Review: The Outer Worlds

It is easy to tell a Japanese RPG from a Western one. JRPG’s focus on cool visuals, heavily inspired from anime and manga with at times cheesy dialog and story lines and combat that features summoning monsters and comically over sized swords. Western RPG’s, generally speaking, focus on the dialog and story, presenting worlds that seem to brim with possibilities. Obsidian Entertainments The Outer Worlds is very much the second of these, and in some ways is an excellent example, but not so much in others. 

You play as the sole revived occupant of ‘The Hope’, a colony ship left on the edge of  the Halcyon colony, light years from earth. The man that revived you says he can save the thousands of other colonists on the ship if you help him, and of course you do, setting you forth on an adventure across space stations and worlds to encounter a cast of crazy characters, strange planets and vicious monsters. So far, so RPG. 

To solidify this, there are stats, upgradable weapons, companions and quests. Everything you would want from an RPG, except for one important thing: Stakes. The stakes here never feel world ending, there isn’t some ‘big bad’ coming to destroy you, it is a smaller tale than that, which is a deliberate design choice but one that makes everything feel a little bit muted and understated. 

There is a sense of humor to The Outer Worlds that a lot of RPG’s lack, and this comes through in the excellent writing and story lines. The tale of corporations running everything and the rivalry between each one that leads employees to not even take medicine if it isn’t made by the one they work for is something genuinely different and fun, with people you encounter saying the company marketing line at the end of every sentence. It can get a little tedious, but that is kind of the point, corporate policy infringing on everything in your life is just that. 

You start out a loner, but soon come upon your first companion, Pravati, an engineer naive in the way of the colony. This is where the game really comes into its own, showcasing the excellent, nuanced writing that is truly the hallmark of The Outer Worlds. Each companion is a very unique character you help shape over the course of the story, and the both satisfying and disappointing ending wrap up scenes serve as a nice conclusion to each arc, though that does depend on how much of each character's quest line you complete. 

The game is a bit Mass Effect 2 in that regard, with each character coming with a ‘loyalty mission’ style quest line that gives back story and develops each one into those unique characters. The best part is that they aren’t ‘go to this place, fight a bunch of creatures/bad guys and win’. A couple are, but most are helping these characters find closure on an aspect of their lives or giving advice in times or need. 

Of course, you do have the option to be a massive dick. This being a story and character heavy RPG you get the option to be good, bad or somewhere in between, and characters do change to reflect that. Being the person I am, good was my path through the game and I saw plenty to give me a satisfying conclusion. It’s all this that will make or break the game for you in the end, if you find the dialog grating or cheesy, and hate the voice acting, cause everyone is then this won’t be the game for you. It’s not, but that's just my opinion, the voice acting is pretty great throughout, though most people have a southern american accent that isn’t for everyone. The writing as previously stated is excellent and these feel like real people, it's truly impressive. 

What's not impressive however, is the combat. It’s in there, it works, but it's just all so lackluster. The guns have little weight to them and on most encounters are so very easy they are a bump in the road rather than an obstacle to overcome. To put into perspective about how easy these encounters are, each companion comes with a unique combat ability, as well as things that boost your stats in certain ways but the fights being as easy as they were I didn’t have to use these abilities. In fact I actively forgot about them until about two hours from the end of the game. 

The ability to assign different states to your companions doesn’t help with this either, since setting them to aggressive and giving them decent weapons and armour means they will just wade in and wreck anything they see, though this does normally result in at least one dying. On the plus side, as soon as all the enemies have been dealt with they instantly revive, so it's no big deal. 

All that was required was the guns to feel that little bit more weighty, like actual armaments, and the enemies to be harder to kill, just by a little bit and that would have given a better performance out of the combat. As it stands, if it wasn’t there at all you wouldn’t lose that much when playing, which is a shame because effort has been made here, with a variety of weapons both ranged and melee that give you plenty of options, it just all feels kind of pointless. 

Travelling about the halcyon colony grants you areas that include a space station, cities and small towns on a few different planets. It's a bummer that there isn’t more of this as the stellar map has several planets you can’t seem to go to, though to be fair I didn’t find all the companions during my play through so that could have changed, as well as the fact I played as a good guy so the options could have changed. The environments I traveled to were pretty varied and very nice looking, so monotony didn’t set in until the back travelling kicked in towards the end of the game. 

The Outer Worlds is a great RPG that just needs better combat. The writing, characters, environments and tone provide a unique setting that is entertaining to explore. There are ideas around what characters in a game of this type could be and prove successful and satisfying, and despite the ending scroll being disappointing for its lack of animation it gives you closure to a character set you come to love, especially for your player character.

 If you are itching for a RPG that doesn’t have all the over top weapons and summons of a JRPG then this is the game for you, and it isn’t over a hundred hours to play, so it doesn’t out stay its welcome. As western RPG’s go, this is a great one.

Review: Destiny 2

Let me say this straight away: If you didn’t like the original Destiny, stop reading and go play something you do. Destiny 2 differs in some good ways, but the core mechanic of shooting various factions of bad guys in the face remains almost completely unchanged, so if you didn’t like it then you ain’t gonna like now.

