Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2019
Sarcastic Skyrim in space, guys! Seriously! Sarcastic. Skyrim. In Space. I don't even know where to begin with this one considering just how randomly it fell into my life. The Outer Worlds received almost no advertisements or reviews prior to its release. Obsidian just seemed to take a few concepts (Fallout, No Man's Sky, etc.) and blended it together and hoped for the best. My boyfriend, clever nugget that he is, bought it for me while I was on vacation, pre-installed it on my Xbox, and once I got around to booting it up and giving it a go I got immediately hooked. Using a clever basis of sarcasm and witticism, the game can freely make fun of itself and receive little flak otherwise. Yes, your companions are basically just target fodder, but that's funny because unless you're playing on impossible mode they always pop back up to life after each battle, sometimes even giving you compliments for being a badass. Yes, you can kill almost every NPC you come across and somehow the game will limp along dully. Yes, you can just give up on your equipment and weapon upkeep because you can just run through the game, shooting yourself up with health and saltuna (Bumblebee, eat your heart out) every 60 seconds. It lends itself to the sarcasm the game is built on, and makes it almost perfect.
Story goes that you are one of the lost colonists on a ship called, aptly, The Hope. These colonists, from Earth, have some of the most brilliant minds, supposedly, from our home planet, sent to Halcyon to colonize and rebuild 'cause we clearly effed up our original home-space. The Hope has been lost somewhere, sent adrift 70 years ago after it failed to make it fully to Halcyon, a cluster of planets around a star by the same name. One wacky scientist with the look of Doc Brown from Back to the Future has found The Hope, bypassed security, managed to revive you, and forced you to help him out. Endearing little man that he is, you seem unable to do anything but oblige...and you never get the opportunity to kill him as the story progresses pleasantly through its paces. Thankfully, you have the option to be pissed off about it the whole time. As I said, almost every NPC can be slaughtered. So you can go that route, or you can be the do-gooder against the corporations that has sent Halcyon into the toilet. To add to the dynamic, nearly every option in between the pissed-off-sky-pirate or the do-good-darling you can become is just as interesting. Factions or groups of people in Halcyon can admire AND fear you at the same time; they are not mutually exclusive as a little blurb during the load screens proudly announces.
Anyway, so you're dropped into this space-dystopia and your goal is to save your fellow colonists, still trapped in perpetual sleepy-time on The Hope. Thanks to some not so well explained reasons, you can control time for short periods and that's your one and only superpower, which I guess is cool. Otherwise, points as you level up go to skills like language skills that can convince NPCs to do your bidding, weapons handling, health increases when using medicine, etc. You also get perk points that can help out your superpower or speed up its cooldown time or these points can boost your skills further. In addition, as you travel through the world, you will be given the opportunity to get additional perk points by inhibiting something else. For example, if you come across too much acid and you get burned a lot, you can have a sensitivity to acid attacks in exchange for a perk point. I did none of these, but to each his/her own! Make your character sensitive to everything but walking, I dare ya!
My favorite part of the whole game is the dialog and writing. Holy cannoli cream! The story isn't exactly the most bursting-with-life plot, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, I'm kind of glad that you have no idea if you'll ever really do the right thing by reviving the lost colonists. You're a reluctant, out of place hero and that's perfect for the feeling of the game. With endless dialogue options, get ready to sit and listen to almost every person drip with distaste, sarcasm, and just enough wroth that makes everyone seem to have a wonderful sense of depth. Hell, even the computer terminals you come across, rife with messages from minor characters, and the descriptions of guns and products do not scrape by without being touched by the magic of the writers of this game. In addition, if you're a well-rounded dork you will come across a multitude of Star Wars easter eggs, Alien easter eggs, etc.
The gameplay is fluid and has almost no glitches or hiccups in the Matrix. One downfall is there's very little explanation of your HUD (where your health and time control is displayed) and you have to sort of accidentally discover how to do things unless you google it, of which there's precious little information thanks to how, surprisingly, unpopular the game is thanks to lack of advertising. Despite that, the game is forgiving enough that at a normal difficulty you should have no problems figuring it out. It's, somewhat, part of its charm: you really do feel out of place in a galaxy that has grown through almost two generations of "normalcy." The music is unobtrusive, well put-together, and non-repetitive. The worlds are just alien enough, without relying too heavily on this concept. In addition, the game is a closed-world...is that the proper term for it? Open-world vs. closed-world? Whatever, it works. There are a very finite number of side missions, and the worlds/moons you visit aren't impossibly tremendous. After accessing fast travel to a few locations, you'll be zipping around completing stuff in no time which gives the game a sense of finality, purpose, and it doesn't get boring.
Overall, the game is worth the buy, worth the time, and worth the effort ESPECIALLY if you have a soft spot in your heart for perpetual, unending sarcasm. I am wholeheartedly not a first-person-shooter type and this game won me over. True, the fighting dynamic comes second to the story, which helps its case some, but the whole point is that the game is well-rounded enough to support itself without feeling like it has to bury itself in any particular genre. It tells you from the get-go that Spacer's Choice isn't the best choice, it's Spacer's Choice. I have a feeling the developers felt the same way about The Outer Worlds. There are "better" games out there, but this one comes close enough for government work.
