Premise - I like the game but for what is worth it, pick it up if they ever fix the most glaring issues: lag, skill glitches, inventory wiping and latency. I usually play only with my friends so take this as a co-op MP review. This review is also long and verbose because I'm not allowed to complain about the game to friends 'cus they like it ( ): ) and I needed to vent. (I'm sorry.)
TL;DR - Outriders is a good game if played in SP (or in MP with people that live on your same landmass) but it's still very much a work in progress that needs to be extensively beta-tested at the modicum price of $60.
• THE SINGLE PLAYER 7.5/10
SP experience is, by far, the most stable in terms of gameplay and netcode: I haven't experienced a lot of issues by myself, even if lag sometimes is persistent. Biggest issue is that you have to be online to play SP while there's no reason for you to unless you plan on catching up with friends.
Lobby rules were terrible before their "default to closed" choice: their "default to open to all" meant I sometimes got randos or people from my Steam List that I didn't even remember talking to me in a decade joining up for no reason.
But, all in all, if you just want to enjoy the game at your own pace and have it a bit easier while still feeling the clutch of challenge, SP is the way to go as I've felt at my most comfortable when I didn't lag and just glitch somewhere.
• THE STORY 2/10
We can all be more inventive than "guys, it's Literally Hitler!" trope that's been overused wrongly for the longest time. Worst reveal of the entire story, considering you don't even have a chance to grow sympathetic to the Pax due to how rushed the entire plotline seems to feel.
Do you want abysmal characters with the brain of peanuts, clashing together every few moments only to become - out of the blue - the most cohesive band of ragtag adventurers? That's what you get characters wise. The most interesting ones die and you get stuck with your run of the mill angsty teenager, fervent and good hearted scientist and Bentley. Of all of these characters? The only one I actually didn't mind was Bentley herself - make that of what you will.
Story wise, if the first spoiler didn't already tell you how frustrated I feel with this plot... it could've been much more. There was no reason to gut it in the middle only to have that specific cliché appear to make me feel less bad about killing Agst or for not understanding the Pax (who, to this day, have not been understood as PCFS has decided to be as ambiguous on what the Anomaly does as a question mark in the middle of the road at midnight).
All in all, the story is whatever made even more unbearable by the characters and by the lackluster cutscenes.
• MULTIPLAYER 2/10
The multiplayer is not a really fun part of the game. Lag, difficulty and just general few things that don't feel like they're quite where they should be.
CONNECTIVITY 1/5
For a reason or another, PCF has decided that if you're on a different landmass than your party? you get to suffer tremendous lag, with stutters and annoyingly impossible mobs that will make you want to go back to The Division. None of the other games has this stutter and lag when connecting to friends who are across the ocean.
DIFFICULTY SCALING 1/5
The difficulty doesn't scale gracefully as the game doesn't really understand that "more is more difficult" doesn't equal to "fun". At World 14, bosses are sponges - both in fun and bullets - with continuous skill casting and resistance to most interrupts (Venator's Knife doesn't land at all on them most times) to the point where trying to coordinate with three players to stun some of the unavoidable stuff (Chain Lightning, Lightning Strike, Anomaly Rift, Void Pull...) that makes navigating the battlefield a nightmare is not even worth your time. That said, you don't only get to kill things slower, you also get to kill more of the same type of enemy, with constant barrages of low-tier trash mobs that swarm you.
It also does not help that strafing usually makes your entire character go heavily to either left or either right... or that lag makes taking cover one of the most confusing things in the game.
CLASSES 4/5
Unless you're planning ahead with your team, you might end up having one of the most unsatisfying experiences when playing your class; with a Technomancer and Pyromancer in my team (both heavy damage dealing classes), I feel underperforming due to the nerfs that swatted away my ability of basing my build on Warped Bullets and, instead, rely on two other skills... two of them fallible as they are prone to glitch.
So buckle up and watch an optimizing guide, because else you'll look at the results of the expeditions and see yourself at a mere 2mil damage against the 8mil of your spec'd Pyromancer friend.
• ENEMIES 6/10
For being a game where the "we're only 20,000 remaining and most of us are on the opposing team" you sure do a lot of human killing at the beginning - not to mention that even the lowest common denominator of bad guy ("I am juking this old man for supplies" kind of bad guy) has a swarm of people at their command.
That said, there's virtually no difference between fighting the Ferals or fighting Humans as the only thing that changes between the two of them is the presence of a singular enemy that floats around and casts Anomaly related skills. The heavy armored grunts wielding a machine gun are simply renamed to fit the tribadic theme of the Ferals, the melee enemies are the same, the Riflemen get turned into Trappers and the Sharpshooter to Huntsmen.
Most annoying thing is that, the AI never misses. Their bullets are almost heatseeking in the pinpoint accuracy they have and they will do the same amount of damage to you whether you are close in their face or far away... and the shotgun works the same way.
ELITES 3.5/5
Being as lackluster as any other enemy you find in the game (some bosses - like the last boss before endgame - are simply reskin and steroids fueled of other Elites, at least they gave him something interesting in 2nd phase), Elites are simply there to make you curse multiple times. In SP, they're feasibly beatable without much of an hassle even at highest difficulty - but in MP they become a boring mechanic meant to stall you from continuing to the next area.
(MULTIPLAYER) Returning on the matter of Difficulty Balancing, if in SP you can fight one elite and multiple swarming rank-and-file enemies, in MP you now get to beat three elites, all of them with skills to shield, heal or power themselves up.
MONSTERS 2/5
I had imagined the game would revolve around the thwarted fauna of the game - one of the most interesting aspects of the game was that - but we only got to see perhaps... 6 to 7 types of enemies, all of them repeating themselves and some with variations based on whether you were stuck in a hot place or not. The Magma Spider was probably the closest thing to a unique monster you can get as most of the other bigguns just tend to repeat over and over... with a lack of Crawlers, for some reason.
• OTHER POINTS
I wish this game would return more on the Anomaly + Black Fungi path that it had taken for the plot: they were interesting happenings that could've brought some depth to our Singular Braincelled Protagonist as they faced repercussions for what they did out of "me shoot gun, ask questions latur" but the Black Fungi subplot was as rushed as one could be (what did they need Angst for if the Enclave kept producing the virus anyhow without him? We don't know. What we know is that the conflict created by our stupid actions - like killing the scientist who made the antidote in the first place on moral grounds after we've reportedly done worse on Earth -is solved in a side quest, taking less than 5 minutes).
