Outriders Demo Impressions
The demo shows that Outriders has a lot of potential and below we will share more about what we have thought about the game so far.
Intro
The Outriders demo released on February 25th on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4 and PS5. We played the demo on PS5 and Xbox Series X, but our gameplay was recorded on PS5. The game is being developed by People Can Fly, developers of Bulletstorm and Gears of War Judgement, and published by Square Enix. The demo shows that Outriders has a lot of potential and below we will share more about what we have thought about the game so far.
The Story So Far…
If you want to avoid any spoilers of the story you can skip this section. The story starts out with a colony of survivors from earth looking for a new place called home since the earth was destroyed. They originally had two colony ships but only one made it through the 85-year journey of finding a habitable planet. They eventually found a new planet called Enoch. Things seemed to be going fine at first. But the more they were set up and looking around, there was a lot there that made them realize it was not as safe as they thought it was. What awaited them was a deadly storm that caused them to fight among each other for supplies to survive and to attempt to bring order to this new planet. There was a split in deciding what they wanted to do: leaving the planet or staying and trying to avoid the dangers.
This led to unnecessary deaths, and you eventually being put in cryo-sleep. You eventually get out of it many years later by someone you do not recognize. The world is in ruins, and you get dragged out onto a battlefield by an army of people who have been killing and torturing people. You end up being left for dead because a storm called the Anomaly is coming. Your character ends up getting killed but because you are an Altered Outrider, you survive and gain new powers to shepherd your crew to safety (you get to choose your abilities which we will get into later). There is more to it as the story unfolds but so far it has been going really well. The story actually surprised us with how good it was. It was interesting with how they introduced the world and certain characters (especially ones you thought would be with you past the prologue/tutorial).
The way you are introduced to your abilities was pretty cool as well because it builds the world and lore rather than just randomly giving you powers. It showed what the colony went through after all the years you have been in cryo-sleep and how many things can change when preparations are not in place. We cannot wait to see where they go next with the story, and we hope it develops into a great one.
The Visuals
All right, the graphics for Outriders are weird to us especially because we have played a lot of recent visually nice games such as Ghost of Tsushima or even Gears 5. Outriders is not bad, but it feels and looks like it was made at the end of the Xbox 360 and PS3 era in terms of character animations and a few other things. There are some great things though, the environment, especially when the story progresses, looks really great and seeing the animals in the habitat felt fresh. The character customization was really dope and knowing that you can change how your character looks after the initial customization is what more games should do. The detail on weapons and armor is great, it just sucks that we could not find unique equipment as much compared to others to see how the details really shined.
The ability effects are nice, but it feels clunky, sometimes worse than Remnant from The Ashes (another third person RPG shooter). We are sure those things can get updated, but from the demo it gets us kind of concerned for the visuals because it is being developed from the company that made Bulletstorm and Gears of War Judgment, two very visually appealing games and we feel like that was lost somewhere in the development. Also noting that Square Enix are the publishers, they should have some support to bring Outriders on par with this generation of games in terms of feel and visuals.
Music and Sound
The sound is pretty decent. Hearing the way, the guns shoot and the sound of the skills and abilities when using them reminded us of a little bit of the Mass Effect series (especially 3). But so far, the way it is implemented is all right. The impact of the hits and kills is nice though, but if there is too much happening in combat the sound of it gets delayed at times. In terms of the music, there was not much we can remember that we felt was really good or would want to replay a mission because of it. The music either felt generic or just was not in the focus as much as the main theme song.
Gameplay and RPG Mechanics
Outriders is a 3rd person shooter looter RPG. The game has gameplay elements that reminds us of gears of war (the covering mechanic) and mass effect (with skills and abilities). In Outriders you get to choose between four classes (or paths as they call it): Technomancer (long range, damage build, support with gadgets), Pyromancer (standard fire class with medium range), Trickster (a fast, mobile class with stasis skills and focus on close range) and Devastator (a tank with earth bending powers). We decided to play as the Pyromancer and Trickster for our playthrough and it went pretty decent with just the two of us. When levelling up the Trickster, the first three skills that were given were really fun to use. They were Temporal Blade (a hand plasma sword attack), Slow Trap (a bubble where everything slows down) and Hunt the Prey (teleporting to an enemy).
The skill Twisted Rounds (Anomaly-infused bullets) was unlocked when level 6 was reached but did not really like that skill as much as the previous skill that was there. For the Pyromancer, I had the skills Earthquake (a big ground slam), Golem (an earth shield), and gravity leap (jumping in the air and diving towards the enemy). You can upgrade your class tree and it is huge. It can branch into three different sub-classes. For the Pyromancer, the subclasses are Vanquisher, Warden and Seismic Shifter. For the Trickster, they are Assassin, Harbinger, and Reaver. When in combat, you can hold up to three weapons at once and had three skills, one for L1, another for R1 and the last for L1+R1. We could not really mess with the skills and class upgrades a lot in the demo but when the game is released, we want to see how different your character can be with the cool abilities you get.
Throughout each class though, the coolest of the bunch is the Trickster. The core of the game so far is to be aggressive, so using a devastator can be helpful since the only way you can fully heal is to kill with the abilities you have (especially close range). The combat in Outriders is cool, bloody, and gory when everything works. You go to different sub areas decimating enemies to save an NPC find certain supplies to bring back to your base. We want to know what the end game will be like and if the loot itself will be worth it in the end.
