The good news is The Outer Worlds is great, but it might not be exactly the game you thought it would be.
Understandably the first thing many thought when learning that the people behind the original Fallout titles and those behind the beloved Fallout New Vegas were making a brand new RPG together was that this could be the ultimate blend of Fallout old and new in a shiny new package.
In many ways it is, yet the series it most resembles is Mass Effect. Planet-hopping sci-fi with warring factions and engaging companions? The Outer Worlds does this in a manner befitting Bioware’s sci-fi epic, but it’s fused with dark humor and a freeing morality system.
Despite these differences from what’s expected, it all begins in a warmly familiar way. Set in the future, The Outer Worlds takes place on the remote space colony known as Halcyon. Among this collection of terraformed planets and raggedy space stations you awaken aboard a stranded colony ship to discover you’re freshly unfrozen from cryogenic sleep and turns out, you’re probably the one to change the way things are down on the colony. Yes, the chosen one story is back, but that doesn’t exactly mean salvation for the Halcyon colony.
Halcyon is run by corporations that effectively act as factions. If citizens want food and housing they have to essentially tie themselves to one of the corporations for life and know little more than that. To break from this oppressive regime or to underperform for the corporation means being shunned and near-starved extremely far from Earth. The only problem is the corporations had only half-thought out this interstellar colony lark, and now viable food is becoming rare and Halcyon is on the brink of collapse. The protagonist’s quest begins with the idea to get the brightest minds ever frozen and stuffed into cryogenic tubes thawed out and working on a solution for that crisis. How it ends is up to you.
The Outer Worlds isn’t afraid to be political and makes humorous light of some highly-relatable topics (class wars, brands as a defining lifestyle choice, the gig economy), and that ultimately colors your journey and the choices you make. The writing is good enough to take a seemingly obvious solution and offer up another one that is equal to or supersedes the previous one. The Outer Worlds lives in the grey areas of morality, giving you the flexibility to be as honorable or shitty a human being as you’d like. The key to that is how flexible your options are for missions.
One early mission sees you out trying to get a power source for your ship and that leads you into a dilemma between two sides of a town. One is scrapping to live under corporate rule, but oh-so-willing to keep what little power they have over a renegade group who are living free of corporate shackles, but struggling to survive without supplies.
Both groups have a power supply, but each powers the towns they live in. From here your options are immense. I don’t want to spoil too much with this, but among the ways to get that power supply are straight-up murder of one party or even both, threatening one with shutdown if they don’t return to the other, and convincing one side to let the others be. The Outer Worlds lets you kill quest givers, and always offers up a new way of getting your objective done.
I replayed this particular scenario in a multitude of ways and got wildly different results. It even affected the companions I could recruit and later echoed out into other aspects of the story. The Outer Worlds may not be the largest RPG, but it has so much replay potential. In my first playthrough, playing as a Han Solo-esque antihero, I found all the potential companions, but didn’t get to visit every possible planet.
Yes, The Outer Worlds is positively bite-sized when compared to many RPG’s of the modern era. Rather than a big sprawling open world, The Outer Worlds is made up of smaller sections on a multitude of planets. There’s still exploration and looting within these sections, but it’s a more streamlined and condensed kind of exploration. It’s honestly a relief not to have to trudge around for hours when narratively, the planet’s are generally only sparsely populated with human activity and the identikit Western-style flat-pack buildings, so The Outer Worlds makes sure there’s more to find and do in these little pockets of life. Mainly by making sure the world-building and conversations are worth your time.
There’s plenty of chat too if you want it, most of it from the companions you can pick up along the way. There are five possible recruits for your ragtag spacefaring crew and each is worth having around, which makes preparing for exploration tough because you can only take two at a time. They chat amongst themselves, offer up advice, tell you their concerns, and have their own personal story arcs that can be filled out via their own questlines. They have their own upgrade trees, stats, weapons, and armor, and even throw in a special ability. They’re extremely handy in a fight and good company on your travels. My personal favorite is the adorably awkward engineer Parvati, who was full of excitement and nervousness about traveling through space as part of my team, and always felt like the grounded and good-hearted core of my decision-making. The other four have their qualities, but Parvati is one of my favorite NPCs for a good while.
When you’re not wandering about, trading barbs and heartfelt advice with the fine folk of the Halcyon colony, there’s a good chance you’ll be fighting something. Might be marauders, might be alien beasts, or it might just be the entire town you just enraged after shooting their leader in the face. Gunplay is more prominent than you might expect. Sure it has a slow-mo tactical shot system akin to Fallout‘s V.A.T.S. (explained amusingly here as a side effect of your lengthy cry-sleep thawing), but combat is faster than that series, and thankfully, while not exactly refined, it’s fun to get into a shootout, especially if you can find the rare science weapons scattered across colony space.
The regular guns are the usual flavors. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, and the like, all with modifiable aspects from pickups littered about the colony, but it’s the science weapons that add some spice to proceedings. There’s a shrink ray that keeps an enemy at a small size until you either stop hitting them with the ray or they explode from the tinyness. There’s a goo gun that causes enemies to float into the air for a short period whilst taking on damage, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I liked that they were these one-off things found at specific places in the game as it made them feel special.
There are also melee weapons. Blades, hammers, sickles, and scythes that can be made to do extra electric, acid, and plasma damage via modifications. They’re a bit fiddly in more open areas unless you use your time distortion ability, but they are great for crowd control. I just wish the transition on swapping between weapons was that bit quicker so you could switch between a gun and a melee weapon without having to worry about taking damage.
You won’t always have to fight your way out of angry disagreements though. If you put enough points into your intelligence and speech skills, you can actually talk your way out of quite a lot of potential flashpoints. It’s admirable how much thought has been put into all these eventualities, and while it’s not limitless by any stretch, it’s far more comprehensive than anything Obsidian has done before.
The big worry going into this game was Obsidian’s unfortunate, and slightly unjust, reputation for making broken, buggy games with cult status, but I’m happy to report that the odd hiccup and texture popup aside, this is as smooth as any game the developer has ever made. It’s a beautiful game to gawk at too, with the retro sci-fi look of the planets complimenting the Old West stylings of the colony towns and outposts.
A special shout out to the level up jingle too. Every time the orchestral swell played to signify my growing power, it made me feel like the champion of Halcyon I was being asked to be. A superb musical choice in a rather good soundtrack.
I’d love to go into more detail about The Outer Worlds, but a good chunk of what makes it special is the surprises big and small. There’s such a familiar framework, but it’s pared down to the essentials, daring to not waste your time with filler, and in that time, your perception of characters can be changed, the jokes can be appreciated (The Outer Worlds has a fantastic sense of humor), and the worlds can be marveled at. It’s a game that keeps on giving as you can miss so much depending on your choices, and in that sense, it’s very much got a classic game feel to it. It’s a mixture of eras poured into a satirical sci-fi romp and it’s such a joy to experience.
The Outer Worlds may not be exactly what I thought it would be, but I’m so glad it turned out to be what it is.
The Outer Worlds review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
The Outer Worlds is out October 25 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC via Epic Games Store.