My ears always perk up when I hear that Bulletstorm and Painkiller developer, People Can Fly, begin working on something new and Outriders is definitely something new for them. So you can understand my immediate disappointment when I sat down to play Outriders.
Outriders
Developer: People Can Fly
Platform: PC, PS4/PS5, and Xbox One/Series X
[To see our footage of the game, click here]
Upon creating your character, you’re dropped into this self-serious sci-fi world where humanity has left Earth to colonize on the planet Enoch where things immediately go wrong as a storm wreaks havoc on the arriving colony ship. Your character is tossed into cryo sleep where they wake up thirty years later to a very different situation as the colonists have split into factions and war over the limited resources in a valley the constant storm keeps them trapped in. It’s all very by the numbers and done to death in multiple media forms, which I normally wouldn’t have an issue with; my hang-up was it was nearly half an hour before I got into any sort of significant combat scenario which is insane to think of considering the developer. And once I got into the actual combat things didn’t get much better.
People Can Fly are known for making phenomenal shooters and Outriders just feels… sort of okay. Now that’s not to say it’s bad per say, just that it’s not exciting. When you got a new gun in Painkiller or Bulletstorm you’d get excited to try it out because even if it’s just an assault rifle or shotgun there’s at least something different to it; and the guns always had this great crunchy feel to them. In Outriders, however, all the guns I picked up felt no different than the guns in a game like, say, Uncharted. It also doesn’t help when the enemies, and in particular the boss, are these massive bullet sponges that make things feel tedious; when it takes me more than a single direct hit with a sniper rifle to a basic grunt’s head to kill them, that’s where the fun starts to dissipate. I was never surprised by anything I picked up in my time with the demo, to the point where I couldn’t tell if they were bland on purpose to give more emphasis to the powers which if that’s the case then boy was that a mistake.
I’ll cut right to the chase and say this game is very clearly trying to ape elements of Destiny; the menu UI, down to even the circular reticle, feels ripped straight from Destiny. The co-op was referred to as a fireteam, and the general flow of the mission felt very much like a strike. And just like in Destiny, after the initial tutorial section you’re able to choose from three power sets that will become your class for the rest of the game. Hell, one of the supplied screenshots even has all three classes posed next to each other and two of them are blatantly wearing gear reminiscent of the Hunter and Warlock classes. Now, none of this is bad, but when the game is making you wonder why you’re playing this when you could be playing actual Destiny, now that’s where the eyebrows start to raise.
My main issue with how the game operates is that you have all these elements clashing together horribly. It’s a cover shooter but a dozen enemies will enter the arena and rush straight up to you, even ones with guns, but you don’t have the mobility as you do in Destiny to handle hordes of enemies like this. You’re the “chosen one” with special powers but you don’t feel powerful using them. It’s a loot shooter that takes place on an alien planet, but all the guns and gear you find are things you’ve seen in any other game set on Earth.
Speaking of powers, you’re given three different power types to choose from: pyromancer, trickster, and devastator. Pyromancer is obvious enough, the trickster is the assassin type class, and the devastator is the tank as you conjure rocks to slam foes with. My two co-op partners picked the trickster set which, from what I could see, allowed them to drop time slowing bubbles and teleport. As a big fan of fire powers in games I made the obvious choice by going pyromancer and unfortunately didn’t get a chance to see what the devastator looked like in action. Each power has a variety of “moves” you can have equipped at once, and they all run on a cooldown. You even have a melee attack that’s based off whatever power you picked and runs on a cooldown, after which it returns to a regular punch. From the demo, it seemed like there were eight powers in total to get, and you can equip three at a time.
Playing the pyromancer, the fire powers were flashy and the gory explosion caused when a burning enemy explodes was a lot of fun at first. After that initial admiration however, I started to use the powers less and less as my demo went on. This brings me back to how powerless you feel in a game with goddamn superpowers. Now you could obviously argue that once I get higher in level I’ll have access to the truly powerful stuff but to that, I’d counter that would be bad design. If your character has powers, and you’re one of the only ones with them, you should feel powerful now, not in fifteen hours when you hit level 30. A game like this should start you powerful and further increase it as it goes on.
As I played through the demo I started to wonder if perhaps the powers are meant to be used more strategically than to fulfill some power fantasy, which would make sense but it’s not the vibe the game was giving. As the pyromancer, whenever you set an enemy on fire if they die in that state then they’ll cause a massive explosion; this is also the way you heal. My team eventually got in the rhythm of dropping a time bubble to slow the enemies to a crawl, I’ll set them on fire, and we’ll cause a chain of explosions. It was neat chaining our abilities together, but I eventually noticed that I was only ever using my powers when an enemy was close to death because the explosion only activated when they died. And since the enemies would soak up bullets, I’d be emptying magazines into them before lighting them up at the last second.
It was at this point that I really started to take on a sour taste from the game. If I have all these powers that I’m only using at the specific moment the game wants me to, instead of on my own accord, then I’m not having fun and in turn, why am I bothering to play this? To emphasize this, when I got to the massive bullet sponge of a boss at the end of the demo he made my powers almost pointless. They already barely did any damage to him, but killing burning enemies is my source of health recovery so not only am I not bothering to use my abilities on him since they do almost no damage, but I’m also robbed of my only source of regaining health points. The boss took a wearyingly long time to finish off, made longer due to the fact that he’d heal an almost absurd amount of times where I felt like something went wrong with the demo and he shouldn’t have been doing that as often as he was.
I don’t want to end this piece by saying developers shouldn’t try to do new things, quite the opposite, but Outriders isn’t doing anything new and what it’s doing isn’t particularly great. You don’t ever want to see a game look bad, especially from a developer you hold in high regard, but Outriders unfortunately just wasn’t for me and hope when the game comes out later this year that I’m proven wrong. All of my issues with the game almost make it feel like it started out as one type of game and someone upstairs said it needed to pivot into something else; perhaps something that’s currently popular.
