The Outer Worlds

Review

The colony spaceship known as The Hope disappeared 70 years ago somewhere in the Halcyon System. All the occupants are now slightly stiff, shall we say (an understatement if you have been frozen for that long). A wanted scientist, named Phineas Welles, has found his way to The Hope, and you guessed it, you are the lucky one who he selected and woke up!  Like a baby in nappies, you have no idea what’s going on until you open your eyes, when you see and hear Welles rumbling about saving the colony, and within a few seconds you are sent to one of the planets within the Halcyon system via an escape pod to . . . . oh, for goodness sake, you just woke up; you have absolutely no idea what you going to do in The Outer Worlds!

The Outer Worlds is a first person/action/RPG game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Private Division on the 25^th October 2019 on the Epic platform. The game is also available on Xbox One and PS4 while the Nintendo Switch version will be release sometimes in 2020.

Before starting this review, I would like to mention that I was privileged as part of the E3 2019 Media frenzy to sit down in an exclusive 20-minute preview presentation of this game with The Obsidian Entertainment developers, and I must say, I was extremely impressed by what I saw at that time. I wondered if the released version would be as good as I had remembered in June this year!  Let me tell you, it is an absolutely cracker of a game!    

As you launch the game, a fabulous cut-scene will appear which will show Phineas Welles docking onto the “Hope”, and from there you’ll start customising your character. When this is done, a new cut-scene will occur which will lay the story out in more detail, including who your contact is, on your way down to the first planet.

Unfortunately, your contact was squashed upon your landing and he will be your first kill of the game! From here, quests will appear, and you’ll be on your way to an excellent game. Quests are divided into a few categories (Main, Side, Task and Companion) and you can choose whatever you want to do first, but if you are like me, you might want to complete most of the side quests and tasks before following the main story. This will allow you to gain more experience points and therefore level up your characters faster, improving your skill trees and giving you better odds both in fights and in dialogues. As you progress into the game, you’ll meet other characters, and if you choose, some of them will join your party.

As you explore these planets and find settlements, you’ll be able to fast travel to each of the known locations from your map screen, as long as your party is not engaged in any sort of fighting. But before that occurs, you’ll need to find them, which in turn will lead you to explore these areas and engage in fights against cool creatures and bandits. Each winning confrontation will give your party extra experience points which will help you to level up faster in return. Each time your character levels up, you’ll receive 10 points which you can distribute between 7 skills set (each skill set has 2 to 3 options). Each even level up (2,4,6 etc) you’ll receive an extra point which you can only use to add a perk to your character.

 So far, in my 30 hours of playing (which includes all side missions available to me), I visited three planets, two spaceships, and the scientist, Phineas Welles’ asteroid hideout, and I must say that I am absolutely blown away with how each of these places looks and the way the atmosphere is portrayed. It’s just brilliant!

As you explore each of these locations, you’ll find stacks of items to collect in bins, fridges, cupboard, shells, corpses, stashes and many other places. Unfortunately, you are limited to how much weight your character can carry.  One way to rectify this is to find suit modification upgrades which will allow your character to carry more weight. There are also modifications for weapons. These modifications can be implemented at any benchworks you find within the game.

One thing you need to be aware of is the wear and tear of your weapons and armour. You need to make sure you collect weapons and armour parts as much as you can and use them for repairs. If for some reason you are running low on any of these parts, you can break a weapon or a piece of armour for parts. You can also buy parts at merchants or at vendor machines, which are scattered all around the place.

The combat phases are superb! At first, you’ll be fighting alone, which will be tricky as you will have an average weapon. Then, as new characters join your party, you’ll be able to select two of them each time you dock into a location. When in battle, these two characters will automatically engage in fights with you. However, each of these characters has a special move which you can activate at any given time during a battle. These moves are spectacular and will take time to recharge, so use them wisely.

These types of games are quite hard to pull off, in my opinion, as they appeal to audiences of people who like RPG and first-person shooters. It is a big juggling act to make sure to appeal to RPG gamers with a good story and dialogs, as well as offering great battle scenes for first person shooter fans like myself. This game offers a great balance for both styles of gamer.   

Visuals are stunning and each location you visit has its own feel and atmosphere, which is just amazing, and makes you want to explore and find out more about the story. I really like the voice acting, which is top notch (I did expect this), and the soundtrack and sound effects are fabulous too. Personally, I didn’t encounter any major issues during my 30 hours of gameplay so far, which is always a bonus.