Outriders

 

I'm always looking for co-op games to play with a buddy so naturally I found Outriders which is some kind of campaign third person cover based shooter so that alone made me pick it up

Outriders is summed up as like Gears of War meets RPG-Lite looter shooter meets Open world. Its semi-open world its more like open-instanced where you have a world map, then in every location theres a Camp which has NPC's you can talk to to do upgrades, travel, shop, etc. Then you can fast travel to other instances on the world map. But you cant actually freely wander around to other locations, its always intermediated by a travel NPC.

So you have that as a framework for selecting and travelling to missions or side missions, then you have a bunch of RPG mechanics which is where the game tries to be appealing to the modern audience I guess. You have the typical loot of armor parts like Boots, gloves, helmet, body armor, killing enemies will randomly drop out loot, doing some side missions will give you random loot, but other than that theres not much of interest. When you go to the inventory screen (which isn't very well done, frankly) you see the loot is different color 'tiers' like Diablo or something, purple, brown, grey etc. Apparently the different loot has abilities like adding fire, or adding explosions or something, but its actually hard to tell what these abilities are or how they work, I think its just automatic. But mostly it has the typical green arrow letting you know this particular piece of equipment is more effective.

So basically the whole game you just keep collecting random loot, open inventory, loot for the green arrow telling you the item is more effective, and equip it. Thats pretty much all there is to the loot, atleast for me. The weird and stupid thing is, for armor, apparently youll have a green arrow telling you a piece of armor is more effective, but armor is actually directly tied to your health points. So youll equip some 'better' armor, but youll lose like 500 health points. Its kind of stupid, and I couldnt make any sense of it. The loot is not great, its just there to keep you busy and have something to do besides mindlessly shooting, but its really not the star of the show, and isnt a good example of loot done well in modern games. It feels shoehorned in like the devs were thinking "oh, its a modern game, So we gotta make it a looter shooter, thats what the kids are into nowadays' Like soulless without passion.

Theres all sorts of more RPG style mechanics, Like you even pick between 3 or 4 different classes when the game starts, which were really confusing and none of them seemed appealing and it wasnt clear what any of them did so we had to google it and still it was confusing. Its like some classes specialize in snipers, or assault rifles, but not really because all classses can use all weapons but some are more effective because their skill trees are more suited for particular guns? Dont know, its pretty stupid and bad.

The skill trees are generic and nothing amazing, typical stuff like gain X more health, X more damage with 'assault weapons' or 'sniper weapons' - but this wording in particular is really strange and obtuse because for the first half of the game I wasnt really quite sure what counted as a "Assault weapon" because theres all sorts of different looking weird guns. Like for example, I wanted to use rifles that didnt have scopes, but on the skilltree there was points for "X damage with sniper weapons" - but I wasnt sure that since the rifle I'm using doesnt have a scope, is it still classified as a 'sniper weapon' ?  Well I found out later that you can press a button to go into more details for a weapon and it will tell you the category the gun is, but even then it was still a little mystifying. Its just not very well done.

For my skilltree I just went towards getting assault rifle damage shit, and also 'toxic' abilities which is a skill point you can use that tempoarily boosts your weapon damage, thats kinda all I did.

Which brings into the next RPG mechanic, it has like MOBA style abilities where you have 3 main abilities you can press. You can go into the menu and choose from something like 10 abilities, but can only have 3 slotted at any time. You can change these abilites whenever you want, but can never have more than 3.

Theres different categories of abilities like 'Freeze'  'Turret"   "Decoy" "Interrupt skills" but I dont know the system isnt that appealing and its just all kinda meh. The main abilities I used were things that froze enemies, and the ability to add toxic to my weapons to tempoarily buff them. Didnt find the skills all that enjoyable, It kinda just turns into something like World of Warcraft where you have your skills on 'rotation' and youre constantly just spamming numbers waiting for the cooldowns to come back. Kinda stupid.

Next, you have the setting, characters, plot, dialogue etc.
It's completely devoid of soul or meaning or anything interesting
All the characters are as cookie cutter as possible. Like AI generated levels of mundane and dull.
Token nerdy black guy, feminist strong women characters, like i dont got a problem with any of that shit nessesarily, but the characters are so lame and boring you quickly pay any attention to anything theyre saying. TO make matters worse the story is really dull and boring typical sci-fi crap like "Ohh we're the chosen ones to save the earth and save humanity" or some garbage nonsense. NO depth or complexity to the morality or anything its just "LOL youre the chosen one, go save the world" K, dont care. There's a few funny cutscenes and stupid voice acting but other than that its just one ear out the other.

The combat is the main saviour of the game. It plays much like Gears of War style snapping into cover, blind firing, great fluid responsive controls, diving all over the place sprinting etc. The guns all have different mechanics and recoil patterns and characteristics, theres a lot of different kinds of guns and its almost like every 5 mins youre equipping some new gun to play with. They have different magazine capacities, firepower, spread, etc. Lots of different designs too so it keeps it fresh. You have more RPG shit like numbers flying out of enemies when you shoot them indicating how much damage youre doing so you can try to determine which guns are better. The combat is pretty fun for the most part, guns sound good and theres enough variety to keep you interested. Theres a decent variety of enemies youll find monster mutant animal types, then the next moment fight demonic grunt guys with guns, the enemies are hard to describe but theyre like weird humanoid aliens with guns.

Though the combat isnt without major flaws, like I said before, its got those MOBA abilities where youre constantly spamming abilities from cooldown like youre playing WOW or some shit. That just feels wrong, I dont need that in my shooter games. But worst of all, there can be some types of enemies that are like mini-bosses that are SUPER bullet sponge. Im talking youll be dumping thousands of rounds into these guys from a LMG before they die, and it just feels stupid and cheap. To top it off, they can also cast these MOBA bullshit abilities where they spawn shields, spawn fucking stupid spinning lazer beams that murder you quick, and they can even do abilities where they fully regenerate all their health after youve been mowing them with bullets for 5 mins. Really stupid! Youll be running in circles shooting thousands of bullets into some of these guys and you just think "What the fuck am I doing with my life? video games are kinda dumb sometimes" . You might be able to chaulk it up to me not fully understanding the mechanics, or the gun statistics or whatever else shit, but I dont think so, I was constantly upgrading my guns and getting all sorts of new gear, I just think some of the enemies are stupit bulletsponge nonsense.

This gets weirder because the game doesn't ask you to select a difficulty in the beginning really, instead, it has this 'World Tier' system where as you kill more and more, the game automatically increases the difficulty, thereby making better and better loot drop, but making the enemies harder and more bulletsponge. There are 15 total 'difficulties' and near half of the game or a bit more we had the difficulty maxed out. And I have a big problem with this difficulty system, it just seems all wrong. You can change the difficulty at any time, reduce it down, and then the enemies drop worse loot again. But the whole interaction between difficulty level, and enemies dropping loot, it just feels like a bad design. Like its all so meaningless, the only difference is a stupid stat-check of how much DPS my random generated gun does, not my actual skill. And once you got the difficulty on 15 (max) the game is still pretty damn easy, most enemies die fast  - BUT you have these random miniboss guys that are insane bullet sponges that spam MOBA bullshit abilities at you, that regenerate health, that spawn stupid spinning lasers, that TELEPORT you across the arena, its a fucking mess. And the only enjoyable way to deal with them is to turn the difficulty down, its just stupid. I would have prefer the game to drop this convuluted dumb psuedo-difficulty system and instead have the traditional "Easy/medium/hard" right as the game starts, and thats it. So its a coherent, consistent, progression and system without these stupid designs. Its like oh Im stuck at a part? Ok ill just increase the difficulty and grind enemies until they drop weapons that have a green arrow telling me its better so the enemies stop being bullet sponges. What? I dont like it at all.

The variety in 'levels' is really small. Basically every 'level' is just a circular/square arena with a few pieces of cover that you walk into, you go around the deathmatch arena killing waves of enemies, then you walk onto the next one. Thats how the whole game feels. Its not like youre walking into real curated locations with personlaity and character - No, its just one deathmatch arena after the other. For literally the whole game. The main missions are so soulless and devoid of personality and character that whenever we played the side missions, we were wondering if we were playing the main missions or not. The side missions feel like main missions! and thats not saying side missions are good, thats saying the main missions have so little personality that theyre no different than the optional content. You go to a few differnet locations, like snow and desert stuff, but it still all feels the same. I beat the game an hour ago and I cant really remember a single unique mission or location, it all blends together into the same generic deathmatch arena after the other without any identifiying uniqueness to any of the missions. On one hand its a good thing that the game constantly puts you into the action, theres rarely a moment where youre just standing around doing nothing, theres no exploiration to do really, theres no puzzles to solve, the cutscenes are relatively minimal and infrequent, its just one action packed arena after the other, its kind of a good thing cause you cosntantly get gameplay, but it also like I said is way too repetivie and without any differenciation. It feels like the whole game is almost a bunch of random multiplayer deathmatch maps with bots thrown in. Not good, really, if you want a memorable, unique, handcrafted campaign.

Theres no shortage of content, atleast, theres tons of side missions and we almost beat them all, but yeah theyre even more dull and boring than the main missions. Its just go to X and kill this General, which is kind of cool because everytime you kill the general it gives you a cutscene executing him, that was kinda fun. Other than that its like go to X and collect this item or kill this boss or clear out this place. Really standard stuff. Then you go back to town and get an item reward or something. Nothing much to say about it.
But when I say 'more content' I mean that even after you beat the game, it introduces all sorts of new mechanics and systems like 'Expeditions' and different 'World tiers' and levels for you to do. I never did any of it, but its there if I want it.

But really its a co-op campaign game. Those arent all that common. So thats a massive bonus. Just the fact you can play through an entire action packed Gears of war style clone with a buddy, getting loot, leveling up, laughing at cutscenes and shit together, that already makes it a decent experience. I think the game could of probably been way better if they scrapped the whole psuedo open world bullshit, scrapped the leveling up, scrapped the loot system or heavily changed it to be more interesting, scrapped basically all RPG mechanics, and just was a honest bonified Gears clone like it actually is at heart. As it stands its a somewhat enjoyable, co-op action experience, with heavy flaws and reeks of generic 'sellout' modern game design.

6/10