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I will be honest with you guys. Before I bought Outriders, I first pirated it. Yes, I know piracy is bad, etc., etc., etc… But I don’t like investing a full AAA price for a game. And I do know there was a demo available. And I tried it and liked it. But demos tend to be the showcase of what’s best in a game. So I pirated it and played a little further before I did buy it. Did I spend my money well? Let’s find out!

Outriders is a brand new IP coming to the world of AAA games. Something we don’t have happening that often these days. And it’s sci-fi fantasy, my probably most favorite of themes. And it’s a looter-shooter on top of that. You can have almost endless amounts of fun in them if done correctly. And the IF is a big one. But let’s start simple. Let’s first talk about the story.

The story takes place in the future when humanity has finally achieved its ultimate purpose of destroying the Earth. But you get to be lucky. You’re one of the chosen ones that were sent to a new world called Enoch. Here, you’ll attempt to rebuild humanity and hopefully, not destroy this planet in the process. But soon after you land, you’ll find out that Enoch is more than ready for humanity and you will not be destroying it but rather humanity will try not to be destroyed by Enoch and its strange anomalies. To avoid further spoilers let’s keep it general. You’ll get to be one of the chosen ones, given unimaginable powers, you’ll try to find out how to save humanity, make friends and enemies in the process, discover the beauty of what Enoch used to be, learn the horrible truth, and yadayadayda.

Don’t expect this to be a prize-winning story. But honestly, I did quite enjoy it. Especially the start of the story takes a pretty personal approach and while the end was a bit too obvious for me personally it wasn’t bad. What really makes the story enjoyable is just wonderful voice-acting and well-done cut-scenes of which there are more than plenty. Be sure not to skip them as the bare minimum. And if you – as me – take an interest in the world, be sure to collect every last journal entry as that’s where the majority of the lore is hiding.

Before we move on to the gameplay itself, we now have to talk about the elephant in the room. The technical issues. And yes, there is a lot to talk about here. But somehow, not from my own personal experience. I guess I was one of the lucky ones and for the most part, the game worked for me flawlessly.

But if you take a quick search on Reddit, you’ll see plenty of people complaining about a plethora of issues ranging from bugs in the game itself (more on them later though), multiplayer issues, problems just getting into the game, inventory wipes, and many more. This is a problem. A big problem. It seems that the majority of the big issues with Outriders have been fixed at this point, most people can get into the game without major problems, inventories are not getting wiped anymore but there are still issues with multiplayer and bugs in the game.

And I’ve said we will talk about bugs so let’s go over a few of them. So… some of the set bonuses of the legendaries don’t work, modifications sometimes just decide not to work or in one case work permanently even if they should be only temporary. You can teleport yourself into the void with one of the characters if you get unlucky… and to summarize there are more bugs than I can realistically list in this review. And that’s a big problem. I’ve personally got really lucky and experienced just two bugs over the roughly 65 hours I’ve spent in the game. The first being the best defensive mod in the game bugging out and literally being active all the time (and this is a very common bug) and one time all of my armor just randomly decided to stop working and I kept getting killed very quickly until I restarted the game.

Interestingly, the majority of the bugs seem to be related to multiplayer. It was the case with inventory wipes, huge rubber-banding, mods not working properly and this is most likely because of the way Outriders does multiplayer on a technical level. They don’t have their own dedicated servers instead they rely on peer-to-peer connections that send later info to the main servers that keep things such as save files. These problems seem to have people working on them and hopefully, they will get fixed as soon as possible.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to the game itself. So… gameplay. There are two main “parts” of Outriders for you to experience. The story and then the end-game grind. But both come with the same core gameplay of an RPG looter-shooter with abilities. You’ll start by deciding what kind of character you want to play. You get to choose from four different classes: the Devastator – a close-range focus kind of guy with plenty of mitigation abilities, the Pyromancer – a guy who has been blessed with the powers of fire that prefers to stay at range but doesn’t mind occasionally going in close, the Trickster with the power to bend spacetime itself, quickly attack his foes at close to suddenly appear at the opposite side of the battlefield, and the Technomancer with his toxic and freezing gadgets who likes to shoot his enemies from afar.

A pretty good selection to be honest and the classes do feel pretty unique while playing. Each of the classes then has three different ways to build your character – either focusing on your weapon abilities, tankiness/support, or your skills. Each of these ways to play the game are mostly viable though some of the builds perform significantly better than others. I personally choose the Technomancer for my main character as I prefer to shoot things from a distance but each class has at the very least one very competitive build for endgame and all work well enough through the story.

And while playing the story is where Outriders shine. I had a lot of fun going through the story, doing all the side-quests, picking up journal entries, and enjoying the ride. The problems come in the end-game grind.

The end-game grind… How to describe it. Probably with a completely different genre than a looter-shooter because while still being a looter-shooter it starts to feel a lot different once you finish the story and get to the end-game. Here, you’ll be presented with 14 different expeditions/dungeons that can be attempted at 15 different difficulties. That sounds like a good number of things to do. 14 times 15 is 210. But you don’t really get to experience 210 different dungeons. You will just experience 14 dungeons over and over and over again. Yes, the added difficulty is nice but it doesn’t work the way you’d want it to.

This is because of three things. There are no new mechanics added to fights as you progress through difficulty levels. It’s just a matter of enemies having more health and occasionally more enemies being thrown at you. And just to be clear – I’ve managed to finish 13 out of the dungeons at the highest difficulty with a gold medal. And the last one isn’t even doable solo gold because of its mechanics. Add to that the fact that you’ll be improving your gear as you progress and all the difficulties will essentially feel always the same, just with bigger numbers.

The second problem lies in the fact that all the dungeons have the same exact objective. Finish them as fast as possible. This leads you towards the path of just going for the max damage build always. There is a desperate need for more alternative modes in the dungeons. Or ideally, more dungeons with different objectives. I know this isn’t an MMO where you have dedicated healers, DPS, and tanks. But give us horde mode where the longer you stay alive the more and better loot you get. Give us true boss mechanics where you, for example, have to abuse the boss to destroy a platform to get him damaged. There are so many choices but Outriders just stuck with time-trials, the simplest one.

And lastly, the grind for gear itself. Oh god, the grind. It’s so bad. And done in a way that just doesn’t make sense. First off, the parts that are okay. You’ll need to spend a good amount of time searching for gear with the perfect stats on them. That’s normal, that’s what you’d expect. Then you have to pray to RNJesus to get that item with one of the mods you require. That’s still okay, makes it tougher to get the perfect build going but still okay. Luckily, you can at least swap one of the mods on an item so you don’t have to wait for the miracle item with two perfect mods on it. But that’s where the good news end.

The bad news is that most of the time, you won’t give a damn about getting epic or legendary items as they just plain suck most of the time. Purples can be good, sometimes, rarely. Legendaries just plain suck. Their stats make no sense for what kind of a job they're meant for, their variants often just suck and the only reason why you will want them is because they come with the coveted tier 3 mods that you will want to smack on your epic items. There are only like two or three legendary armor sets that are being used for builds out of 17 sets and an additional 2 or three legendaries that are used from the 10 individual pieces that aren’t part of a set. That’s maybe a staggering 11 pieces of legendary armor out of 90 that is being used! Unacceptable!

And the legendary weapons? What a joke… Maybe 2 have the exact perfect stats you’d want on a weapon, maybe 10 have at least two of the three stats you’d want combined with a good tier 3 mod. Out of 46 legendaries. You’ll just end up using epic weapons and carry a legendary for the coolness factor in your secondary slot that you will NEVER use.

But, that’s not even the worst part. Truthfully, the best items you can get uncommon and rare with the perfect stats. Why would you prefer lower-quality items to drop for you? Because you can improve them to epic and hope you will get the perfect tier two mod on it and then slap a second good modification on them manually. This turns the excitement of getting epic and legendary items into disappointment. And even worse than that. The best way to get these uncommon and rare items is just to log into the game once every half an hour, quickly check all the vendors if they have items with your desired stats, and log out. That’s just sad.

Before we reach the end of the review I also need to talk about features in the game that are just plain stupid and missing. First, the stupid features.

The biggest for me is the fact that each of your characters needs to unlock modifications for themselves. But not really. The real way to do this is just to buy a set of random items (seriously doesn’t matter which) – send them to your main character that already has them unlocked through the shared stash, slap the modifications on them, send them back and your low-level character has them. The only benefit of this is that you can quickly plow through the campaign on your alts. Secondly, resources – again need to be gathered individually for each character but again, not really. Just farm with your main a bit, send the items to your alt who will sell them, and buy the materials. Also, the caps of resources and currencies are waaaaay too low – 999,999 per resource but you get more than 70,000 of the end-game currency per level 15 dungeon finished. And you can farm them very easily once you have the gear.

Secondly, there’s the fact that you have an overabundance of currencies but nothing to really spend them on. With just six shops in the game and only one of them accepting the end-game currency you’ll quickly reach the cap and have no reason to grind anymore. Worst of all, while the end-game vendor sells a few legendaries he only sells them once and never refreshes them so you’re stuck with those until RNJesus blesses you with the legendary you want for that one mod you are missing to finish your build.

Then there are the missing features. The lack of transmogrification is the big one so you’re stuck with your character looking like he went through 5 people’s closest in the morning. The already mentioned lack of ways to spend your end-game currency. Missing voice or even text chat in multiplayer and the list can go on but I think you get the idea.

Conclusion

So… in conclusion: I’m really split when it comes to Outriders. On one hand, I’ve had a good amount of fun with it. It looks great, it plays great when you’re actually playing it the way it was intended to play. But it just has too many issues to truly warrant the sixty-dollar price tag. If it cost 40 bucks I’d be fine with the missing features. If it cost 30 I’d understand a lousy launch with bugs that will get fixed in a matter of a few weeks. And honestly, that will be my advice to you. Don’t buy it now. Wait until it gets fixed and goes on a sale for 30 maybe 40 dollars and then actually buy it. Because it is a good game. But not for its price.

So, that’s it for today guys. I hope you liked the review and if you did, please up-vote the review, follow my blog, and be sure to share it with your friends. And comment, if you have anything you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.