Recent reviews by Tadres

Sasuke: "Hideo-san, your map are so big... *blush* that people keep on skipping content we put hours to make, we need something to do about it!!"

Hideo: "Let's make every enemy a sponge that oneshot players unless they collect specific items x amount of times, to be able to progress; that way, they had to check any nooks and cranny on the map."

Naruto: "But what if players don't understand that, and will be fighting one boss in that cave for over 2h, then rage-quit and write a negative review?!"

Hideo and Sasuke: "Nani!!!"

Need an better UI.

If "Destiny 2" game mode called "Gambit" branch out and became an standalone game.
But with mech suits (like Warframes/Anthem) and with dinos as the main enemies.

Looks fun, plays fun. But with cut content (since it's a beta) it's hard to say if the game survive in the long run.

P.s. For todays "optimization standarts" - game runs quite smooth.

Was fan of this studio since "War of the Roses," but Darktide broke my heart.

Core gameplay feels like direct copy of VT2.
No improvements, no new mechanics, with copy-pasted witch from L4D. Range weapons - meh.

After release got lots of crashes, but not in the cashshop, this is good way to know where are dev's priority lie. FPS dropped from 80~ in pre-release version to 50~ on release.

Some parts of the game still not accessible, but you already can spend extra $ on skins in fully functional cashshop.
Game also use same typical schemes from сhinese mobile games. Aka skin cost 2300 premium currency, but you only can buy 2100 or 2500.~

Music is good tho.

If you have itch for an warhammer themed games, I pity you.
Better wait a year, and take it with discount.

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Pros:

• Loot’n’craft is dope!
  
• Legendary items feels unique.
  
• Diverse landscape!
  
• All Classes have unique playstyle and are interesting to play with.
  
• Story is interesting, a lot of attention to the details (a lot of foreshadowing)

Cons:

• Firearms remain viable option only on low-level difficulty.
  
• Build diversity – near of state “almost exist.”
  
• Prologue – is a confusing mess.
  
• After 2/3 of the campaign is merely done, story start to slow down and became predictable.
  
• Big variety of tech issues including network ones.
  
• Other player abilities are to loud.
  
• Game spoilers story via loading screen and tips in it...

Mixed:

• Side-quests are interesting story wise, but not gameplay wise.
  
• Can replay campaign and side-quests endlessly, but it’s unrewarding because of how game structured.
  
• Side-quests lacks in variety, there like 3 quests that don't require of you to shoot and even one trying to be a horror.
  
• Enemy variation – a game about alien planet with anomaly storms that can force rapid evolution, yet we fight same enemy with a different color scheme!

Verdict: Bugs aside, purchase with the discount!

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Writhed around 1-2 week after initial game release, but was never finished, and with the power of «Steam Autumn Sale» – I had to.

Also, the review is lengthy, and the number of characters is limited, therefore let's skip the foreplay and get straight to the action.

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If you didn't know what those colors represent... – let’s be real this stuff are in 90% of modern games nowadays.
As well as that one thing, which is persistent as your neighbor with hammer drill – Trash loot.

We all have our own answer to “why trash loot exist?”, but I’ve ne'er seen someone who is actually trying to fix it and… succeed at it!

“How Outriders done it?!” – You ask.

Simple – Crafting. It was made in mind to be useful in midgame and endgame.
(There goes list “why is Crafting is great, but it’s useless on low-level." If you read this, then I run-out off...)

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“Y’all got any more of that «Fortress» mod?”


What is core focus of all looter-shooter type of games?
Right, Guns! And how they feels in player “hands.”

«Outriders» have around eleven types of guns and all weapons have stuff called «variation» (semi to auto, bigger mag or bigger damage, etc.), which also can be switched via crafting menu.

Weapons like the Armor have «Mod» slot, which can alter gameplay. And sadly not all mods are good, and some are to op to not utilize them.

But what prevents guns to be in main choice of dealing damage is enemy scaling (more hp and damage they do) on higher difficulty.

