SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Clever, hilarious and perfectly styled with Obsidian’s signature flair, The Outer Worlds is an accomplished RPG, despite flimsy combat and a few technical flaws.
During my playthrough, The Outer Worlds helped me to an extraordinary realisation: it’s been a very long time since I’ve sunk my teeth into a proper substantial old-school RPG. It’s a refreshing change of pace. Much like its story, The Outer Worlds is all about delivering a sharp kick to the face of corporate greed. Booting up the game for the first time, it sat there waiting for me, asking no questions about season passes, microtransactions or about always being online. It exists on its own merits, enthusiastically fist-bumping the passion project games of the past and present; a complete package that poses one question and one question only: are you ready to have fun?
In a future where megacorporations dominate the final frontier, the Hope, a colony ship bound for the edge of known space goes astray and winds up abandoned on the edge of the Halcyon Colony. After being awakened by the slightly bonkers scientist Phineas Welles, your character sets out on an interplanetary journey to investigate the corporations that dominate Halcyon, and to find a way to rescue your fellow colonists on the Hope from their cryogenic slumber.
Obsidian has been filling in a carefully carved niche: classic RPGs, and The Outer Worlds is just the latest in the line. It’s a wild ride from start to finish, with a fresh and original space Western setting populated by fascinating, complex characters and steeped in a dark, dry humour and wit. The writing is razor-sharp, creating a nuanced story that revolves around the idea that there’s no perfect situation, that every action has consequences, and most importantly that there are no wrong answers to any given problem. The Outer Worlds makes you consider who you’re actually roleplaying as: are you a liberator setting out to free the people from the chains of the ultra-capitalist Board, a mercenary seizing every opportunity to make money, legal or illegal, or a ruthless corporate stooge looking to bring the colony to its knees? The extreme excesses of its capitalist world makes it frequently, if subtly, funny, and there are plenty of references and laughs to be found.
Halcyon is well-defined, with several unique locales for the player to explore. Each has an affiliation and a sense of history, and you’ll meet people from across the spectrum: some are Board capitalists, seeking to implement social Darwinism in the name of maintaining strength and stability, while others are anti-capitalist revolutionaries dedicated to razing that system to the ground. And there are hundreds who lie somewhere in between. I chose to resist the Board, but The Outer Worlds didn’t make it easy. Often, the game gave me choices, each with merits and flaws, and tasked me with choosing how to proceed. Sometimes, the choices appeared binary: do I send electricity to a small free-thinking agricultural commune, making a powerful statement against the Board, but at the cost of starving the mostly good people of a struggling corporate township, forcing them to fend for themselves?
The game’s true genius lies in the way it nudges you towards seeing the binary choice for the illusion it is; there’s usually a compromise, a complex but better way to resolve the situation. But it’s never obvious, and that in itself is praiseworthy when we have games that hold a player’s hand and coach them through everything. With The Outer Worlds, there’s an implicit trust that the player will learn to start looking for less obvious alternative solutions to the game’s encounters: a mark of excellence for any RPG.
On your journey, you’ll eventually recruit an eclectic crew for your ship. They all have their own backstories and personal quests you can complete, and their presence on your squad boosts your character’s skills. It’s up to you to pick squad-mates to fit the kind of mission you’re taking on. All six feel like real people with lives independent of whatever you’re doing: they interact with one another and when on missions, offer their own thoughts on what they think you should do. Particular mention goes to Parvati, voiced by Ashly Burch, who, like the player, is seeing the wider colony for the first time, and brings her special kind of naïve charm wherever you go.
Comparisons to Fallout are inevitable. There’s no denying that there are similarities; combat feels very familiar, as does the Tactical Time Dilation ability which slows down time so you can target enemy weak points. The combat is dated, old-fashioned and ultimately disappointing. It offers nothing new and feels very rough-and-tumble; it’s never particularly intense or tactical, and the experience lacks the polish that would make it properly engaging. Combat encounters quickly devolve into total chaos, where you fire at basically anything that moves until your companions shout something about it being safe. The skills you gain, such as hacking, persuasion or engineering, also unlock various options in dialogue and exploration; again this is practically identical to the Fallout model.
But the game shows off several of its own innovations which make comparisons unnecessary, even if the similarities will already be enough to put some people off. Your character can find a Holographic Shroud which, combined with ID cartridges, makes for a foolproof disguise, allowing you to sneak into restricted areas. Although it quickly runs down, you can recharge it by persuading or just straight-up lying to enemies that see you, making it an immensely entertaining alternative to the guns blazing approach. The way you’re dared to try and use guile instead of firepower is representative of a game that constantly dares you to do something outrageous or audacious. The game also features Flaws, passive drawbacks that you can accept in exchange for valuable Perks that give you passive benefits. The game leaves the trade-off up to you. Character building feels substantial and deep, betraying its inspirations in Dungeons and Dragons. Want to pump all your skill points into melee weapons and resolve every situation by battering hapless NPCs? You can do that. Want to pump your points into persuasion and become a silver-tongued charmer capable of talking your way out of anything? You can do that as well. The Outer Worlds happily caters to even the silliest, most outrageous builds.
The game does trip up when it comes to the technical side of things. While I didn’t notice many bugs, I encountered a broken personal quest that labelled one of my companions as dead when they were in fact very much alive and travelling with me, which made the epilogue slideshow frustratingly inaccurate. On the PS4 Pro, the visuals are low-resolution as a result of the lack of Pro enhancements, although the game’s unique world aesthetic does make up for that in part. Xbox and PC players won’t suffer from the latter, since visual quality is dependent on platform. PlayStation owners however should consider themselves warned that this isn’t something to use to showcase the Pro’s power.
With this game, Obsidian succeeds at what they set out to do: create a single-player game with clever writing, a story with nuanced player choice and plenty of excellent and often slightly dark humour. The familiarity may put people off, but it’ll attract others looking to get their classic RPG fix. And for that, The Outer Worlds might just be one of the best choices you make.
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