Outriders - Review

Enoch, humanity’s last hope. We thought we could start over again here. We thought this was a chance to start fresh. Now we’re just slaughtering each other.

Outriders is the newest entry into the Looter Shooter genre of game. With a decent player base, and online co-op option, how does Outriders stand up against the other juggernauts of this genre, and does it carve its own niche? Let’s find out.  

From the moment I started up the game, I was instantly struck by how great the game sounds. The opening cinematic has the clear Square-Enix musical touch and it immediately pulls you in to get you ready for the world you are about to enter. The opening cinematic is beautiful, and much shorter than the typical Square game, it gives you a small view into Enoch and get you ready for what you are about to enter.

This trend continues through the game. The voice acting is superb, every character feels individual, and even the player character has had a lot of love crafted into their verbiage. The idle chatter of the world characters as you walk past, whilst not particularly interesting, is a touch I thoroughly enjoy. It engages you into a world, and makes you feel like it is alive. The music is great, but never overpowering. It lends its charm to the areas, and the encounter music gives you that pumped up feeling. You know you’re in for a fight whenever it kicks up, and it keeps you in the fight. The guns sound great too. A lot of love was put into making the guns sound really nice and feel really good.

That was a huge selling point for me. I am not particularly adept at shooters and tend to shy away from them. I had a good time with Destiny with friends, but I was never particularly good, and felt the guns somewhat lacked the power they should have. Outriders made me feel like I was good. It made me feel like I was competent and able to play the game fully. The guns feel nice, and on most world tier difficulties you’ll feel a nice response from blowing an enemy away with a shotgun at close range, or filling them with bullets with an assault rifle from behind cover.

Just to touch lightly on it, the game gets progressively more difficult as you play well. The “World Tiers” are a good way of gradually increasing difficulty. Your drops get better, your item level cap increases and in turn enemies are higher level than you as you increase. I got as high as World Tier 13, out of a possible 15, before I found myself getting incredibly frustrated in the final segments of the game.

Unfortunately, I found at higher world tiers this falls off. The gunplay still feels good but going from world tier 10 to world tier 11 feels like a world of difference in damage output. This may be skewed by the fact I was playing the “Tank” class, and my DPS was somewhat lowered. Unfortunately, I also didn’t feel like much of a tank, as the tank style enemies would typically rush me and kill me in about 3 shots. Thankfully, it is very easy to lower the difficulty on the fly. Unfortunately, that means that if you’ve played a higher tier, you’ll likely not ever get gear to that equivalent ever again, so you’re more so playing to push the storyline than get better loot.

This is somewhat counter-intuitive. I want the game to get progressively more difficult, and I want to be rewarded with better gear as I get through tougher sections. The problem comes in that I felt I hit a hard cap, where I was unsure if I was just playing poorly, or that the game was at a point where solo play was just not possible anymore. I understand the game encouraging and making it very easy to do co-op play, but I really wanted to experience the story alone. The one fight I did with someone else, they wanted to skip cutscenes, and thankfully it requires everyone to vote to skip, I wanted to play at my own pace. That just isn’t possible with random teammates. With friends, this shouldn’t be an issue. But the endgame being so heavily skewed towards needing teammates made the final sections somewhat underwhelming, because I needed to lower the world tier difficulty. It’s a minor gripe, but unfortunately one that can affect a player reaching the end game.

The story itself is solid. It’s not going to change the world, but it’s solid. I always found myself wanting to find out what was going to happen next and continue to push. Most of the side quests tie into the main story in some way, and I appreciate the dedication in doing so. The story being as good as it is, was important in helping me continue to push through, because unfortunately the core gameplay is incredibly repetitive.

Enter area, kill 20 to 30 enemies, kill a tougher mini-boss style enemy, enter next area and plant travel flag. Rinse and repeat. This is the core style of gameplay, and whilst I understand this is essentially how these games work, were it not for the great story, and amazing world design I likely wouldn’t have pushed through to the end. I found myself sometimes struggling with the amount of repetition.

The further point to the repetition is that the human enemy types, have about 5 models, and then 2 recolour versions as you progress further. Each faction tends to have 1 special type of unit, but it becomes glaringly obvious how few actual enemy types there are in the game. I was excited when I fought my first monster types, because it was a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, there is 4 different types, with 3 variants within these types. This adds freshness, and there is a few mini boss “unique” style of monsters, but I felt there was just a several lack of variety. It’s not until the final few hours that these monster types start crossing over as well. So typically, you’re only fighting one or the other.

Thankfully, everything in the game is incredibly pleasant on the eyes. The world design is great, even if it is on a map-by-map basis. The character models look really good, even if it’s a lot of repetition in the enemy variants. The world characters are all individual and unique, and every character you interact with is really well designed. There is attachment to a few of the characters, and the game does a good job of evoking feelings for your main crew.

The true multi-phase boss fights are fantastic. They are incredibly well designed, feel unique and truly push you to play well. Unfortunately, there is a total of maybe 5 across the whole game. There’s upwards of 20 areas, and only 5 of these truly tough boss battles. Whilst I enjoy them not being over-saturated I feel there was room for a few more of these. Harder encounters with more “elite” variant enemies is not a substitute for these amazing boss fights. A few more of these would’ve gone a long way to mix up the repetitive nature of the encounters. Five to six hours between each one is just a little too long of a stretch.

I’ve mentioned a lot of negatives, but Outriders is a fun game. The amount of loot, ability options and game here is great. There is plenty to do, the story is worth experiencing, the end-game content is challenging and encourages you to continue to play. The encounters are generally fun, and the game feels nice to play. Outriders isn’t ground-breaking, and unfortunately, without some major content updates I fear it may fade away. It’s an experience with taking, but I really hope the developers really look into expanding the world and increasing the variety of enemy type with endgame content. I would definitely recommend the game to anyone who enjoys looter shooter style games, as there is a game here worth investing in.

The Score

7.5

Review code provided by Square-Enix

The Pros

+Gunplay feels nice

+Amazing sound design

+Fantastic boss battles

+Great character design

The Cons

-Hard cap on solo play

-Very repetitive gameplay

-Lack of enemy variants