I was interested in this game when it was announced. Pretty simple reason: it’s made by People Can Fly, the same people that made Painkiller and Bulletstorm. So they have a pretty good track record for great games, Bulletstorm being one of my favorite non-DOOM FPS games.

But quickly red flags were showing up for this game. It just… looked strange. It finally ended up getting a demo. That demo… removed all possible hype for me. But I did notice some people saying it was good, and it’s possible that I just chose a character class that’s not fun to play. So with the current Epic Game Store sale and the constant 10$ coupon during the duration of the sale, this ended up being half-price. So I figured on friday that I’d grab it and it’d be my long-weekend game (it was Victoria Day weekend in Canada). And boy do I feel like I wasted my time.

Let’s go and talk about why! No, this is not a review because I’m not done with it, and I don’t want to play any more of it. If you want to treat this as a review go right ahead because this is the closest I’ll get to it.

Developer: People Can Fly
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: April 1st 2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version played)
Genre: Cover-based semi-RPG third-person shooter

So this game is balls. There’s many reasons why.

So this is a cover-based semi-RPG third-person shooter with loot mechanics. An important thing for action games to be fun, first and foremost, is to not have cover mechanics. Cover systems are anti-fun, as they encourage being bored behind a wall just waiting for enemies to pop up. They work for stealth games, and literally nothing else. If you have a cover system, it needs to be complemented by a system that’s both funner than taking cover and more effective. Cover should be a last resort. Vanquish did that. It had a cover system (that is useful exactly once in the game),  but the actual gameplay is about sliding on your knees all over a level, activating bullet time to quickly take out enemies. Outriders… has the skill system. It’s not ideal. Another thing a loot-based game needs, is loot that’s fun. Outriders has nothing. All the loot sucks.

So this is a shitty cover-based shooter. When that’s the start point of your game, that’s not a good start. In the demo I played a class that encouraged using cover as well which is pretty bad. It was super effective, because of course being in a position where you can’t get hit 90% of the time means you’ll never die. The game “fixes” that by having some classes that need to be close to enemies to heal, so some of them need to get in the middle of enemy groups to thrive… ish. I mean, you can still just stay behind cover most of the time and only get close to enemies as needed. I tried to avoid that, but it’s sadly the ideal strategy. If the ideal strategy in a game is to stay crouched behind a wall, you just made crap.

How this game works is that you have a choice of 4 classes (as you’re not only the “last” Outrider (which doesn’t work if you’re doing multiplayer) but also you become “altered”). The descriptions for them are awful so you don’t really know what they do before not just unlocking them but also getting them to level 22. The quirk is that each class has a different way to heal their HP, as there’s no HP-healing items. You can heal through life leech from equipment, but that not ideal most of the time. You fully heal at the end of an encounter, otherwise during battle it’s class-based. One of them heals by hitting enemies with any attack. 2 of them heal specifically from kills from really close. The other heals from kills on enemies that they marked with their skills. So the one that heals from any damage… stay behind that wall. The others, stay behind the wall but move up from time to time if your health gets low. Not sure about the pyromancer, feels like staying behind the wall is fine if you can mark enemies from a distance.

As you level up each class you get access to more skills. I had played the Technomancer in the demo. He had grenades and turrets and stuff I forget now. He was OP because he relied on cover. The other class I played is the Trickster, which is MEANT to be a hit-and-run kinda class… That’s not how it really ends up working because its skills aren’t good for that at all (there’s one skill that actually does the “run” part of hit-and-run, but it’s otherwise awful to use). You only select 3 skills at once, out of a selection of 8. For Trickster I found that only the first 3 skills were any good. While there’s less reliance on cover with Trickster, it’s still OP because it’s cover, but because you need to be close to enemies to heal, you do need to get in the thick of things pretty often.

The loot is tremendously boring. It’s basically a few types of guns that all function identically (some have different variants like assault rifles have semi-auto, burst fire and full auto modes). Each weapon gets a few random attributes, most of which aren’t interesting (and you should be aiming to get life leech, as anything else is useless). Higher rarities get extra random attributes, most of these are pretty useless too. A few seconds of poison damage? That’s nothing since you can kill everything so fast anyways. The only one that matters is inducing Slow, and some minor healing ones. Higher rarity armor also has a chance of powering up your skills very mildly. None of this is interesting, it’s just adding numbers to your numbers. You can power up equipment, so the numbers are better… yay? You can also increase rarity but the material for this is tremendously rare (and it’s the same material for upgrading purple/yellow equipment, so… oof). Basically the loot strategy is “choose 2 gun types you like, and use the ones with weapon life leech and the better numbers” and you’re pretty much good to go for the whole game as far as gear.

