So, let’s get this out of the way from word one. The Outer Worlds is a great game, short, simple and sweet. It is an amazingly well made First person RPG title.

It’s rather refreshing and almost gratifying to see a competently made game for a change. No micro transactions, no mandatory online bullshit, no season pass, God it feels good. Now, Is Outer Worlds a perfect game? No, it’s damn good, but it has a few small issues, that will probably be fixed in the coming month or two. But what is the Outer Worlds exactly?

The Outer Worlds is, in my opinion, Obsidian’s middle finger to Bethesda. For fans of the old school Fallout games, Outer Worlds will feel extremely familiar to you. Especially if you’ve played New Vegas. The dialogue mechanics, overall game play and visual aesthetic is very reminiscent of Fallout New Vegas, with a healthy amount of Bio shock or Atlas Shrug thrown in for good measure. The visuals are gorgeous with a kind of ‘advertisement heavy industrial’ vibe to it, mixed with Bioshock type stylisation in the form of huge mechanical billboards and digital advertisements everywhere and corporate logos on everything from guns to canned food. Even the loading screens are advertisements!

The premise of the game, is thus. You are random frozen colonist number (such and such), aboard an unmanned vessel floating in the Halcyon system, controlled by a board of consumer cooperation’s that basically run everything. You are revived by a frantic mad scientist, and told the system is going to shit fast, and that you need to wake up the other colonists by tracking down some chemicals. To this end you are sent back and forth between a small slew of different planets, each with their own distinct looks and vibe. Filled with beasts, marauders and various settlements; both corporate owned and rebellious. You have a small ship to travel around in, and said ship also acts as a hub for all six of your collectable companions, among other things.

Now, the main story is short. Like, you can plough through it in a day. Unless I’ve somehow missed half the game Castlevania style. There are a good handful of side missions, and lots of back and forth traveling from place to place. Content and variety wise, the game is also short. There are only a handful of different guns, melee weapons, armour and enemies. Most situations you can talk your way out of, or brute force through, there’s a karma like system that makes corporations or groups like you and therefor make them easier to deal with in situations, and vice versa ones that don’t like you more difficult to work with. You can hack, sneak, steal, lie etc. pretty much a play your way game, with a heavy RPG presence. There is a huge list of stats to level up, each stat bunched into groups and levelled up in groups to a certain point, from which you can focus on certain stats like lying, hacking, melee damage, etc.

Overall it’s damn well polished, you can tell Obsidian took their time with this game. There are basically no bugs, no glitches, no issues at all. Hit boxes are tight and responsive, gun play is easy and fun, and each world environment is fun to explore. There’s an early part in the game that made my jaw drop with how good it looked, caught me totally off guard and I loved it. It’s been a while since a game managed to do that. More so, companions and NPCs feel like actual people, instead of computers, I love that your companions stay on your ship and actually interact with one another, and you can choose which ones to take with you on trips planet-side. They all feel fleshed out and unique, and some of the NPC characters are damn well made as well.

That being said! There are some things that did urk me. The biggest being the holographic stealth gadget. The game isn’t very good at explaining how it works. It operates automatically in restricted areas if you have the correct ID cartridge. There’s five in game, all hidden in random places, one of which being inside a restricted area, filled with guards, in a locked room. If you wana get it stealthily, I’d recommend going high into hack and lie.

There is also a tendance for loot GUI’s to not pop up when you interact with containers or corpses. The hit boxes are pretty tight, so it’s easy to miss enemies with precision weapons like the snipers. It’s also a pretty text heavy game, and a lot of clues to things are hidden in character dialogue, very vague clues mind you.

It’s clear the Outer Worlds is what Obsidian wanted fallout to be, there are a lot of obvious likenesses to Fallout, and even a little influence from Bio shock by the looks of some areas in game. In Summary, whist short, The Outer Worlds is incredibly well made and full of passion. Developed by Obsidian Entertainment, released October 2019. I give The Outer Worlds, a much deserved: