it's hard to really talk about this game without bringing up the game's that it's trying to be, the outer worlds wants to be a new take on a batheda style RPG, something akin to a fallout or an elder scrolls, its something obsidian are very good at and they know their way around it, they made new vegas, often considered one of if not the best of this kind of rpg and their credentials beyond this are still nothing to look down on, they set out to make their own take on this and i'd say they did a damn good job here, it's not as good as their last try, i like new vegas more and i like fallout 3 even more than that, but they did a damn good job with what they could and it made for a game that even with its obvious influences, still manages to stand out well enough on its own to be easily recommended for it's really fun gameplay, great RPG systems and amazing world and writing.

with the gameplay, it's a bathesda style rpg through and through, some changes like the multiple small maps rather than one big map, which i like for the variety but it makes me weirdly less curious to explore and it's about the size of your average dlc fallout map per map but closer to something like the pitt rather than point lookout or far harbour, not sure why and the locations themselves are much less varied than what you would see in a fallout, the loop is the same though, scavenge, quest, explore and talk to an npc with some fun dialogue choices, maybe with some variances if you have the right skillset, like skipping combat entirely though dialogue choices or getting extra rewards, though this game is much heavier on that last bit, there's so many more options here to do things like skip fights and it made a charisma and science focused build seem so much more viable, which i love a lot. you have combat that's pretty basic but you have some things like explosive barrels of various elemental effects and a time slowdown to replace vats, which is much less effective and less fun in general, i rarely ever used it. you have tons of combat build options to make the basic nature of the combat more fun though, you have guns and melee both, some standard stuff like rifles and pistols and shotguns, fun melee weapons like scifi hammers and a SCYTHE (one of my favourites, mained it as soon as i found one) but you do have some things like the games science weapons that do more fun things like a shrink ray (that felt a little broken for most of the game, it never left my main 4) or a goop gun that makes enemies float in midair, you are missing things like grenades though and consumables don't seem as useful or important here, you have a dodge though which is cool, but i never found myself needing to use it much, same with the block, i didn't ever want to actually put points into either, but i can imagine them being super useful if you dedicated to it since the healing item here is both a lot rarer than stimpacks and is also a slower over time effect which does make you want to be a lot more careful in combat because you can very easily find yourself overwhelmed. i do like how even non combat skills can tie into it though, like how science can give you better damage with those cool science weapons or how dialogue skills and charisma can make enemies cower in fear or run away from you leaving them wide open, it's super cool and i love how much thought went into the skills system. that's kind of it though, if you aren't exploring you're fighting and if you aren't doing either you're in dialogue, it's a very simple game in that way, you don't really get much variety, though the game is on the shorter end so i didn't mind it a ton, but if this was a hundred hour long game i could see it being a little bit much, there's no real minigames or side activities.

there's tons to see with sidequests though. there's super varied objectives most of which don't even require combat and many of which can effect the state of the world in major ways, there's tons of fun characters and things like the companion quests can massively change characters (sometimes for the worse), they even take you to parts of the game you might otherwise never have been to, like whole huge chunks of Byzantium that are only seen in sidequests, like the retirement district and massive dungeons like the abandoned town on monarch and even whole planets like schala or the space station near groundbreaker or towns like fallbrook and even whole factions that you can side with like the boarst factory or the mercenaries on monarch that you won't see at all if you don't decide to diverge from the main path. the faction system itself is a little bit of a missed opportunity though, you really only get lower vender prices if you get on good sides, though i do like how if you play your cards super right you can actually broker peace between even the warring ones, like how (spoilers) in the almost civil war on monarch you can get both to join sides and it even gets referenced at the last mission with both sides helping you to storm the prison or how you can help keep the boarst factory leader alive in the quest to kill him, it's neat to be able to do that if you have the stats or the information to open the right dialogue choices, it feels super rewarding. you can also find things like optional bosses and even some unique weapons, though much less of the latter, as most are locked behind quests or merchants, these weapons also don't feel all that useful since the scaling works weirdly, with each weapon type having better tiers available as the game goes on, usually marked by things like "ultra" or "mk2" that makes it so many of these just can't keep up unless you seriously invest in the games upgrade and modification systems (which not every weapon can even be modified).

