“Trust me,” I tell one of The Outer Worlds‘ companions after she protests my plan to wipe out her home with killer robots on behalf of a self-interested corporation. There’s no [LIE] skill check indicating that my persuasive space captain is placating her with empty assurances, so I head toward the mission marker with hopes of reprogramming the robots to protect the colonists or maybe attack those aligned with the corporation on sight. Once I sneak past some military forces ostensibly protecting the town—though only about half of them are hostile for some reason—I reach the terminal. Suddenly it becomes obvious that there’s no choice to be made. The only options are to follow through and align with the corporation or slowly trudge back through a bunch of long loading screens without accomplishing anything. Feeling railroaded and wanting to have something to show for my troubles, I shrug and press the button, wiping out an entire town with the kind of insouciance you’d expect from someone throwing away a food wrapper; no one who lived in the town was particularly memorable, and the party member who initially protested never brings it up again, so it’s hard to care. The Outer Worlds tries to replicate the magic of Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas, but it suffers from many problems and moments like this that become increasingly prevalent until the illusion is shattered and you realize that it’s just a hollow pretender.

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The Outer Worlds review navigation (click to jump to section): Story review | Gameplay review | Bugs and issues | Visuals and music review

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The Outer Worlds‘ interesting premise and setting is almost entirely wasted

The Outer Worlds begins with a mad scientist character named Phineas Welles sneaking onto a ship called the Hope and waking you up from hibernation. The Hope contains some of the best and brightest Earth has to offer, but the ship was lost for long enough that the normal methods of waking everyone up would result in their deaths. Only Welles knows how to wake everyone up safely. Unfortunately, he lacks the materials needed to do so and is a fugitive wanted by the Board, a collective of corporations that serve as the nearby space colonies’ government, so you become his errand-boy. Despite his early enthusiasm and humor, however, The Outer Worlds isn’t an overtly comedic game. It does try to be one on multiple occasions to varying levels of success. Obsidian wasn’t up to the task of establishing stakes while simultaneously keeping the tone light, though, so you’ll read a couple of sarcastic item descriptions and then spend several hours fixing grim famines and power struggles.

Everything is run by corporations, leading to entertaining rules that prioritize profits over consumers and employees. You’ll hear a whole bunch of company-mandated slogans, for one thing, and human testing is also incredibly common. The Outer Worlds tries to have its cake and eat it too; one minute you’re supposed to be amused by the lengths a company goes to cut costs and the next a companion is pointing out the spot where everyone she’s ever cared about was killed. “Jarring” isn’t a strong enough word for it. The tone is all over the place.

Toward the end, the writing finally commits to its seriousness and becomes bog-standard as a result. You get your ending slides that describe how the future plays out as a result of your actions, but it’s your standard “savior/destroyer of the universe” stuff. The Outer Worlds is constantly cycling through the games it desperately wants to be—Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout: New Vegas—but retreading that ground feels stale in the absence of something new.

Borrowing elements from popular games of the past isn’t inherently a bad thing. The problem is that this is all The Outer Worlds ever amounts to; once you strip away its inspirations and references, you’re left with a generic Fallout 3 clone that’s padded out with fetch quests. The only sidequests with any interesting story content are the faction and companion loyalty quests, and even those require running around fetching things for people. You’re unlikely to like or even remember most of the companions you pick up with only a couple of exceptions—for me, small-town girl Parvati and (to a much lesser extent) Ellie the pirate medic. The problem is that they’re all interchangeable, with each having a single personality trait and past trauma to discover and otherwise being cardboard boxes with automatic weapons hastily duct-taped to them. Party members will abandon you if you kill someone they care about, but that doesn’t feel like much of a consequence when everyone is so bland.

