Similarly, while some of the endgame missions do a fun job of tying up loose storylines, others just feel like harder reskins of earlier boss fights. Sure, that five-story-tall Street Shark monster looks awesome, but the whole “shoot the big thing outside the arena and avoid being smashed by its big hand” concept feels a little played out. What’s unfortunate is that, despite good encounter design for both styles of enemies, the more traditional boss battles are some of the least engaging fights Outriders has to offer.
I genuinely can’t remember the last game that could make me cackle as hard as when my earth-bending Devastator combos a Gravity Leap with a Trickster’s Stasis Bubble, creating a slow-motion fountain of bad guy chunks.įrom the variations on fodder-level mutants to the larger beasts that look like somehow even grosser and meaner takes on something out of Half-Life or Alien, the encounters designed around them are a fun alternative to the endless rain of bullets you have to dance through when fighting human enemies. Still, each compliments the others in more interesting ways than something like the standard healer would.
But the combination of sadistically gratifying superpowers and destructive weaponry makes sure it’s always good fun – there’s something morbidly hilarious about seeing a whole-ass ribcage rolling through a skirmish like a bony tumbleweed – and that borderline cartoonish, over-the-top violence is really accentuated in multiplayer.Įach of the four classes has strengths, weaknesses, and skill sets familiar to class-based action games – except for the fact that here they’re all primarily focused on dealing damage (of the 32 unlockable class skills in Outriders, only two have healing abilities). Sure, the combat scenarios become fairly repetitive – especially after you’ve played more than a few of Outriders’ endgame challenge missions that follow its 30-odd-hour campaign. Gunfights are frenzied affairs that leave battlefields literally coated with blood, and even though you’ll likely outgrow its cover mechanics pretty quickly as you progress, this delightfully chaotic action is just as entertaining at the third level as it is at the thirtieth. Outriders is at its best when you’re blasting your way through hordes of bad guys with a couple of friends.
That said, the overarching story and unexpectedly hostile alien world is interesting enough to keep things moving, and there are some genuinely intriguing twists as it progresses, even if (without getting into spoiler territory) their payoffs are somewhat underwhelming. While there are a few moments throughout that could have evoked some believable empathy, they’re all undermined as a result.
OUTRIDERS REVIEW TV
The Expanse is pretty good, too! (It had to be saved from cancelation by Amazon Prime Video, but that’s beside the point!) Outriders would definitely fall somewhere in between those extremes if it were a TV show – its story makes decent use of its recognizable sci-fi tropes for when deep-space colonization goes wrong, but the script often takes its grim/dark self too seriously.Ī lot of the voice acting falls flat – particularly for the leads, who mostly just dutifully grunt their way through accepting quests – and the script careens back and forth between being so hardboiled that it borders on camp, to downright cringeworthy takes on the ugliness of humankind. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course - sure, SyFy might be responsible for Defiance and Hunters, but it also gave us modern classics like Battlestar Galactica and.
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