now one issue is that the game can feel very half baked sometimes, the lore and many of the systems for sure feel complete but there's just so much that feels incomplete. take the system where your character can develop fears, it's cool, when in certain situations your character can develop a phobia at the benefit of giving you an extra perk point, super useful early on and at first i thought it would be super fun to see what my character ended up with, i got three on the starting world....... and that's it, it never popped up again, one of the three effects never even triggered for me, it's like they had an idea for a system, started to implement it and just, forgot to finish it. another example is the planets, it gives you this huge galaxy map to explore but even after both dlc's, half the planets are still just there as set dressing, you can't go to them and at least one of the ones that is there is a single dungeon and another few are fully optional, worth doing, but fully optional, there also aren't as many big zones as i would have expected, 5 or 6 but they're all much smaller than your average fallout DLC map and usually have much less to do, just a few sidequests and maybe 8-10 locations in each (that the game doesn't give markers for on the map like fallout does, which i do like as it does make you really need to get out there and explore them) it makes the game feel very small and it is a lot shorter than i would have expected, though honestly i wouldn't consider that a bad thing. it can also be very short if you don't do the sidequests, maybe 10-12 hours if you super rush it, but if you stick it out with the side content you can pretty easily get 30-35 out of it, i like the shorter length a lot and it is nice to have a lot more to do if you really want it, it's also pretty easy even with things like the optional bosses, i never found myself hitting a real brick wall and i only ever died a lot at maybe two or three specific areas, even when i found myself low on healthpacks and in the games final levels, even the dlc wasn't all that tough, the mantiqueens are the games most annoying enemy but even these i found pretty easy to take down with the science weapons i found. the game is super cheap now also, maybe £8-10 for the physical copy and about 10 a piece for the dlcs, less on sale, i think its super worth this, you'll get enough playtime out of the basegame, if you get the PS5 version it even has all the dlc for free, though it's digital only there so i'm not sure on pricing and it expects you to own the dlcs to even qualify for an upgrade to it, which is sleazy.

i like the world a lot, it's a fun pulp 50's scifi western setting, very noticeably inspired by firefly down to the crew having a cool priest and a quirky mechanic, with cool planets and super saturated overblown colours and a really nice wild west/company town aesthetic and it can be a serious treat to look at sometimes, some worlds like monarch with its super nice plantlife are really great to explore and it has some killer caves too with super bright purple and pink plants all glowing, the game has cool cities too like one that's slowly being terraformed so its a mix of the desert with plantlife slowly creeping into it, there's a really great spaceship town with a market that gave me big Babylon 5 vibes, there's the rich town with Byzantium that, while it has much less to do on it than i would like, is a seriously pretty area, especially the little market square, some of the more bland towns can still look good too, like the town edgewater that's built into a cave system or the the cool abandoned one in a drink factory that has some super bright advertising colours all over it, there's some really cool sights to see, though the games dungeons are a little more boring, you can only do so many abandoned labs before it gets to be more than a little bit tiring and that's really the majority of the games dungeons, but the overworld is super nice at least! and you have a nice ship hub to talk to your crew, i would have liked to see it be more customisable though, same with the house you can buy in edgewater, which i did buy but i don't think i used it more than once.

the story is hit and miss, the main cast beyond the companions can be more boring than not and the games best NPC's are usually found in the sidequests, same for the villains, the more interesting ones are usually found in side stuff, it can also feel really meandering and there's so much of the world you won't see on the main questline, with it only taking you to a few of the main planets and ending very abruptly, its really a story with only 4 or 5 major beats, once you get off the planet its really only 4 stopoffs and you're at the end and even then chunks can be skipped if you have the right skills, it makes the actual main questline feel like some of the games least interesting chunks and it feels more like busywork than the sidequests can, it's not bad though, just it's not really the games best point, it feels rushed and also meandering at the same time. there are two questchains though and the other does seem at least marginally more interesting and does seem like it takes you to planets in a different order, though wi didn't do it and from what i can see it doesn't seem like it's all that interesting either, just taking you to some of the same places and doing an evil thing instead.

i love some of the companions though, not all of them are amazing, the robot is very one note , i don't super care for felix, the himbo rebel and i think the priest actually gets worse as his storyline goes on, despite him having the most interesting questline, but i love pervati's (she's canon asexual representation to boot which is super cool) and elly's a lot, the latter having a very funny twist to hers if you end up recruiting her and keeping her that long, she was my main party member pretty much from the moment i got her, as was nyoka, the cool alcoholic hunter who also has a really great companion questline that gets surprisingly emotional. they also work well in combat too, doubling your inventory space, upping certain stats that they excel in and having some fun cooldown abilities that can deal tons of damage, they even butt in during conversations to comment and sometimes give advice or open a new dialogue path! it's really cool and makes them feel so much more like real people along for the ride with their own views and goals, compared to how they can be in something like fallout.

i looooove the writing though, it's a big parody of those old company towns and the game is big on mocking it and the poorly maintained beaurocricy of it all, it shows a colony that has given up and accepted a new style of capitalist feudalism, people have to pay fee's for their own burials, retirees are killed off in an underground killzone and the rich commend it upon finding out because it "cleans riffraff" (you can trick this person into going there and dying, most satisfying thing i have ever done), people will outright refuse help because of corporate mandates even if it kills them, almost everything and everyone is a walking add spouting corporate slogans and mantras, the unified religion is a doctrine of beurocracy that dictates your role from birth, the evil empire is a board of directors, the raiders, here called marauders, are unemployed people who have gone feral and one of the biggest raiders in an endgame zone is called charles from accounting. the game is really funny and it actually has a lot to say about what happens when we give up and let our soon to be technofeudalist, money hungry overlords win, albeit compared to how bad things actually are this feels like an almost tame ending for humanity, in real life the evil chairman at the core of it would be a tech CEO with a swastica shirt on and a bad fake tan. the game stays fairly light hearted about how grim it all is at least, so it never gets too overwhelmingly bleak feeling, it is that bleak don't get it wrong, but the humour in how hopeless the people are and how absurdist some of the ways this society is fucked are is pretty funny, it's one of the most genuinely funny games i've ever played and i like how it does that while still making its point about this kind of world.

the music and voicework both are super good, there's some recognisable names in there like Ashley burch (who has been killing it in the new season of mythic quest, i know its Ubisoft funded but that show is really good and people should watch it, just don't like, pay for apple to watch it you know) and crispin freeman. the music is less interesting though, it's just kind of there, i guess, it's very background and a little bland, there's some solid piano pieces but its overall very, it's not quite "movie music" (derogatory) but it's very AAA music, it's there for atmosphere and not really to be listened to, it's not bad though for what its worth.

the game had a few big updates and DLC's, the DLC's are two expansions that add some extra worlds to explore with their own themes and aesthetics. peril on gorgon was the lesser of the two in most ways, mostly because it's just a lot of the same, it has a cool noir start to it but it does kind of divolve into the same kind of theme loop the basegame already struggled with, with the abandoned lab style of dungeons being back in full swing, but it is super pretty still and it gives you more of an already good thing, more weapons and locations, you finally get to explore one of those map locations that was just set dressing before, you get more perks and hopefully finally make some use out of that damn flaw system. there was also murder on eridanos, it gives you the usual sames, more items and quests and locations but this one does set itself apart by really comitting to the pulp noir theme in full, giving you a story about the serial's that are popular in the world and it builds the world in a much cooler way, plus it just looks way more interesting than almost anything else in the basegame, it feels much more fresh which is something peril on gorgon really needed, i'll cover both of these in more depth in a seperate page because both really do deserve it. there was also an updated version eventually released, a ps5 upgrade that changed some graphical stuff, upped the saturation, included two modes for performance and graphics, the latter of which has notorious frame issues and is how i played the game, i prefer having a lower frame rate and i'm not even joking and it also removed the level cap which is super nice to have with how high some of the skill caps are post-dlc, this version is how i played the game but getting it is kind of weird and annoying, you need to own the basegame and both dlc's to get it, since this comes with the DLC's included as a standard part of it, but i think that feels like a lot of steps for an upgrade, i think they really should have just made it a standard £8 upgrade and gave you the DLC for free or something, or even just as part of this version, it'd be nice is all. it's a good version though and again it is how i played it.

it was made by obsidian near to the time they were acquired by microsoft, just a few years beforehand and the sequel is actually being published by them, obsidian i don't think really need an introduction, they've worked on dozens of unique and cool games like fallout new vegas, alpha protocol, the pillars of eternity games and KOTOR 2, with their more recent games like avowed, grounded and pentament being under xbox (games i'm not super interested in sadly, though avowed and outer worlds 2 will be on my radar) and were among some of the first microsoft published games to arrive on playstation, even the outer worlds 2 will be and i think avowed too! the game had some insanely talented staff on hand too, obsidian are staffed largely by a lot of former interplay people who worked on games like fallout and planescape and this follows suit, with its two directors being tim cain (who has worked on games like fallout 1, arcanum, vampire the masquerade bloodlines and the pillars of eternity games, he also runs a youtube channel now talking about games and it's a good watch) and Leonard Boyarsky (of diablo 3, VTM, the original fallouts and arcanum) and the game follows super well in the lineage of those games. the game overall is super worth playing, it's a great rpg with tons of charm and an amazing world, it even has a much cooler looking sequel on the way so if you like this kind of game and you think it looks good, i really recommend giving it a try if you're at all wanting an explorative rpg, i mean, what else would you do, play starfield? no one wants to play starfield.