The follow up to Bungie’s loot fest is...well a loot fest, but one with a way better story, some logical and needed changes to how said loot works and some new areas and planets. That doesn’t mean to say you won’t be playing through those same places over and over again to grind out better guns and armour, but let’s be honest here, that is, and always will be, Destiny.

In the first five minutes of the campaign, Destiny 2 tells more story in a better way than the whole of vanilla Destiny combined, excluding maybe The Taken King expansion. This time around it is the faction known as the Cabal who are the big bad, with a particularly evil leader taking the fight to the guardians.

The tower, the main social hub of the first game is destroyed as is the last city for the most part, and of course the mysterious giant sphere hovering above, The Traveller is under attack. This means that your side actually starts on the back foot, as the light The Traveller provides no longer protects you, which means you are mortal again, i.e. you get killed you are dead.

Except that's not quite right because of course you get those powers back. Honestly the major beats of the story are sci-fi action movie hokum, but Dominus Ghaul, leader of the Red Legion is actually an interesting antagonist, with an agenda beyond “Lets just kill everything!”. It adds much needed backstory to the Cabal, and enriches the Destiny universe overall. Even better, you don’t have to go to a website and look up a bunch of cards to get it, it's all done in game.

On the Guardian side of the story, the main three leaders from the first game return: Cayde-6, Zavala, and Ikora Rey. They entrust saving the good guys to you for the main part, but also get their hands dirty when required, again providing good backstory to the universe. Cayde in particular is witty and great, Nathan Fallion continuing a quality voice acting streak coupled with some good and funny writing.

Once the main campaign is complete, after a few hours, the main meat of the game opens up and then it becomes, well it becomes Destiny. You return to areas, grinding out more powerful loot, you do strikes - more difficult version of missions, you run patrols, do the raid if you have friends and time and complete quests. If all this sounds familiar then you would be right, but the thing about this franchise is, at its core, it's really good.

All of the main changes to the format are quality of life improvements over the first game for the most part and improve the overall experience, but that core shooting is still just as awesome as it ever was. If you didn’t like it first time, you won’t like it second, simple as. If you did, you will find an improved experience, one that streamlines some aspects of the original.

For example, you now don’t have to return to Orbit to travel to another planet. Simply pulling up the director will allow you to go to any of the planets available, which are, apart from Earth, all new. It might sound simple, but it really was a pain in the ass in the first game and is probably the best improvement in my eyes.

Another change is that your weapon classifications have changed to Kinetic, energy and power. Again it might not sound like much, but the secondary Energy weapons allow you to take down the shields on certain enemies quickly, and deal more damage when you do. The power weapons are your sniper rifles, rocket launchers and the new grenade launcher. That last one is a bummer because I have yet to find a good one, and it seems massively unpredictable when using it.

That's the thing about Destiny though, you will always find a loadout that works for your playstyle, and the loot comes thick and fast, so one rubbish weapon type is no big deal. That is coupled with another new addition: weapon mods. These are almost exactly like what you have used in other games, slotting one in will change the guns elemental affinity or increase its strength, a useful way to change things up. You can also feed more powerful weapons of the same type to a weaker one, improving it if you really do find one you like.

The final main combat change is for each subclass, those awesome abilities that let you shooting lightning from your hands or use a giant fire sword. They each now come with specializations, which allow you to customize your character with say, more focus on your super or helping your team keep a killstreak for longer.

It is cool but honestly it is something for the more hardcore players out there, casual types such as myself will notice little difference. That’s not to say it isn’t a good addition, but it will apply more to the raid and strikes than anything else. To be fair, that was the same in the first game with some aspects, the more you play the more nuance you will get out of the combat.

One annoying aspect is the fact that shaders now apply to just one piece of equipment, rather than your overall look, and are one use only. Again this might not seem like much, but when you can only change a couple of bits to the same colour, it can be vexing. Though to be fair, it can make for some very unique looking characters.

Those who played the first game will be wondering just how much content is in this game, as the last one was...sparse to say the least. The good news is that there is so much more to do, and exploring the maps feels so much better this time around because there are small things to find, such as regional chests with loot to grab and lost sectors, which are small PvE encounters that are a bit more of a challenge than just roaming around fighting enemies on the surface.

It doesn’t include the standard strikes, public events, random firefights, patrols and et all that dot each planet, so there is so much more to do in Destiny 2 and it really does feel like an evolution of the formula. That said, you will, inevitably, get to the end of all that, and then what?

Well, frankly, that is Destiny. You play until you can’t, put it down, and wait for the next DLC. If you have friends you can run the strikes with them, play the raid (which still doesn’t have matchmaking) and fight in the multiplayer focused Crucible. Eventually you will grow tired, and again wait for that next DLC, and if that isn’t what you want out of your gaming experience, maybe this isn’t for you. Those who get it though, who loved the first one and want more of that, well, Destiny 2 is the perfect sequel.

It won’t make you change your mind if you didn’t like the first one on a fundamental level, but if you did it's a great follow up, improving just about everything you wanted from it’s predecessor. The core shooting is still amazing, the game is as gorgeous to look at as ever, and the quality of life improvements streamline the experience in much needed ways. Destiny 2 is worthy of the time you will put into it, until the inevitable day you close it and await the next pack of content.