Not Quite as Good as Fallout, but Close Enough to be Amazing
TL;DR: Gorgeous graphics, good music, interesting story line, some good companion characters (though not all), truly non-linear in that you can get all different combinations of endings depending on your actions. Not as gripping as the Fallout games but I think every Fallout fan should play this game.
I don’t remember how I stumbled upon The Outer Worlds, seeing as it’s been out for a while and I had not even heard of it. Looking at my Steam history, I purchased it on February 15, 2021 and it has been out since October 2020. Seeing how it was made by Obsidian Entertainment (who worked on Fallout New Vegas, need I say more?), reading a few reviews, and getting a first hand account from a friend who had played it, I snapped it up. It sounded like Fallout in space, and I can confirm that is pretty much what it is. Play the opening sequence and you’d be hard pressed to disagree.
Character Creation
Creating your character is very familiar if you’ve played basically any open world RPG. You choose your gender, personality traits, skill set, and of course looks with a series of + and – signs and draggable sliders. You have to be very careful with the personality traits you initially choose, because they cannot be altered later and you can get completely locked out of certain story branches without a high enough perception, or intelligence. This is not unexpected however, as these traits are chosen and locked in at the beginning similar to the traits you are born with.
On appearance: Yes, it IS hard to make an attractive character. I like to make characters I play look like me, and I failed. You don’t have near the amount of options available to you as say in Fallout 4, you are stuck with several presets for nose shape, eye shape, etc. You can make your nose wider or your eyes closer together with sliders, but that is about it. Also, the hair styles for women suck. If you want to be a homely, bug eyed chick with purple lipstick and a shaved head, you will be very happy with the available choices for appearance in this game. However if you want to look like a more typical person – and I’m not talking supermodel, I’m talking just an average person – you will be annoyed just as I was. I can confirm though that this unfortunateness is for both male and female characters, so in Obsidian’s defense I think the ugly people with their ugly hairstyles are a drawback of the engine they used, not some SJW crusade like I’ve seen other gamers accuse them of. 99% of the time you are playing in first person though, so your appearance does not actually matter very much.
Gameplay
Like all games of the genre, after character creation you are given a brief introduction of what is going on, then you are dumped somewhere and told you must go and do something. Doing this first mission acts as a tutorial as you get your bearings, and in a matter of minutes you are starting along the main storyline. Once you get to the first town, you begin to discover all the dialogue choices you have and the vast amount of freedom you have to just wander and do things at your own pace. That is probably what I love best about these open world games, you can be playing the same game next to someone and you’re both in completely different locations doing completely different things.
This isn’t just a walk-around-talking game though, obviously there are a lot of weapons and a lot of fighting that happens. This can get tedious at times, but you can adjust the difficulty down to Story Mode if you don’t want the whole game to be endless shooting and sneaking. Speaking of: if you have a super high sneak ability, you can avoid all the pew-pew, but you also miss out on loot and xp so it’s probably best to save sneaking for quests where it’s required in order to be successful.
Dialogue is, to me at least, the best part of these games because that is the heart of the story: it’s about people, how they react to situations, and how you react to both them and the situation also. You can be a complete jackass and tell people off or even attack them in dialogue, you can be sarcastic, flirty, or even just play dumb. Important choices are made through dialogue, so if you’re the type that just goes “yeah ok” and clicks through all dialogue without listening to it or reading it, this probably is not the game for you. Even terminals can have hilarious things on them if you have the curiosity to check them, like this screenshot from one of the DLCs:
Companions
Note: You can play completely solo, and there are perks that enhance your abilities should you choose to do so!
I need to keep things vague here to avoid spoiling anything, so I will simply say that companions in this game are a mixed bag. I only actually liked half the available companions, and the other half I did as little with as possible because I found them boring or annoying. They all have loyalty quests except for Sam, and some are very well thought out and interesting while others left me thinking “Was that it?” If you are playing on Hard or Supernova, then the abilities of your companions is a huge factor in deciding who you have accompany you. They all have their own specialties and you can train them in their own perks as they level up with you. They also pipe up during big decision points in the game, but in my experience it won’t hurt your loyalty or “karma” with them if you go against their wishes.
Companions also come with abilities, which you can control if you train up to at least 20 in the “leadership” skill. Basically while you are in combat, you push a specific button to tell companion A to use their special ability, and another button to tell companion B to use theirs. This can be literally life saving in some fights, especially on Supernova where if your companions go down, they are truly dead and that’s it.
One last thing on companions: while their idle chatter between each other (if you have 2 with you) can be enlightening and even downright funny at times, the noises they make when they are hurt in combat can get super irritating. I liked having Parvati in my party but I wanted to smack her multiple times for the way she shrieks and screams if she takes even 1 point of damage.
Combat
Combat is relatively straightforward in this game, you aim and shoot for the most part. Complicating matters however is that you are encouraged to use guns from far away, then switch to a melee weapon when the target gets close to you. This sounds simple, but when you have 5 giant monsters on you, your companions screaming, and you’re close to death you don’t really have the wherewithal to think “Gee, I should cycle through my scroll wheel right now to find my melee weapon.” Well, maybe you will, but I didn’t. So I used guns pretty much 100% of the time.
Couple the above with needing to manually tell your companions to use their ability every time, and combat can get annoying. Add to this your “time dilation” ability which slows time down similar to the VATS system in Fallout (but without the ability to pinpoint a body part), and it frankly just becomes too complicated. This is just my opinion mind you, but when I’m trying not to die I personally do not like having to remember to do 6 things at precise moments on top of shooting at the thing attacking me.
Inventory
The inventory system in this game is clunky. Your bags fill up very quickly and you become encumbered every 5 minutes, it feels like. However, if you keep an eye out for vending machines and workbenches, you can sell or break down items you don’t want. Breaking items down is extremely handy, because it gives you parts that you can then use to “tinker” with your existing weapons and armor…which actually just means upgrade (I don’t know why they chose tinker).
Weapons and armor can be swapped out on yourself or your companions pretty much anytime you’d like. This aspect of the game works like all other RPGs, you look at the stats and decide based on the type of character you are playing which items will help with your play style. The one annoying thing about it though is trying to organize all your items so you can compare them to what you currently have. It takes multiple clicks at the bottom left of the inventory screen to organize based on value, for example, and it is several more clicks to compare to what you are currently wearing. In short, answering the question “is this new weapon better than what I have?” is not a quick answer and it can get tedious.
One of the first things you’ll discover in this game is your handy dandy inhaler. This super charged injector (you don’t actually inhale anything) will heal you and give you other bonuses depending both on the perks you have chosen and the ingredients you’ve added to it. You can add medicine as well as food to your inhaler, and increase the number of slots up to 4 ingredients total based on the perks you’ve chosen. This is one part of the game that seemed to break away from the traditional “take a potion” or “go see a healer” options that RPGs usually have. Plus you pick up a TON of edible ingredients through your travels, so you can constantly be refilling your inhaler if you run out of an ingredient.
Conclusion
If you like any of the recent Fallout games or Witcher 3, you should love The Outer Worlds. While it doesn’t have the replayability of some other open world RPGs, I know for a fact I will be playing it at least one more time. It doesn’t have any romance options at all, with your companions or with any other NPCs, which I found unusual for this genre. In fact up until the DLCs things were super asexual, i.e. there weren’t any sexual jokes at all in the main game that I noticed, not even G rated ones. There were laugh out loud moments in this game though, and the storyline is dystopian but realistic enough that it is very relatable in a “that could very easily be us in 10 years” kind of way.
Bottom line: BUY IT!
