Rating of
3.5/5
It's Not the Best Choice, It's The Outer Worlds
Chris Kavan - wrote on 01/25/26
Obsidian Entertainment will forever and always be tied to Fallout: New Vegas - still the most ambitious and memorable of the series. But people looking at that through rose-colored glasses may forget the game was an even buggier mess than Fallout 3 when it was released. Obsidian has made other great games - I'm particularly a fan of South Park: The Stick of Truth (a fun and damn funny licensed game), along with solid early sequels in Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2. They also made Pillars of Eternity (and its sequel), Tyranny and Avowed - but as I haven't played those I have no opinion. What I have played here, is The Outer Worlds - a space exploration/FPS games about a long-distant Earth colony dominated by corporations and, of course, utterly falling apart. It has its moments, for sure, but is a bit bland and yet too familiar at the same time.
Looks and Stuff: While the game is a few years old by now, I still feel it looks too cartoonish for its own good. Not quite Borderlands cel-shaded and not quite the more realistic feel of most modern open-world games, it's somewhere between and it's distracting. The enemies pretty much three flavors: human marauders/outlaws/soldiers, mechanicals (flying drones and slow but deadly tread-based) and the local (angry) creatures. There are some variations with wildlife - Primals (gorilla-type monsters), Canids (a dog-type thing that is mostly biting jaw), Raptidons (some spew poison, some charge) and Mantisaurs (a giant mantis insect) - along with bigger mini-boss style creatures of each variety.
The environments take you to many steam/dieselpunk-inspired colonies - surrounded by lava, sulfur pools and jungles. While each area has its definite quirks and characters, the re-use of several assets made a lot of it feel too samey to really give places enough depth and difference to really make them stand out. But permeating everything is the feeling of decay and despair - from illness to garbage to buildings falling apart (even the nice ones) - everything does really feel like its on the verge of revolt and/or collapse at any given moment.
The voice acting is well done - even if the characters feel underutilized. Some big names in the voice-over world appear including Ashley Burch, (as one of your companions, the naive back-water mechanic Parvati), Crispin Freeman, Debra Wilson, Sumalee Montano, Victoria Sanchez and Piotr Michael among them. While I wish your companions had been given a bit more depth, the fact they comment on how things are moving along - and even with each other - at least means some effort was put into them.
The music is nothing extraordinary and I encountered no major bugs along the way - I never got stuck once though I admit to falling afoul of many blocking volumes that I thought were cheap.
Story: Mankind has been sent to colonize distant worlds via cryogenics and two colony ships are sent: The Hope and The Groundbreaker. But The Hope goes missing - it's story lost to time and legend. The Groundbreaker becomes one of the last free-owned places in this new galaxy as Halcyon Holdings - made up of ten corporations - asserts its control on the habitable worlds. And things are not going well. Rogue scientist Phineas Vernon Welles has managed to track down The Hope and manages to finally awaken a passenger without catastrophic death - that is you, The Stranger, main character and tasks you with saving the dying colonies by helping him thaw out the rest of The Hope - and the best and brightest minds aboard - hoping to save what is left. He sets you up with a contact - who you immediately kill by crashing your escape pod on top of - and you take on his identity as the captain of The Unreliable. You are introduced to the harsh realities of this new world in Edgewater, a corporate town that produces Saltuna - and nothing but - a backwater colony dominated by the one, huge factory. But there are others - dissidents - who have left this behind and formed their own group outside the walls. This is your first taste of whether you are going to be corporate stooge or rebel.
The game moves things along briskly - in order to thaw out the citizens you need dimethyl sulfoxide, a rare chemical that is key to bringing people out of long cryogenic sleep. From the wilds of Monarch to the nepo baby capital Byzantium, you'll see the all the dangers these new worlds hold - including the very worst... no, not the blood-thirsty marauder gangs or massive, hungry creatures the most horrible of all... bureaucracy. Yes, monsters and starvation aren't the only things to worry about... red tape will truly kill even the most hardy of souls. It turns out the reason the colonies are dying is that the alien food found just isn't quite compatible with human kind - all the Purpleberries and Cystypigs (literally food made from tumors dropping off pig-like animals) and Sprats (yes, stellar rats) and Rizzo's alcohol and questionable drugs can't sustain the population and the corporations realize everyone will slowly starve and that's why they need The Hope - not to thaw out anyone, but to jettison them out and freeze everyone else - letting the wealthiest few survive. Thus you must navigate this hellscape in order to help the mad scientist or, if you're truly evil, The Board themselves.
The DLC I found far more interesting than the main game itself. Peril on Gorgon takes you to a desolate asteroid where one of the main companies, Spacer's Choice, abandoned a project years ago and now lies mostly abandoned - with a surprisingly large amount of marauders present. After a package arrives on The Unreliable - a severed arm and mysterious message - they meet up with Minnie Ambrose, daughter of Gordon's lead scientist Dr. Olivia Ambrose - who wants to clear her family's disgraced name and clear her mother of the charges after the disaster that befell Gorgon. This leads you to discovering some disturbing truth behind one the game's most prolific drugs - Adrena-Time and just how far corporations are willing to go. This one is willing to go to some dark places and it's truly interesting.
The second, more ambitious DLC is Murder on Eridanos in which star of the silver screen Halcyon Helen (or at least her the actress who plays her - Ruth Bellamy) is found murdered just before she was to announce the release of Spectrum Brown, the latest alcoholic vodka from Rizzo's, on the floating luxury getaway that flies above the gas giant Eridanos. Everyone's a suspect - Helen's co-star, aging icon Spencer Woolrich, hot-headed Black Hole Bertie - star tossball player and reported ex-boyfriend of Helen with known anger issues, the Prophet of Profitability - who Helen had a major tiff with and that runs a cult-like group on the resort, Sedrick Kincannon, owner and operator of SubLight Underground who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty (or bloody) and finally, Administrator Ludovico the man who contacted you, Rizzo's liason. The DLC provides a sprawling area to explore, lots of fun characters and, again, a quite dark story involving parasites, happiness and madness along with the oldest trick in the whodunnit book (no spoilers though).
Gameplay: A traditional FPS with sandbox play. You run around, you shoot things, you level up, loot, upgrade, pick your playstyle (stealthy, dialogue happy, just kill 'em all?) - if you've played a few of these, you should know what you're getting into. The game adds in a slowdown effect Tactical Time Dilation that allows you to pinpoint kill as time is slowed down - not quite VATS, but pretty close. It gets better as the game goes on provided you put some points into it, though I rarely found myself in true need of it.
The game gives you some companions - most with dedicated side quests, though, as mentioned, none of them really stand out too much. Parvati was probably my favorite - though I also liked Ellie (a doctor who became a rebel who came from a wealthy family that used her rebellious escape to declare her dead and claim her sizable insurance money). You also have Felix, a true rebel but utterly clueless, Vicar Max, a priest looking for forbidden knowledge, Nyoka, the alcoholic wilderness survival expert who mourns her fallen comrades and SAM - a robot with some deadly upgrades. While not a companion, I found your AI upgraded ship companion ADA to also be a fun source of randomness throughout your adventures.
Upgrading is capped at 30 with the DLC that increasing it to 36 while the Spacer's Choice edition goes to 99 but increases each level so much you would have to do A LOT of grinding to get anywhere close to that. Each level gives you 10 points to spend on attributes - these are base stats - Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Perception, Personality and Temperament - each tied to different skills like melee, ranged weapons, medic, lockpicking, hacking, dialogue skills and so on. All skills can be raised to a max of 150 points - and you get a bonus at 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 and 150 and this provides a lot of variation on what you can focus on. At each even level you also gain a perk - there are three tiers with 14 perks per tier giving you everything form more armor and better vendor prices to increased companion options, weapon damage, etc. One of the fun things about his game is flaws - if you get hit by certain enemies too many times you may develop a phobia to that creature or if you get damaged too many times you may develop a crippling effect from that. Flaws are permanent but do provide you with some free perks and you can choose to accept a flaw or not.
One of the main issues with the game is how useless so much of the items you collect can be. Weapons, armor, food, drugs - I used almost nothing I picked up. In fact, until the DLC/very end game I hardly used my medical inhaler. The game gives you a lot of rare and weird Science Weapons but most seem dubious or downright worse than the mundane regular weapons aside from some cute effects. Food and drugs are plentiful and I never used them. Most give you positive AND negative effects and seem more hassle than help. About the only thing I needed more of in the world were Weapon Parts as your weapon breaks down the more you use it - granted, you can scrap the abundant crappy weapons for parts anyway, but still. Armor broke down too, but not nearly as fast so Armor Parts were more than plentiful. Likewise, I was never in danger or running out of bullets or lockpicks or hacking tools and aside form some super high-level things in the DLC was able to unlock or hack pretty much anything I came across (though I admit I did put many points into those attributes).
Replay value: The game does make you choose a route (side with The Board or go against them) as well as offering the standard difficulty options. But that's about it for variation.
Final Verdict: While not the most innovative or impressive open-world game out there, it provides enough entertainment to be recommended - but make to get the DLCs too. Even with them, it's not as massive a time sink as other games of its ilk - but also not that memorable, either.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Replay: 3/5
DLC: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
Hours Played: 69.2
Cheevos: 82% (56/68)
