Outriders seems to want you to play like you’re playing Gears of War, which isn’t a stretch, given its developer.
Polish studio People Can Fly is the studio behind 2013’s Gears of War: Judgment, and there is so much of that game here. To a fault, really. Last, generation level design is all around. That Xbox 360 brown fudge, that convenient hip-high cover dipped generously into a war-torn flan. Chunky enemies and chunks of enemies, bad guys exploding in a puff of blood for no real reason at all. The chug of a rifle, a shotgun blast when someone gets too close. Hold a button to . Even the name of the game sounds like something Spark Unlimited would have come up with the decade before last.
10 Reasons Why You Need To Play The Outriders Demo [PEGI] Watch on YouTube
The story is one I’ve heard a million times before. It revolves around a soldier who mysteriously gains powers and must fight to save humanity on a harsh alien planet called Enoch. There’s a quite incredible tonal whiplash as your soldier shifts from utter bemusement to wise-cracking asshole and back again. Outriders is trying to be a gritty, cool sci-fi romp, but its demo is too often undone by unintentionally hilarious cutscenes whose character deaths ought to be accompanied by canned laughter. The story teases that you’ll eventually uncover the truth about the alien planet’s mysterious energy, but when the writing’s this bad it’s hard to care.
And it’s, you know, quite janky. Outriders does a lot of things other games do and it does them not as well. The cover system is fiddly, the shooting imprecise and the animations jarring. There’s no jump button so you get those silly moments where you can’t step up onto a knee-high ledge. The sprint is kind of hilarious in a sped-up, Benny Hill sort of way. There are lots of little quality of life annoyances sprinkled throughout, the kind of annoyances you used to get in the early noughties. I’ve already reported on the immersion-breaking cutscenes for loading. The normal cutscenes have an annoying camera shake for super gritty effect (People Can Fly tells me this will be tweaked in time for launch). The normal cutscenes also have terrible audio and lip-syncing. And don’t get me started on the user interface, which is so clearly lifted from Destiny’s as to border on plagiarism.
So far, so mediocre. And thus Outriders would remain, I’m sure, if played like Gears of War from 2013. But against the run of play, Outriders is at its best when you ditch the cover and get stuck in.
7 Things We Liked About Outriders And 5 Things We Didn’t – OUTRIDERS GAMEPLAY Watch on YouTube
Your character’s magic powers are significantly more effective and more fun than shooting guns. The Devastator class, for example, can pound the ground for an earthquake effect, leap into the air and teleport to an enemy for a big blow, and even catch bullets they fire back.