Outriders: The review

There are quite a few decent looter shooters out there now. There is always room for more and Outriders is there with the best of them. The gunplay is fantastic, and I personally found the story gripping. If you're looking for a new looter shooter than this is a good deal.

Lets start with the bad and get it out of the way now shall we? It's a 60 dollar game which is pretty steep. I understand that's the common price for an AAA studio game, but lets me honest there are plenty of smaller dev games out there that are fantastic and hold up just as well. For a 60 dollar game you have to nail everything to be worth it.  The biggest issue for me on the game is I don't see the replayability for this game. The end game is pretty static. I have two characters max leveled and done everything in the game other than Expeditions.  The expeditions are static and never change.

So with a steep price tag and a weak end game why would I recommend this game? I had a blast playing it. I'm sitting on ~30 hours played and still having fun. I feel like I can get my play time to an easy 60 hours which brings the cost down to ~ 1 dollar per hour of fun which is an okay value. I'm still waiting to see how I feel about the engame. My pyro is starting to come together and it's quite fun so far.

So with that all said what exactly is Outriders? It's a cross play looter shooter game. It plays a lot like Gears of War except it's a looter shooter with skills and a talent tree. Each class gets 3 branches for their class that changes the way they play. You can play with skills or with guns, or even do a hybrid approach. It's up to you! The balance of the game is a bit wonky, and they have already nerfed a few skills one week in. Although personally these skills were so broken I'd go from struggling to equiping the skill and killing a boss in a single clip... Yeah they were extremely broken.

As an Outrider you are the first to land on the new planet Enoch. Earth is dying/dead and you need to scout the new world for the remaining humans. As an Outrider you land on the ground first, and you find a mysterious signal that is scrambled. That's when all hell breaks loose. The world is an extremely dangerous place, and it has a lot of lore behind why it is so.

Your health bar is more of a resource than most games. You're going to lose health, and it's not a big deal. Every class has its own way of healing. Take the Pyro for instance. When you kill an enemy that is marked by one of your skills you health for a percent of your max life. The trick is to make sure everything is burning and marked and just watched your health bounce around!

The gunplay is fantastic. There are a few guns in particular that I personally enjoy the most. Those would be the standard assault rifle and the one shot sniper variant. The sniper shoots one shot before it reloads, and it does massive damage. If you happen to have the right mods you can make it do crazy damage for the first shot of every clip, and since you only have one shot per clip.... It's every shot for extreme damage!

The story is pretty decent, although the ending feels pretty bad. I won't go into any spoilers, but I did find the begining to be interesting, and the middle amazing. The end was a let down, but it makes sense. It just feels like they could of done something else and ended in a more interesting way.

With all all that said I really hope that you guys pick up the game and try it. It's a really fun 3 player looter shooter. The devs have mentioned if there is enough of a demand a DLC may be an option, but for now they are going a more Diablo approach with what you see is what you get.