For Your Consideration - Outriders Demo
You ever played a game like this and go "huh, this is just another looter shooter". Yeah, this game got me confused, pretty disinterested and then out of nowhere, sucked me right into its somewhat potent vortex. There's something pretty interesting about this game.
So remember who People Can Fly are? The Polish devs that made Painkiller, the first game with the expansion. Right before they started working with Epic on the Gears series as a support studio before Bulletstorm and Gears of War Judgement. The latter of course was a good game of its own merit, but considering its early peers, it was a pretty big far cry. As in, yeah it was a good Gears of War game before Gears 5.
So they left Epic(as a subsidiary) and partnered up with Square Enix to publish their new title, Outriders. Outriders is a B-grade Sci-Fi inspired shooter. It isn't bad per se, feels like a welcoming homage to all those late 2000s to 2010s Sci-Fi series. But those as a template for their own thing going on. Basically gritty atmosphere where everybody isn't in the talking mood and is just downright pissed with everything that has happened in the game.
It's a pretty straightforward setup with characters that are trying to be badass and silly at the same time. It's not something that takes itself very seriously, although at the same time, the narrative doesn't become difficult to ingest much like other looter shooters. Very little smoke & mirrors in comparison.
Recently a demo was released with limited content access, but you can play with your friends online and have a go at like the starting half of the first act. Sadly I still haven't found a public match to play for some reason. Despite that last part, I want to give an honest opinion of the first 5hrs of my playthrough: Impressions, believing in this IP, flaws and some interesting observations here and there.
Outriders is far from being culturally appropriate and that to me is ok because this game isn't trying to offend anybody. But the gist of its jokes, tropes, sardonic humor and doom n gloom act serves to mostly be for these rag-tag, counter-culture, disenfranchised, etc anything of negative connotations group to take their frustrations on subjecting their enemies to gruesome amount of biological warping.
Basically you play this biologically altered, omnipotent soldier part of a group called Outriders, basically the rangers for the dystopian future of the world. You left Earth in cryo sleep, reaching a far off planet before realizing that Earth is pretty much gone and that you have only this place left to recreate human civilization. But then the anomalies happen. Too many plans gone disarray and the recolonization program fell apart. People got hungry, very few food, so they fought off each other to death, but then lo and behold. The people surviving the anomalies have been altered. They've unlocked super human powers.
So here's how you play the game. You do quests, you choose between a set of rewards to pick one of them. You open chests for loot. Loot has crazy attributes and abilities too after the first 4hrs.
Outriders demo already puts you in a fast-track headstart with least rare weapons already providing you good stats, abilities and bonuses. You unlock 3 different powers and as you continue playing, you unlock more to switch between on the 3 slots to use actively.
Weapon mechanics and crouch cover basically exists, you take cover, enemies take cover. Now if that simple was the case, this'd be a pointless game to play. Because the real fun comes from the abilities. I already played Pyromancer and am going full scourge earth protocol on these insurgents. Burning them to a crisp, feeding on the damage restoring my health and turning them into giant pipe bombs even.
You pick from 5 different classes and spread mayhem from the one you've picked. All classes are great even though I've only played Pyromancer thus far. While I couldn't play online either, I've seen and read enough to know that the game synergizes really well with other people's abilities too. It's basically Destiny but if Destiny was made by the team that worked on Bulletstorm of course.
Gunplay is secondary, although it is alright. The abilities are the main fun factor of this game. Of course all would have been really peachy if it wasn't for the basic half-brain A.I and terrible level design. Seriously though, this whole thing feels like a weird Gears rip-off. The storytelling, dialogues, the somewhat gritty exterior, the attitude. I mean derivation's fine long as there's good originality holding the game.
And that's the thing. The game does have its own personality, it is mechanically fun, there are lot of ways to use your abilities. You'll even fight other altereds and can interrupt their abilities too. Boss fights are good fun. Even if the enemy A.I is basically mind-numbing fodder, the class variation of them keeps you engage and lets you go unhinged with so many crazy abilities you can throw at. There's one where all notion of time and space in one circle make enemies really slow and blowing them up just lets you churn them out of their skeletons in silly fashion.
The absurdity is there and I want to clamor for it. But you can't be this based and refused to acknowledge the issues at hand. Like story and characters I could get by with, they're nothing that serious. But while they had the looting thing figured out, keeping me as the player engaged and being immersed into its world is important. I didn't even mention the other problems, the technical ones.
The game runs terribly. Optimizations bad: FPS drops, performance hiccups, crashes, cutscene dialogues out of sync, enemies getting stuck, animation oddities, texture pop-ins, enemy death delays, etc. Like the list is big to remember. Am sure they have nearly two months to iron these out, but time's a ticking guys.
If the level design was fixed, if the A.I was tweaked a little more, if the gun loot variations were little more different and if they fixed most of the technical issues, I wouldn't mind getting this game. There's a good sigh of potential stemming from this game. I want to give it my blessings. But am also burned out from looter shooters in general, if this game doesn't do what it really set out to do despite the fact that there's no mention of any at all in-game monetization and PvP game modes, maybe I should stop hoping for anything this point.
The demo is still around, I'd suggest you check it out. It's a fun game, really. They set out to do different things of course. Oh also, you can change color scheme of your attire....for free * gasp *