The combat is ass. Basically every area is just a bunch of cover randomly placed, and the devs figured out basically waves of enemies that spawn at awful spawn points in big chunks. Kill all the enemies, a few more pop up once or twice, and that’s it for that combat area. If you’re playing Technomancer you’re fine because you’re behind cover all the time, far from where the enemies spawn. Other classes need to get up close more, which means sometimes you randomly get a ton of enemies spawning directly on top of you, killing you in a second. Maybe it’s just that Trickster is really weak, but enemies just focus the shit out of you and kill you real fast. This is really shit design, you’re making classes that NEED to be in the middle of enemies, but you make them spawn in huge groups right where the player needs to be, which makes them get killed in a second… And these enemies are so good that they can shoot at you directly even if their gun isn’t pointed at you, super! Maybe the tanky class is better for this. The Trickster is supposed to be hit-and-run, but the teleport skills are both one-way (one is hit, the other is run), but you wouldn’t want to spend 2 of your 3 skill slots on these. The run one is specifically a “return to marked spot” skill, so it’s not as useable as the other one. The other skill you could use to run is the slow trap, which makes a dome where everything including bullets are slowed down, other than you… but it’s not very effective for that, it’s better for attack. The other Trickster skills are dumb. One gives you shield which is pointless. One throws knifes which I guess is fine but I prefer the sword. One just makes your bullets stronger for one reload’s worth (so it’s useless!)… This is sort of meant to be a multiplayer game, which… I feel would make everything way too easy? I dunno, the combat areas are already as filled as possible with enemies, I doubt they can put more in there. Also the hitboxes are weird. You can have a shotgun at point blank centered on an enemy and you’ll just miss… It’s a bit off. There’s also no interesting movement options. Just “go to other cover spot”, running and rolling. The Trickster can teleport but it sucks.

Progression is just “go where the main quest tells you to go”. It’s pretty standard. Each area has one or 2 side quests (which are just areas for boring combat), and eventually you also unlock hunts (which are strong monsters that are really boring to fight) and bounties (which are strong humans that are boring to fight).  One system here is the world tier. You get EXP when you kill stuff, but you also increase your world tier meter. If you die that world tier meter goes down (it can go down to the minimum for that tier, but not down a previous tier). Filling up the meter unlocks the next tier, which increases various things like enemy levels and overall strength (basically they go a number of levels above you).  You can switch back to previous tiers if you have difficulty with the latest one. I have no huge issues with this system, except that the game is basically exactly the same no matter how far you get because enemies are always a few levels above you based on world tier. So there’s no particularly hard areas, and no particularly easy areas. It’s just… mild the whole way.

Also the game is a bit glitched at points. There’s some areas where the game would randomly teleport me for no reason. There’s some times where the quest tracker would glitch and point me to the wrong place (it would frequently point me to areas that it wouldn’t even let me enter… even though my quest wasn’t in those areas). It’s small things here and there. Nothing that ended up breaking the game, but annoying time-wasters. Once major glitch I got is that activating Max FPS disables enemy sounds (so I thought I was getting hit by nothing for part of the game, it was enemy bullets that I just wasn’t hearing). I have no idea how this can happen, but it does.

Overall

Outriders is awful, unfortunately. The boring cover-based combat, the boring loot, the boring classes (I’m basing that on only playing 2 of them, maybe I’m wrong and the game is only good with the other 2, that’s… absolutely possible… I don’t care enough to try it.), the boring side-quests that are just… more boring combat… This game is just not fun. After 14 hours of play (roughly, I may have left it on a bit during dinner once), I just don’t want to keep going. This is just bad. And I’m near the end anyways, before getting to the post-game stuff which is just more boring to do.

People Can Fly have made good games before. This one is awful. Do not buy. I hope they do better next time, the team that made Bulletstorm SHOULD be able to keep pumping out quality. All devs has missteps. Hopefully that’s all this is, and not a look at what’s to come.

That 5.7 user score on Metacritic is overly generous. It implies some quality.