Thomas plays Outriders with his girlfriend and finds it wonderfully dorky. He is sure that the game exists only for his sake.
Like people in pretty much every other job, I have days when I regret my career choice. For example, when I”m sent to Minental against my will. When developers send out wrong builds and I have to double test games because of it.
Or when I have to play some co-op shooter with random journalists and YouTubers before the official release. Everything can”t always go perfectly. If work were so terribly great, you wouldn”t have to persuade people to do it with money.
That”s why I need games every now and then to remind me why I voluntarily bother with this stuff every day and most weekends instead of just becoming a dog groomer somewhere. Games like Outriders.
When Outriders 2021 came out, I left it alone because there were still problems with multiplayer, lag and balancing, and because it was just a bit too expensive for me given the mixed reviews. In the meantime, Outriders runs smoothly and is cheaper than socks.
I installed it at the beginning of the week just for fun and wanted to play it for a short while. Now I can”t get away from it for days and have also dragged Claire, my intended, into the wonderfully depressing world of Enoch. What an end-awesome trip!
Not really my genre
Outriders is a loot shooter. I find most games of this genre rather dull. Blame it on that awful Borderlands. It just gets on my nerves when every defeated enemy wave explodes in a shower of loot from 38 billion weapons and I spend more time in the inventory window than fighting my enemies.
Outriders solves this problem very comfortably by dropping loot in manageable quantities and letting me see before I pick it up whether or not it”s better than the stuff I was wearing. Then I can either just put it on at the touch of a button, stuff it in my pockets or take it apart for raw materials without having to interrupt the game and stare at the inventory.
The game flow is great. I blast away enemies with the pump shotgun, and they shatter in a completely exaggerated way and fly off in pieces in all directions. The action looks incredibly cool, because Outriders does things that I”ve never seen in any other game: Claire, as an assassin, teleports across the battlefield, puts hordes of enemies into slow motion using special abilities and then peels the flesh from their bones. Soldiers, monsters, wild creatures, everything around us turns into screaming skeletons.
A few of them are still shooting around, some are trying to flee in panic. As a destroyer, I smash into the middle of them. They explode, their bones slowly floating away all around us. It looks almost scripted, like one of those movie trailers where the camera rotates around the action in a slow-motion sequence. We are unstoppable, overpowering, almost superheroes, except that our characters clearly don”t care about anything for a long time.
Maximum Edgy
I love the story and the terribly dark setting of this game. In its lame, clichéd-for-the-genre opening, Outriders sets us up with a grizzled veteran who seems to be built up as some sort of guiding figure to lead us through the game.
He calls the shots on our first trip through the alien world of Enoch. He knows the score. Ten minutes later, in a cutscene, he”s just picked off, almost casually, and never comes back.
A few missions later, we are supposed to kill the leader of some gang, who then also unexpectedly dies in a cutscene. The player character even complains about this because he had the perfect spell on his lips and now can”t recite it.
Enoch is probably the most brutal game world I have ever seen in a shooter. Enemies, allies, even bosses often die completely abruptly and surprisingly. The main character is initially horrified by this, but later only comments on such events with sayings like: “Fuck, seriously?”
Over time, we become ice-cold killers ourselves. Some gangsters and bandits beg for mercy in cutscenes, want to explain and justify their actions, but the protagonist no longer listens, is not interested in any explanations, shoots them down without hesitation. No mercy, no compassion, no remorse. And they all deserve it.
Deep black history
I don”t know who wrote the story for Outriders, but I want to give that person a hug and ask, “Boy, who hurt you so abysmally? Is everything okay at home?”
An old man asks us to shoot his way to his dilapidated house because he had to leave everything he cares about there. When we do him this favour, we find the graves of his wife and daughters, who were killed by an angry lynch mob. That”s where he wanted to go back to.
Another client asks us to deliver a care package to a fighter in the wilderness. She supposedly sends the parcels on to his daughter and sends him the young woman”s letters in exchange. In the end it turns out that the daughter is long dead, his contact keeps the packages and simply writes the letters himself to keep the old man happy.
Everyone lies, cheats, rips off and walks over dead bodies. Every character you care about is either brutally killed in front of you, or sooner or later turns out to be a creep in chief. And will be brutally killed in front of your eyes.
The player character eventually gets fed up and just cleans up. “It”s not what you think! I”m not a monster, I can explain everything-” BAM! Most video game protagonists are shining heroes, always showing mercy, acting like shining examples. The main character in Outriders often seems ice-cold in comparison, radiating a certain Tarantino coolness. I don”t need that in every game from now on, but here it”s refreshing, unspent and increases my gameplay fun enormously. In places, the game reminds me of “Mad Max” or “Escape from New York” with its end-time heroes and villains.
Versatile without being overwhelming
Unfortunately, even the best story eventually comes to an end. Nevertheless, we continue to play Outriders, if only because the Worldslayer expansion offers endless hours of end-game content. But we also simply have fun tinkering with our characters.
Mods for pieces of armour change and strengthen the effect of class skills and enable new ways of playing, similar to certain legendary items and armour sets in Diablo 3. A modified weapon haunts enemies with lightning strikes, creates minefields on critical hits or siphons off health points.
Speaking of life points: Instead of banal healing simply at the touch of a button like in so many other games, the heroes in Outriders regenerate their lives only through active combat. I play a destroyer and only get healing when I actively punch enemies in the mouth or blast them with the shotgun at close range. This also drives the flow of the game.
On top of that, there are talent trees that can be used to increase toughness, weapon damage or the power of the class skills. In an expansion, more specialised trees and a kind of paragon system like in Diablo 3 will be added, which will give long-term players some additional passive bonuses.
All of this allows for different play styles and individualisation of the heroes, but never becomes so complex that you have to rack your brains for hours over the correct distribution of points. For a shooter, I really like this system: I have enough control over the strengths and weaknesses of my characters, but I don”t have to spend hours planning or studying wikis to make well-informed character development decisions.
Buy and go
Outriders is not a service game, does not require membership or any special accounts and does not have a cosmetic shop. Okay, the Worldslayer expansion wasn”t cheap, but with it you have the complete game and everything that goes with it.
You can play through the story in a good 15 hours. If you then feel like it, you can continue to play expeditions, repeatable missions and all the content in general and continue to farm experience, character upgrades and new equipment and become more and more powerful over several hours. Again, it”s kind of Diablo 3 with guns.
It”s a shame that the game was quite a (commercial flop) . Apparently the release didn”t recoup the production costs and generate a profit, the user ratings are less than enthusiastic, which is a bit difficult for me to comprehend from today”s perspective and as a latecomer.
Apparently there were major problems in the technology at the start and progress was at worst completely deleted. Okay, with such difficulties I probably wouldn”t have any more desire either, that already completely ruined the fun of playing Wolcen for me. What a pity! In its current state it plays really well, especially if you have one or two friends at hand. But anyway – I will continue to have fun with it, even without a big community!