So on harder difficulty we left with only one thing to do – is adapt and transform our guns into utility gear to proc «weapon mods» or player skills to slay an enemy.

Some skills even have strength to one-shot enemy, but pure dps from the gun can’t achieve that, lol.

Therefore after WT6 majority of players use “two” type of guns:

• LMG with big mag, to proc mods or/and player skills often.
  
• Any other gun that have required combination of mods.

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We have four playable classes with unique and thematically different abilities.

Yet, three out of four classes develop same ability with slight variation in name, color and stats department, and their…

Skill-Tree’s is kinda bland.
It’s made out of three sub-trees, all classes have unique names for them but they all do the same:

• All classes start from same spot, with slightly altered nodes to be fitted for specific class.
  
• Nodes unlocks in sequentially one after another.
  
• Amount of skill-points you can naturally acquire from leveling is 20, but to fully unlock one skill-tree you need around 25~ points.

If we look at some builds that, are available online, we can clearly see remarkable similarity in them, with exception of one or two nodes in skill-tree, and a bit different ability set up.

This brings us to conclusion: game is in drastic need of node diversity or/and increased pool of skill-points to give us leeway in making more unique builds.

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«Outriders» use somewhat known difficulty modifier called «World Tier.»
Which is heavily modified, to make it work for a newbie and veterans alike.

If in other games new Tiers can be unlocked after player hit certain threshold of «Gear Score,» in Outriders case, you need to level it up. But WT gains exp only on last unlocked tier.

”But Wait, There's More!”
It will loose exp, if your character dying a bit to much in same encounter.
At-ease, soldier! You cant un-level yourself.

Premise of a difficulty that will increase to consistently provide a challenge, intrigued me.
In theory this is good idea, but like the rest, the realization of it leaves much to be desired.
Because despite all of that changes game still just buff NPC stats, but not their AI and/or adding new types of enemies.

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“Looter shooters and the curse of bad writing."

This one is rough. You can fix bugs and broken mechanics but not the story.

«Outriders» story had lots of high and lows in the quality department.
But most of it is ruined by “shaky camera man”, I get why you need it – to show action, but where is the action in “two men just talking a near table”?

The story pacing is all over the place.
Periodically we got straight bee-lined trough events.
On the other hand in some parts of campaign, pacing feels stretched to beyond believe, almost like it was made intentionally to fulfill set quota on game length.

Let's take a look at its rushed prologue for example:

• Amount of lore, story and events cramped in a very short prologue is mind boggling.
  
• NPC are dying left and right, and player character acts like we should care, but we don't since we knew them for 1 minute or less.
  
• We can read more about events and our relationship witch characters in a journal.

This prologue has same vibes; as when you are trying to watch new TV Series from last episode of first season and the 1st episode of season two, with x2 speed on.

But how it can be "fixed":

• Instead of bombarding the player with text to make them care about all of this.
  
• Make few extra missions on Earth to show how “bad” was on it.
  
• Including our “fight” to enter the spaceship «S.M. Flores.» (which, we had)
  
• And a bit extended version of arrival on Enoch, extra time to chat with people on orbit.

As one once told: “Show, don’t tell!”
All of this will give players some time to make an quick bond with NPC, and when game start killing them off, we will can relate to the pain our character feels when his friends/colleague was killed.


In the end.

Game has many issues with its story pacing and some odd staged scenes, shaky camera; however, I liked main story plot and twists – even though they rather predictable.

If only those people have more experience…

One of a few good examples of early access games that made it to the release state and still rocks!

Don't buy this game for co-op/multiplayer experience it's desync galore from 2016 till this day.

Of course if you are love to lose months or years of in game time due desync , and you also love to restart session after/near midgame content due endless desync errors then you are fine.

I give this game 10 desync out of 1 gameplay session.

Paradox: Let's add one more launcher to collect data and advertise stuff to our player base.
Whatever can go wrong?

Great game, sadly can't say the same about dev team.
RIP Alec Holowka.

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