour palette in the early stages and the combat arenas shamelessly littered with waist-high walls, the resemblance is only skin-deep. Beneath the dude shooter veneer, Outriders is a very different beast.
People Can Fly have employed what’s come to be known as push-forward combat, originally popularised by Bloodborne and subsequently named so and canonized by id Software with 2016’s DOOM. As the name suggests, this kind of combat is designed to encourage players to constantly push forward and be aggressive. This is usually done by tying healing to player aggression, which stops players from turtling and encourages them to get into the fight as often as they can.
Deadly Class(es)
Outriders is no different. Each of the four playable classes has its own way of healing. The tanky Devastator heals by dealing close-range damage, the roguish Trickster heals using temporal abilities, the self-explanatory Pyromancer heals by setting enemies on fire, and the Technomancer – the closest thing to a support character in this game – has abilities dedicated to healing themselves and the team.
This immediately gives the battles in Outriders a very different rhythm than any other co-op shooter because you’re free from relying on your teammates for healing in all but the most dire situations. Since everyone is responsible for their own well-being, the team synergies are almost exclusively of the offensive kind. And my god what synergies there are. Dropping a time bubble that slows all enemies trapped within it as a Trickster, only to have your Devastator buddy leap into the air and slam right in just as a Pyromancer causes a literal volcanic eruption beneath their feet, resulting in a tapestry of blood and guts and limbs, cascading in slow-motion, is something that never fails to make me cackle with glee.
The powers all feel great to use, as do the guns. People Can Fly have a well-established pedigree within the shooter genre with Gears of War: Judgement and Bulletstorm, both of which had some phenomenally designed guns. The arsenal you’re given in Outriders isn’t as diverse as the ones in those previous games, but the guns still look cool and feel satisfying to fire.
The Perks of Being an Outrider
The combat really comes into its own when you throw gear and perks into the mix. This loot system is Outriders’ single most brilliant gimmick that, in my opinion, absolutely schools every other looter on the market right now. As expected, loot is categorised from common all the way to legendary. Rare loot and above always drops with a ‘mod’ which is essentially a perk that significantly alters your play style. Guns have mods that change how guns work, while armour has mods that change how your abilities work.
A gun might drop with a ‘Bone Shrapnel’ mod that causes killed enemies to explode into, well, shrapnel made of their bones and causing area damage to all their friends. Another gun might drop lightning from the sky, or heal you with each critical hit. I found a shotgun with a mod that reloads it every time I perform a dodge-roll. Armour mods might increase the damage of your abilities, change how they behave (the aforementioned eruption might throw in some debris with the lava), or let you use them more than once. No percentage chances here, some mods just let you use your abilities twice or even thrice before cooldown.
Craftwerks and Skill Trees
Where People Can Fly really went insane is the game’s crafting system. Whenever you dismantle a weapon or armour piece, the mods that were in it go into your library. And these aren’t single-use items either. Any mod you acquire, you will then be able to reapply as many times as you want. By spending a paltry amount of resources (which you also get from dismantling items in addition to loot drops, quest rewards, and mining), you can apply any mod from your library into any piece of gear. The UI has icons showing you when a mod is already on your character or which mods you already have while dismantling an item. It’s a hassle-free crafting system that lets you tinker to your heart’s content as long as you have the resources for it. And believe me when I say I always had the resources for it, because Outriders has zero interest in gating your progress with grinding.
With perks and mods as powerful as this, it’s easy to imagine all the ways it could completely break the class balancing, so I was consistently baffled throughout my 80+ hours with Outriders that that was never the case. I can’t possibly imagine what a pain it was to playtest these things, and People Can Fly deserves all the kudos in the world for coming up with a progression system that provides this much flexibility without breaking the balance.
Then there’s the Class Trees. Every class has three skill trees that alter their stats as well as change the way their abilities work, cooldowns, health pools, damage output, etc. The current level cap is 30 and there is no way you can unlock everything on the class tree, but the game lets you respec literally any time you want at no cost at all. Once again, it’s a progression system that allows and encourages flexibility and experimentation.