More than anything, I’m disappointed by The Outer Worlds‘ black-and-white morality. Phineas Welles is basically Doc Brown in space, and the skeletons in his closet are utterly unremarkable. The Board, meanwhile, makes a case for their kitten-immolating evil being justified, but their rationalizations are nonsensical. None of this would matter if The Outer Worlds‘ writing was humorous because no one cares if cartoonishly over-the-top characters are complex. Huge chunks of the game consist of people trying to survive in a grounded world, unfortunately, and this causes most of the morality to feel dumbed-down. In terms of writing, The Outer Worlds is to Fallout: New Vegas what Fallout 4 was to Fallout 3.

The gameplay replicates modern Fallout but streamlines it in strange ways

There are no tagged skills (which allowed you to increase certain skills faster than others in the Fallout games) in The Outer Worlds, but it makes up for this by grouping 2-3 skills into categories and allowing you to spend your 10 skill points per level-up on the entire category. This only applies until a category has reached 50 points, but that’s more than enough to beat most skill checks during the first two-thirds of the game. You can also equip armor and a helmet that grants bonuses to skills, as can your allies (who increase your skills even more simply by being in the party). As a result, most players will have almost every possible skill check available to them for the majority of the game. It’s only at the very end that you’ll have to decide whether you want to be able to lockpick doors, hack computers, or intimidate people during conversations. This undermines The Outer Worlds‘ replay value by filling out your builds in a way that ensures that each playthrough will be similar to the last. There aren’t that many different weapon types, either, so the only thing differentiating each playthrough will be your choices and how they manifest.

Reactivity is one of the things that The Outer Worlds does better than most games, but much of it is smoke and mirrors. The game is broken up into smaller hub areas/worlds like in Mass Effect rather than being a continuous world, so your decisions are localized, with only the biggest ones rippling out and having any kind of real impact. There are definitely choices, though. You can leave a very real mark once you’ve worked your way up to the figures holding the real power.

The Outer Worlds‘ most interesting feature is actually an old feature carried over from the original Fallout games and other classic RPGs like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura: no one is invincible. Phineas Welles spends the game behind bulletproof glass, admittedly, but you have the freedom to walk up to anyone else and shoot them in the face.

This has interesting ramifications. For one thing, attacking someone is liable to draw in nearby faction allies. You can reduce the volume of gunfire using weapon mods, but there are no full-blown silencers, so being trigger-happy puts you at risk of killing someone who unlocks a long faction loyalty quest or sells an interesting weapon. Violence has its uses, though. Killing the boss of a faction you dislike can result in an ending where their faction withers away into irrelevance. If someone wants to send you on a long fetch quest in return for something, you can choose to shoot them and pocket it from their body instead. Everyone being equally vulnerable means that you have options.

The gunplay is weighty, but The Outer Worlds‘ combat has a long way to go

Fallout 3 and New Vegas didn’t have great gunplay, which probably had something to do with them recycling many of the mechanics and systems from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a fantasy game where the only ranged weapons were bows and magical effects. Fallout 4 improved its ranged combat by giving its weapons a sense of weight, fortunately, and The Outer Worlds takes the same approach to ensure that its weaponry feels substantial. That’s not enough to keep the gunplay interesting, though. For one thing, most enemies can be torn through like tissue paper on “normal” difficulty. I’d recommend turning the difficulty up to counteract that if not for the significant difficulty spike halfway in. That would be truly insufferable on higher difficulty settings. Once you’re equipped with weapons from the area that do more damage, however, everything gets pitifully easy again. The Outer Worlds‘ difficulty curve makes no sense. Many enemies have a penchant for lunging at you, too, and while the gunplay doesn’t feel floaty like the first 3D Fallout games, enemy movement definitely does. The only tool you have to even the odds is a bullet-time ability. It helps, but is entirely useless for discovering enemies when they’re hiding in bushes. There’s no automatic lock-on like Fallout has.

I encountered pop-in, audio bugs, disappearing enemies, and much more

The Xbox One version of The Outer Worlds needs some serious work. The most pressing issue is its loading screens that typically last 20-30 seconds—that would be fine for a traditional open-world game with a single large map, but a hub-based one adds two additional loading screens by forcing you to fast travel to your ship, change your ship’s location, and then fast travel out near wherever you’re going. That’s not good enough in a game that frequently requires zipping from planet to planet to complete even minor sidequests. Sometimes the console simply can’t keep up with a brisk jog and The Outer Worlds is forced to freeze the game so that it can load something. The console is always struggling to keep up in the loading department. It feels like menu buttons need to be hit multiple times before The Outer Worlds registers what you’re trying to do, and even opening the save screen can result in a dozen seconds of waiting around. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a console game in such poor shape.

I remember when RAGE came out on the Playstation 3 and many pointed out how bad its texture pop-in was. It’s outmatched by The Outer Worlds, which sees textures (including eyebrows!) pop-in every time the camera shifts its position to get input from one of your companions. And I can’t tell if it’s related, but sometimes this pop-in is accompanied by voice acting that doesn’t actually play. It becomes impossible to skip past the line when it happens, too, suggesting that it might be a loading issue. The whole thing is a technical mess.

There were even two occasions where the audio became hopelessly bugged, causing sound effects to slow down and break apart whenever I’d move around. You move a lot.

Other issues are intentional or too strange to tell either way. At one point, a four-legged enemy appeared to use a door and disappear. Running toward the door caused two other enemies to become hostile, though, and when I turned my back to them, they teleported behind me instantly. Fall damage is also a serious problem in The Outer Worlds, in large part because of the prevalence of invisible walls. It may look like you can drop down from a high point onto a platform, but that platform is most likely a smooth slope that slides you off while retaining your momentum, resulting in instant death once you hit the ground. These invisible walls also make climbing virtually impossible, so you’re stuck following roads lined with enemies rather than creating your own shortcuts. That really bugged me.

Nothing bothered me quite as much as how railroaded I felt at the end of the game, though. It’s not just that destroying-the-village-with-robots thing; I was constantly left with only one realistic option for solving problems where before I had been offered multiple choices. The Outer Worlds‘ early gameplay provides opportunities to accept tasks and subsequently betray task-givers, but you always seem to be upfront about your intentions toward the end. Being able to build goodwill with someone you dislike and then use the help they provide against them is immensely satisfying. Having that freedom disappear once you’re finally in a position to strike at The Outer Worlds‘ power structure is a huge letdown.

Sometimes, the game outright undermines your preferred approach. I decided to try diplomacy and stealth to make it through the game’s final area without bloodshed, only for the factions I befriended throughout the game to show up to an area none of them had the clearance to land in and start firing on every enemy in sight while I tried to sneak my way around. This was after a conversation with the crew about talking our way in. I chose that option from a list of choices, so it’s not like The Outer Worlds didn’t know what I was trying to do. It’s nothing less than bad design.

The setting is colorful and interesting, while the music only stands out once

Visually, The Outer Worlds has a major edge over Fallout, taking place in the far future on several different planets and space stations. The setting can be overwhelming at first when the unfamiliar flora and fauna first hit you, and this can make it unnecessarily difficult to notice things early on before you can differentiate between usable objects and background decorations, but it’s always magical looking up and seeing a large moon with rings while the lighting casts everything in a pinkish glow. Many conversations are cast in a flat blue light that’s downright ugly, though. The lighting has some undeniable low points. As for The Outer Worlds‘ soundtrack, I wasn’t very impressed. I spent something like 23 hours playing and only remember one track: it’s a minimalist track that’s kind of like a bell (maybe a synth of some kind?) that first plays when you come across a town that’s recently seen many of its people slaughtered. The track does a good job of establishing the underlying sadness of the carnage. Then you walk into a building and a scientist tells you that he’s working on a diet toothpaste, at which point the atmosphere created and maintained by the music pops and none of the pieces of the scene fit together anymore. That’s The Outer Worlds in a nutshell. It’s okay, but I can’t recommend it.

Story: 1.5/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

The Outer Worlds review – Not quite reaching the stars first appeared on Killa Penguin