The Outer Worlds Switch - Review
When The Outer Worlds released last year, we reviewed it on PC and rated it very favourably, but now that it has come to Switch, can we apply the same score, or is this one port you should not dock at?
If you are not aware of the story, it is simple, you have been rescued by Phineas Wells, who used up the last remaining chemicals that make up a special serum on yourself, without that serum, people who have been frozen as long as you have, tend to blow up. The task set to you is simple, go and find more of those chemicals, a simple goal and if you ignore the rest of the game, one that is achievable in a very short amount of time, but as this is an Obsidian RPG, there are countless side quests, logs and other shiny objects to distract you. You, a newly crowned captain of a spaceship, can recruit members of the local populace to your ship, letting them carry the heavy load at times, both figuratively and literally, so each time you play through, you can experience the game in entirely new ways.
As far as the core gameplay goes, there is a lot to unpack in it, you can play the game as a stealth operative, doing all you can to avoid combat, you can go the complete opposite and run in shooting everyone you meet in the face, or leg, or wherever. When you speak with people you can be a dick and threaten them, or you can be nice and offer assistance, the game is about offering choices to you, something that again, if you replay the game, can be fun to discover all over again. Your companions, the folks that you recruit onto your crew, also have options of their own, so if you are attempting to repair something and your skill is not quite high enough, but Parvati, a possible crew member, has the skill, you can still do it. Because the game is all about choice, including what missions you undertake, there is little in terms of a set path, sure there are some main quests you can follow, but those are not mandatory, unless you want to push the story forward.
Sadly though, we must talk about the Switch version, specifically around the bad, but before we do that, I will touch upon the nice things the game does. Being able to take the game away from the TV and play it anywhere is a nice thing, more so given the choices that you can make, each time you head out somewhere, you could play it a new way and experience something else. Given that the story should take around 12 hours or so, you could theoretically play it one way on a flight to LA and another way back, if you so desired. The game also offers up motion control aiming, which is always a welcome addition, but the game actually goes above and beyond there, offering up two different modes. You can have the motion enabled all the time, which is pretty standard, or you can only have it come into play when you are aiming down the sights of a gun, which to me, is a far better use of it.
That concludes the good things, I know, not a lot, now we get into the not so good, as this is where the game tends to live, first up, lets talk performance. The game has load times that border on the crazy, not all of them doing, going into and out of the ship, is pretty quick, however when you leave the ship in a new destination, that takes some time. It would not be so bad, if you could scroll through the games loading slides, but you are left with whatever random image it shows you and while text does appear on the bottom of the screen, it sometimes feels a little superfluous to the experience. Speaking of load, the game suffers from terrible in-game load problems as well, both in combat and out, there was a moment, when I ran into a town, only to see some objects floating in the air, then the loading wheel appear and after almost seven seconds, the people holding the items were added into the game. Now, knowing it would be hard to believe without proof, I attempted to record the evidence, using the capture mode, but the game does not support it, making me wonder why. In combat, the load times are not as bad as the previous example, but when the action really kicks in, things can stutter quite a bit and not because time dilation has been used.
The worst element though, are the games visuals, they are a mix of ok, all the way through to what the heck is going on here and they tend to skew more towards the worst side of things. There are times when the visuals look good, not great, but good, characters look fine, there is a good amount of detail in the backgrounds. The problem is, those times are rare, more often than not, the characters will look ok, but the backgrounds will be flawed, or even worse, it all looks bad. There are some nice touches, like the draw distance outside is pretty generous, but even that is presented with an asterisk and that is that the lighting is only drawn on, until a much smaller distance away from the player, which results in details being drawn in, in an even smaller radius. When the game is looking good, it is very playable and while not the most visually appealing, still looks good, the problem is, when it goes bad, it is like looking into the sun, stare to long and your eyes will go bad.
There are some nice parts still, the menu’s are clean and detailed, text conversation boxes are fine as well, meaning that reading the multitude of text on screen is not a problem. Even the countless text logs and computer screens that you can access look fine, the game even allows for you to scale text size, so if you need it larger, you can do that as well. The audio is perhaps another aspect of the game that carried across without issue, characters sound great, the worlds sound amazing and the score is wonderful, but no matter how charming the embarrassed noises from Parvati or the impressed tones of Felix’s voice are, the visuals always subtract from them.
The Outer Worlds on Switch is playable and if this is your only platform to enjoy it on, then I highly suggest you give it a go, as the story and world are fun to explore. If you have played it on other platforms, or skipped it on them, in favour of the Switch release, then you might be best returning to those other platforms. The games visuals, while serviceable at times, fail to maintain a consistent level of presentation, if they could do that, things would not be so bad, as it stands though, while it might be Spacer’s Choice, it is not the best choice.
The Score
6.0
Review code provided by Private Division
The Pros
+Portable Outer Worlds, letting you replay with new decisions anywhere
+Still contains the same loveable and quirky characters
The Cons
-Visuals are more of a mess than anything else, making it hard to enjoy
-Performance is a blend of bad and worse, with long loads and stuttering combat