Of Monsters and Gunbros
All of this comes together into a combat sandbox that’s firing on all cylinders at all times. But even the best combat ever can get boring if you repeat it for too long. Outirders avoids that with some truly bonkers enemy variety and encounter design that makes sure you will never fight that same battle twice (unless you repeat a mission, obviously). The way they’ve done this is not just with enemy variety, but by making enemy types a feature of the levels in which they appear.
Broadly speaking there are two types – melee and ranged. So you have dudes who use guns, grenades, and cover and other dudes who rush at you with big knives. Then you have creatures who throw projectiles and areas of effect, and other creatures who rush at you with big fangs. There are many different subtypes within these two but depending on what kind of level you’re in, the enemy combinations always make for interesting combat. Areas with lots of cover have lots of gun dudes for you to outflank while larger, more open areas have more of the rusher types. It’s often said that great game design is finding a great 30-second loop and making you repeat it over and over, and I’d say People Can Fly have definitely found one hell of a loop that I’m yet to get bored of.
Apocalypse When?
And then there’s the story. It’s not particularly interesting, but I do think it’s very well-told. The premise of Outriders feels like sci-fi mad libs. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Earth is dying, an expedition was sent to the far reaches of the universe to find inhabitable worlds. Upon arriving on one such planet, things went unfathomably wrong and now everyone is fighting for survival. I don’t like describing games as “like this thing but also like that other thing” but the plot of Outriders can be summarised as Mass Effect Andromeda by way of Heart of Darkness.
What I didn’t expect here was that none of the characters seem to have plot armour. I was never sure which character would make it to the next cutscene, let alone the next chapter. And even if the overarching plot doesn’t grab you, the narrative metagame of character death bingo probably will. It’s also helped along by some really grounded and human character writing and voice acting that makes the core cast an easy bunch to root for. I started the game rolling my eyes at how every character was a scenery chewing badass, but by the end I was ready to die for all of them. There’s a real Guardians of the Galaxy energy to their interactions and that is not praise I give lightly.
The campaign isn’t just an amuse-bouche either, as the case tends to be in every other looter. This is a meaty, full-length RPG story that took me roughly 55 hours to complete. That number can vary a lot depending on how much you engage with the side-quests, but the ballpark number seems to be in the 30-40 hours range. Once you finish the main story, there’s a surprisingly substantial endgame that is all here in its entirety right out of the box. To put that in context games like Destiny and The Division didn’t get proper endgame content until patches months, or even a year after launch. Marvel’s Avengers still doesn’t have anything resembling an endgame.
We’re in the Friendgame Now
For Outriders to have an endgame that’s added another 40 hours and counting to my playtime is nothing to shake a stick at. Once again, the fundamental design decision seems to have been to provide a complete experience rather than a platform for future updates.
This takes the form of Expeditions, which is essentially a whole other mode with its own storyline(s) that continues from where the main story left off. I won’t spoil what happens here but the gist of it is that you and up to two other players run through timed dungeons for loot rewards. Think the Nephalem Rifts from Diablo and you’ll have a fair idea of how this works. Expeditions have their own challenge tiers independent of the game’s difficulty setting. Completing a dungeon on one tier unlocks the next, which leads to progressively better loot. There’s a total of 15 Expeditions in Outriders right now, after which you will be well and truly done with the game.
It’s also worth noting that these Expeditions are all new dungeons, not recycled chunks of the campaign levels. I could honestly go on and on about how impressive and exhaustive the content in Outriders is, but I think you get it by now. This is a meaty, substantial, content-rich RPG that has nothing but respect for the player’s time and money.
Verdict (srsly it’s so good!)
“Nothing but respect for the player’s time and money” is as accurate a summation of the appeal of Outriders as there can be. The game made a woefully bad first impression with the server crashes and technical issues, and while it’s still not quite blemish-free, Outriders is finally in a state where I can actually recommend it. People Can Fly have said they might consider DLC if the game does well, and I for one definitely want to see more stories in this universe. Whether or not Outriders has a bright future ahead is something only time will tell, but for now, I want to applaud the developers at People Can Fly for making a game that will make even heavy-hitters of its genre sit up and pay attention.
Review codes provided by Square Enix. This review was originally published on PC Mag Middle East. Outriders is out now on Stadia, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox Game Pass.