The way that the equipment you collect (weapons or armor) goes by these rarities: common, unusual, rare, epic, and legendary. You get your basic armor and weapons like assault rifles snipers and shotguns (personal favorite), but I wish there were more sci-fi like weapons, especially seeing who is making this game you would think there would be some kind of insane cool weapons too, but in the demo so far, each weapon you get has regular perks like fire or freeze bullets or a perk to get health back. We wish they did more with that though and we are sure that they will. We even saw some guides online showing that you can get some unique looking legendary weapons inside the demo, so we will definitely be checking that out.
There is also a world tier system which works pretty well. What the world tier level does is when you are progressing throughout the game, it will automatically scale to the next tier (we believe you can disable the auto scaling and even scale down if necessary). Each time you level up a tier, you can claim rewards for that. Also, when completing certain areas in the game, you can put your flag down when prompted and fast travel to previously visited areas in the game. And about the areas in the game, a lot of them are split up depending on the mission you are doing. We are used to a lot of games now being seamless and seeing how each area you go to in Outriders is a loading screen does not feel right. But because we played on the newer consoles, the loading was not that long (even when respawning after death).
Online Multiplayer and Cross play
Outriders multiplayer work really well. It is a drop in/drop out system (where someone can join and leave without interrupting your game), and you and your friends can play the entire game together. There is a hub area where you can go and team up with other players or friends, but it is not like Destiny where you see the other players talking to NPCs and such.
It is more like a matchmaking system and the people you party up with are the ones you can see. When you are in the lobby, there will be a “Quest Timeline” and it will show where you are at in terms of the story, and you can switch points in the story. We also found out that loot is separate and surprisingly the game still treats your progress as a single player. What we mean by that is if you go into a story cutscene and you are playing with others, your character will be the one talking in the cutscene (even if someone else activated the cutscene).
Inside quests, we have seen that when you talk to someone, and it goes into a cutscene it only shows the person who went up and talked to the NPC. The other players would have to talk to the person to see the cutscene themselves. You end up still getting the quest even if you do not see the cutscene. It may be a glitch though, but we are not sure. Also, during those cutscenes/conversations with characters, each person can choose their own dialogue option which is pretty cool.
The question we have though is if there are branching story choices in the game or is the dialogue just for show/just to learn a bit more of the story. My one issue is the number of enemies there are, and some bosses can be a bit of a bullet sponge. Also, the damage you take at times can be a lot (my lord, it is insane), but it does encourage you to rush more and not hide. We did have to cheese one boss though because of how hard that area was, that was a funny combat experience. Maybe if we played with one more extra person it would not have felt as difficult as it was with two people.
Bugs and Glitches
Now the bugs I’ve encountered in Outriders are somewhat unique. One of them is when you reload while in combat, the game throws you on the inventory menu. Another bug that is hilarious and a bit annoying is where when you play as the Devastator and use the skill Gravity Leap, you end up teleporting or crashing into an enemy and cannot move for 10 seconds while everyone is shooting you in the process. Although you are supposed to move like that using the skill, being frozen in place is not supposed to happen.
For some reason, the cutscenes had some frame rate issues and unnecessary motion blur and the camera was shaky even in regular conversations. It felt like a weird fan-made live action movie with the way it was. It seemed like the second time we played they fixed some of that though in a small update. There were also lip-syncing issues at times, especially when initiating conversations with people in the hub. It is not really a big issue, and we are sure it will be fixed by release, but it is hilarious and can be immersion breaking.
One last thing we encountered was that every time you kill a boss or a mini boss, we will see a cutscene of them dying and we clearly see their bodies visible on the ground. But after the cutscene, their bodies disappear and what’s left is just a huge blood splatter as if our characters ripped them apart or that they exploded. We always laughed when it would happen because it would be so unexpected. We are not sure if it is fully a bug/glitch, but I do not think they would leave boss battles to end like that. We did not even get a lot from them either! We would not be surprised if they got killed by that huge creature in the game.
Final Thoughts
We are grateful for the fact People Can Fly and Square Enix took the time to release a demo for us to play. It is not every day where we have a chance to try a game earlier and give our input to fix any bugs or glitches before release. Square Enix has been doing an awesome job releasing demos of games. They did it with Dragon Quest XI S that was released on November 2nd, 2020, and recently with Project Triangle Strategy on the Nintendo Switch that was released February 17, 2021. It feels really cool to try out demos again, it reminds me of the previous generations like the Xbox 360 and PS3 when demos of big games were released frequently. Playing Outriders was not a bad experience at all, but it really shines and gets fun when you play with friends. You can create your own fun and wreak havoc on your foes while trying to see what the story is about.
The game so far makes me miss old simple straightforward games when it comes to leveling up and focusing on the progression of the story. Even if it is an RPG, the world does not feel unnecessarily huge with waste of space areas. The leveling felt great and was not grindy so far, and things in the story flowed well better than we expected. What I hope for the game when it is released is decent content like great expansions, quality of life updates and some dope loot. We do have worries about if it will be repetitive or if there is more cool enemy variety than what we have seen so far. We are really hoping the story to go in a great direction and build the characters it introduced. We also hope the loot pays off and do not feel like we are getting the same weapons over and over (also avoiding micro transactions as well). We will see how it goes when Outriders releases out April 1st on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, PC and Stadia.