Outriders is a cooperative third person shooter developed by People Can Fly and published by Square Enix. While part of the early storm of attention surrounding the title was complaints about server issues, Outriders is well worth pushing past any technical issues, offering fun looter shooter combat, interesting class abilities and an engaging - albeit cheesy - science fiction story.
In Outriders, Earth has become uninhabitable, causing humans to load up into spaceships and search for a new home. The chosen planet is called Enoch, and the player controls a customizable character who works as an Outrider, a soldier in charge of scouting the area to ensure its safety prior to the rest of the colonizers' landing. Enoch is not as it seems, however, and the player's character is cryogenically frozen, waking up 30 years later to a world torn apart by insurgents and aggressive alien species.
Outriders’ story is nothing especially innovative, but it does have a few fun twists and turns, even though most of the plot points are rather predictable. The gameplay and vibrant atmosphere of Enoch are compelling, encouraging the player to keep pushing through each objective whether the story resonates with them or not. The characters are pretty one-dimensional, but in a blunt, by-the-book sci-fi story, they manage to fit in well with the world People Can Fly created, and serve the necessary roles required to progress the story.
Unfortunately, one of those roles in particular may justifiably upset some players. One of the characters is rebellious and angsty, and, for a while, it’s unclear whose side they’re on. Eventually, however, they become paralyzed, which helps convince them to come around and officially join the team as one of the good guys. However, when the character first discovers their paralysis, they tell another member of the party that it would have been better if someone had just killed them. The character does eventually make peace with their new wheelchair, but the problematic trope of “death is better than being disabled” is a fairly frequent occurrence in entertainment media, and one that many folks in the disabled community have spoken out against.
Other than one dimensional characters, part of the story's cheesiness can also be attributed to how poorly the cutscenes run. Not only is the dialogue choppy, often feeling like two lines of script were glued together, but the visuals stutter as well, which is strange considering how well Outriders runs during actual missions. The game also starts off with a motion blur camera that's shaky and disorienting, and while it can be turned off in the settings, the default option is to have a camera that makes it difficult to tell what's happening in each scene.
Another strange issue with Outriders’ cutscenes is that some of them are quite literally only five to ten seconds long. The game will tell the player to press and hold a button to transition into the next area, and the screen will fade to black, pop back in and show the protagonist climbing rocks or jumping over a canyon before resuming gameplay. At first, it seemed like this was an inconvenient but understandable way to avoid a loading screen; however, the player is given the option to skip every cutscene, including these short ones, and deciding to skip them doesn’t mess with the flow of the game at all. In fact, skipping a cutscene and delving back into the game is an incredibly smooth and fast process, which makes the inclusion of the random, short clips of the player character jumping over rocks even more baffling.
The loading screens that are present in Outriders, though, feel almost unbearably long. If the player’s goal is to mainline the Outriders campaign, it’s not too much of a pain since they don’t happen too frequently. However, if the player is hoping to knock out a bunch of sidequests, which typically require bouncing back and forth on the map, or is having trouble with the servers and needing to pop back in and out of the game repeatedly, it can be frustrating to sit and wait through the long load times.
That said, none of this matters too much once the gameplay kicks in. Everything about Outriders as a looter shooter feels smooth, and the leveling mechanic is unique. Like most RPGs, the player’s character gains experience points from defeating enemies, letting them level up and automatically beefing up stats. In addition to the player's character level, there are also levels for the Outriders world called world tiers. As the player progresses through each world tier, the next one unlocks, meaning that enemies get more difficult but have an increased chance of dropping powerful and rare loot, similar to the system employed by the wildly successful Genshin Impact. In addition to dealing more damage or providing more defense for the character, the gear the player collects can also include different mods that provide benefits, like increased damage with certain weapons or faster cooldown times on the character’s special abilities.
The world tier mechanic is also useful because the player can jump to a higher world tier to get good loot, but the stats of their gear remains the same if they decide to bump the world tier difficulty down. This can be really fun if one doesn’t want to play for challenge or is having trouble getting through a particular area because they can choose a lower world tier and mow through enemies with high powered weapons collected previously by playing on a higher level.
Unfortunately, switching between world tiers can feel clunky, since the player needs to pause the game, select the world tier option and then cycle through the world tier menu. The pause menu, as well as the world tier menu, often lags or causes Outriders to stutter, which puts the player in danger of crashing or freezing the game. Since pausing the game also doesn’t stop enemies from being able to attack the player’s character, it would be nice if there was a shortcut to swap between world tiers without having to go into the pause menu. As of now, however, that’s not an option, and may never be an option, which makes world tiers a good way to pick initial difficulty level at the start of a mission, but not something the player can utilize easily on a whim.
In addition to leveling and gear, picking a class in Outriders heavily impacts play style. The player’s character is Altered, meaning that they essentially have superpowers because of the Anomaly, a mysterious storm on Enoch that either kills a person or bestows them with supernatural talents. The key to surviving in Outriders is learning how to master these abilities since they heal the character in addition to dealing damage and providing helpful status effects or debuffs.
For example, with the pyromancer class, the character has a focus on medium ranged and fire based attacks. One of the abilities unlocked fairly early on is called Volcanic Rounds, which pierces armor and remains in effect until the player reloads the gun or switches to a new weapon. Not only that, but accurately hitting enemies with Volcanic Rounds replenishes health. Learning how to best maximize health recovery and damage with Anomaly powers is the most important skill in Outriders because there are no health recovery items - the only way to survive is by mastering a combination of gun combat and class abilities.
Surviving in Outriders can be hard, too, especially after finishing the main campaign. There honestly isn’t that much to do afterward unless the player has unfinished side quests, but there are drop box locations that are, essentially, a challenge mode, requiring skill, powerful loot or help from friends. Players are timed as they fight their way through waves of enemies, and the challenge rewards players with high powered loot, even if they aren’t able to beat the area. Of course, playing the challenges to completion earns better loot, but it’s a good way to grind for gear if there’s still stuff to finish in the main game, like side quests or various other tasks for achievements or trophies.
Obviously, another important unique aspect of the game is the multiplayer component, especially since Outriders is an RPG through and through. By joining the game of a friend (or stranger), the player can drop into someone else's campaign and play along with no restrictions. The game gets harder in order to compensate for multiple players, and whoever's hosting can pick any unlocked point in their story or continue from wherever they left off.
However, playing with friends was a problem at launch because of Outriders server outages, which are normal for an online game at launch but remained frustrating. The outages impact the single player experience, too, since an internet connection is required even if someone's playing alone. While the Outriders servers have become more stable since its launch, it's an issue worth keeping an eye on moving forward, simply because of its impact on both multi- and single-player gameplay sessions.
Overall, Outriders is worth the time investment so far, in spite of its clunkiness and server instability at launch. Although Outriders has areas it needs to improve, the core ideas and gameplay are incredibly strong, making it easy to overlook whatever flaws are present. It's also an easy game to recommend for both solo players and groups of friends looking for a shooter to dive into together, and because of the world tier mechanic, anyone with any level of skill can jump into Outriders and have a great time.
Outriders is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Google Stadia. Screen Rant was provided with a PS4 code for the purpose of this review.