The Outer Worlds 2 - Review

When The Outer Worlds released back in 2019, it felt like a good old time, a familiar genre, made by a familiar developer. What was most interesting about the game was the universe it left us once the credits rolled, which is why its surprising that The Outer Worlds 2 leaves that space behind for all-new space. Does this new system offer up a grand adventure, or is it all nothing but corporation propaganda?

The story of The Outer Worlds 2 is some what of a wild ride and also kind of boring. You are an Earth Directorate Agent, a group of folks who enforce justice wherever it needs enforcing, except for in Arcadia. Your mission is to sneak aboard a station, rendezvous with another EDA and then steal a skip drive, the tech that makes ships move through space. Only something goes wrong and your left running from the station as it explodes and you spend 10 years in hibernation, drifting among the stars. When you are woken up, life in Arcadia has taken a turn, Spacer’s Choice and Auntie Cleo, two big companies from the first game, have merged and are now Auntie’s Choice and are now waging war with the Protectorate, a splinter group from the Order of the Ascendant folks who live and die by the Excel spreadsheet.

What makes the story great is that you get to meet a lot of interesting folks, some of whom will even join your team. You will bounce around the various planets and even a few ships and space stations, each briming with things to do. Where the story falls over is with the bad guys, the Protectorate are just not interesting or threatening. Almost all of their actions are revealed in the final mission and while some you can guess, some are just random. That would not be bad if they were more of a threat throughout the game, but they really are not. Now sure you can make enemies of a faction or two, which can impact things, but that is not the same. The game does have multiple endings and you can choose how things play out, the ending I got on my first playthrough left me disappointed, so I have already started a new playthrough to get a better one.

That seems like a good time to talk about the gameplay, which for better or worse is much like the first game. Don’t misunderstand there are a lot of new things, but at its core, it is much the same as before. Where things shine is with the upgrades and skills, because even choosing one upgrade over something else can have a significant impact to the game. As you level up, you earn skill points, fairly standard stuff and every 2 levels you can choose a new perk, which can grant you some cool and interesting options. One perk might let you do more damage with a pistol or other small gun when you are closer to enemies, but do less damage if they are further away.

Now that alone would be good enough, but Flaws are also something you need to watch out for, now just know that in normal difficulty they are optional. Flaws are perks that are awarded to you, based on how you play and if you accept them, you get a great update to something, but also a big con. One Flaw that I was offered early on was due to my crouching everywhere, the plus was that I could move faster when crouched, but enemies within a set radius of me, would hear me. Another one that I accepted without thinking locked my skill point association down, if I had a skill at 6 points and four at 3 points, I would not be able to add anything to the first skill, until the rest had caught up. These Flaws are quite interesting, one of the ones offered to me was to force me to accept all Flaws when presented, but the game warned me about accepting that until I was done with my first playthrough.

The rest of the gameplay comes down to talking to folks and shooting things, sometimes those two overlap. A lot of the quests that you undertake can start off feeling quite simple, like getting some replacement robot parts from the robot factory, but then spiral down into a quest on testing brand new life saving tech. Sometimes though the quests have multiple outcomes, depending on your actions, in one such mission I had on the second planet, I was asked to recruit someone and once I got the first done, I went for the second, only to realise the quest was done. This is perhaps where the quests can become a problem, because sometimes they will give you two options and the one you want to choose, will require a skill or equipment you don’t have. That is true about a lot of things in the game, hacking a computer, speaking with folks, but I found with the quests it was the worst thing to do. You could spend 30 minutes battling through a horde of enemies to get something, only for your actions to be made redundant as the game would not let you complete the next step due to a lack of skill and it does not tell you this beforehand.

The talking with folks though, that can be delightful, most of the time. Some times the game will throw you quest information from overheard conversations, but more often than not, you need to engage with folks. A lot of the folks are just there for their quest and nothing more, but some have a few things to talk about and those are what make the game special. Talking with someone and being able to really have a conversation with them, that was what I enjoyed, and being able to expand the lore of the game from those conversations, just the best. Perhaps the nicest thing is that when you have conversations with people, if your companions want to chime in, they will and you can even let them run things for a moment, which is nice. It makes everything feel more organic, rather than just like a series of scripted conversations. Of course, the character trait you select at the beginning of the game can impact things in interesting ways as well, which also helps.

The main thing I did not like about the gameplay was the inventory management and crafting systems, which seems like it should be essential to the experience. Inventory management has no useful sorting option, you can sort, but you only get A to Z or Z to A. It is also quite a challenge to deal with the guns you have, when you have a lot of them and while you can mark them as junk, that is really the only thing you can do. If all of that sounds familiar, that is because it is the same menu that was used in the first game, it was not great there and is not great here. Crafting sounds great, because it lets you use all the crap you pick up, in order to make ammo or mods for your gear, but it is needlessly complicated. In order to make ammo, you need to find the recipe for it, then you need to craft that, to unlock the option to actually make the ammo. Crafting spaces are few and far between as well, unless you have a certain companion with you, that means you will often spend time in the space when you find one, in return for little results.

On the presentation side of things, there is a lot of good to report one, which is nice to say. The game looks great, the characters still have their Fallout: New Vegas look, which is fine, they were never going to be metahuman level, but the locations more than make up for them. Having a conversation with the new mayor of Fairfield is nice, but the city makes up for the fact that the character looks like he was pulled from the first game. The first time you land on a new planet, you will get a sense of alien from what you see, but it is odd how quickly you become accustomed to the giant purple and green gems sticking out of the ground. You will also spend a bit of time in your ship, which is old when the game begins, but even older when you get back to it and it shows. Across the board, the game is quite visually pleasing, which given players are likely to spend 50+ hours here, is a good thing,

It is not all sunshine and rainbows though; there are some annoying issues with the visuals. The first is that every piece of tech, no matter which faction made it, spits out blue sparks and while that is not game breaking, it is annoying. How hard would it have been to have there be at least one more colour for that, I know that is a weak complaint, but you will see a lot of sparks. There are worse things, characters randomly floating, flipping around and even zooming about, but there is one more visual issue that just pissed me off once I noticed it. The grass, yes that small thing often seen purely as decoration, the game has this random LOD for it. Basically, within 3m from your character, the grass moves normally, but outside of that it’s stiff and once you bring it into range, it becomes loose. You will see it all the time and now I have told you, you won’t not see it.

On the audio side of things, there is a lot of good as well and that comes down to how well the voices are acted. Given the sheer number of characters you will speak with, having good voice acting is important and the game really has that here. The main characters feel real, they have frustrations in their voice when you do something stupid, joy when you do something good and silence when you are just a moron. The game features both an orchestral soundtrack, which is great, kicking into gear when the action ramps up and becoming wonderful background noise when you are just walking. There are also three radio stations that have a host of songs that were written for the game and they are fine, as they are all original songs, I have no connection to them, so my interest was not peaked from the get-go.

Sadly, there are a few audio issues in the game, nothing groundbreaking, but weird none the less. The most common one is guns not sounding when they are fired, which sure it happened only now and then, but still weird. Conversations that you overhear would often carry out long after you are past where the people were, there was a farmer on the outskirts of Fairfield, I heard the entire conversation play all the way to the other side of town. I did have a few instances of characters having two different voice actors attached, like one soldier was bashing something with a hammer and was male, but was female when I tried speaking to them afterwards.

The Outer Worlds 2 is a great sequel; it takes what worked in the original game and just expands on it. It does not reinvent the wheel here, but just offers up more of the same and I am mostly ok with that. The games main baddies are not much of a threat most of the time and it undercuts the tension they offer in the final encounter. If you enjoyed the first game, you would like this one and for those who were not as keen originally, with all the improvements, giving this a go would be a great choice.

The Score

8.5

Review code provided by Xbox

The Pros

The characters you meet and choices you make really make an impact

The locations are wonderful, each have their own unique feel to them

The Cons

The main bad guys don’t really feel like the main bad guys, which is a shame

For all that is new, the awful menu returns and is just as annoying as it was in the first game