The Outer Worlds was Obsidian’s gutsy attempt at a spiritual successor to its lauded work on Fallout, but the game couldn’t completely hide the developer’s roots. The spacefaring retro-future was recognizable as a continuation of Obsidian’s earlier game, though it had enough of a distinct setting and its own gameplay systems to feel fresh. The Outer Worlds 2 builds on that sturdy foundation, and while it’s largely more of the same, it is also a confident and expansive sequel that suggests a bright future for The Outer Worlds as an ongoing series.
In Outer Worlds 2, you play as “the Commander.” Whereas the first game had you play as a random colonist, this new role inherently imbues you with more authority as an Earth Directorate agent. In short, you’re a fixer, dispatched to the Arcadia region that’s being ripped apart by a factional war, corporate takeovers, and the emergence of rifts that have been cutting the colony off from communications with Earth. From the very beginning, you have your badge and gun, so to speak, along with your own fledgling crew and a spaceship base of operations called the Incognito. Of course, your very first mission goes terribly wrong (as these things tend to) and when you regain consciousness some time later, you set out to find the persons responsible for the botched mission, while also investigating the increasingly dire rift problem. Without getting into spoilers, it’s a strong opening that propels the story forward with momentum and mystery.
When you’re creating your Commander, you can select a number of different backgrounds like a disgraced gambler, a disgraced professor, a disgraced freelancer, or an ex-convict. You get the sense that most people become agents in the space FBI for lack of other options, except for the Lawbringer background, which is pure and straightforward Lawful Good. I chose Roustabout, which is a friendly way of saying “disgraced idiot.”
One of the greatest strengths of Outer Worlds 2 is how it creates opportunities for role play, in the classic sense of messy improvisational drama, or sometimes tragicomedy, as you weave your own story and interpret a cohesive narrative for yourself. I began with the Roustabout as a goof, wanting to play as a charismatic, trigger-happy dumbass in the vein of Futurama’s Zapp Brannigan. I specialized in the Guns and Speech skills, and chose a Lucky bonus trait, wanting to handle myself in a fight but also open smooth-talking dialogue options and sometimes just blunder my way through with astounding luck. And it worked, for a while.
But somewhere along the journey, things started to subtly change. I made mistakes that I wasn’t fully comfortable with for the sake of maintaining my character, and I faced dilemmas that forced me to think about where I drew the line. I stopped trying to be a jack of all trades and doubled down on Guns, Speech, and a third selection, Leadership. Without any specialized knowledge of science or engineering I started leaning more heavily on my teammates, asking for their advice or what they made of a situation. By the end, the story of my Commander was of an overconfident idiot who slowly grew into a capable leader, learning to trust their crew and having gained their trust in return. In the end, that was much more interesting and fulfilling than spending the entire 20 or so hours as a Captain Kirk parody.
Like the first game, most of your time is spent venturing to strange worlds, taking on quests to progress the story or your reputation with various factions, and fighting your way through alien beasts, hostile automatons, and opposing human armies. In this case, the human enemies are primarily the Protectorate, the authoritarian rulers of Arcadia. And like the first game, The Outer Worlds 2 is primarily combat-focused. You can talk or engineer your way out of some situations, but mostly you need to just clear the area of hostiles before investigating the next story node. I went for the direct approach with heavy gunplay, but a Melee or Sneak build could let you approach combat encounters very differently, drawing aggro to bash in skulls or stealthing your way around to backstab and hack your enemies.
Part of the reason I leaned into the gunplay was that the wealth of guns on offer felt great. My memory of the first Outer Worlds was that guns were a means to an end, but in Outer Worlds 2 it feels much more like a native shooter. One weapon might run on Zyranium, dealing radioactive damage but overcharging automech enemies instead. Another could be a triple-barrel shotgun with a chunky one-two-three punch. Another might set enemies on fire and reduce them to ash. Each one felt satisfying and responsive. There are 10 different ammo types, so I spent most of the game swapping my weapons constantly and then discovering how much I liked the new one. A flexible mods system lets you further customize to your playstyle with your favorite guns, though I was hot-swapping them so often I usually didn’t take full advantage of mods.
In addition to your weapons, you also have a handful of gadgets. The Tactical Time Dilation mechanic from the first game, a clear reference to Fallout’s VATS system, makes its return here, letting you slow down time to line up that perfect shot at an enemy weak spot. There are other important gadgets this time around as well: an Acidic Dematerializer that dissolves bodies in case you’re trying to sneak your way through, and an N-Ray Scanner that lets you see cloaked enemies as well as see the wiring for solving engineering problems. Since the gadget button always uses the last one, I would often use my N-Ray scanner in a non-combat section and then forget to swap back to the Time Dilation gadget before getting into combat, but otherwise the options are nice to have.
To build out your character, you’re granted two skill points per level, but there are way too many avenues to specialize in all of them, and many of the higher-level skill checks require you to specialize relatively early. And since the game is largely combat-focused, I have to imagine you would have a difficult time if you specialized too exclusively in non-combat skills like science, engineering, or lockpicking. Every two levels, you also get a Perk point to shape your character even further with special effects, some of which stack on top of each other. For example, an Intimidator perk requires a high Speech skill, but it’s actually a combat ability that frightens certain weaker enemies when they get hurt. A second perk, Grim Visage, builds on it further by frightening surrounding enemies. By the end, I had perks that enhanced the believability of my lies, gave me a big reputation boost with all factions, passively collected crafting materials while away from my ship, and more. It’s a very flexible system that grants extremely strong bonuses, and right from the beginning you can look through the list and mark Favorites to help you steer toward a particular goal.
Working in conjunction with your skills and perks is the return of the Flaws system. This was one of my favorite aspects from the first Outer Worlds, and it’s even better this time. Unlike perks, flaws appear at unexpected times when the game notices certain consistent behaviors. Despite the name, flaws aren’t necessarily negative and are actually more like trade-offs that help augment your play. If you get presented with one you don’t like, you can always just reject it.
The Outer Worlds 2 feels like the series coming into its own, carried by flexible combat options and great role-playing progression.
Some of these flaws will even make the game much harder and more unpredictable. After telling one too many lies, I was presented with the option for a “Compulsive Liar” perk, which would automatically select lies in every dialogue tree. I rejected that one because I wanted to control when I lied. But some flaws are just great ways to complement your play style or make up for deficiencies. When the game noticed I was constantly reloading it gave me the Overprepared flaw, which granted me much larger weapon magazines, but with a heavy damage debuff if I ever let a magazine hit empty. Similarly, I spent the first half of the game frequently running low on ammo, earning me the Wasteful flaw: I’d see a slight universal increase to vendor prices, but enemies I killed would always drop ammo from then on. I already had a vendor discount from another flaw, Consumerism, so this was well worth the trade-off and I never ran short on ammo again.
Your build includes not just your own character, but that of your companions as well. Each has a companion ability that can be activated in combat, and every five levels, they get their own choice between two perks, helping shape which kind of companion they become. The first such upgrade for Niles, for example, lets you make him a tanky character to draw enemy aggro, or boosts his own firepower, each of which complements his companion ability that draws enemy fire and hits for increased damage. Plus, each companion has passive traits, like Niles’s ability to act as a mobile workbench in case you need to craft more ammo or mods in the field.
Selecting which companions to bring along for a mission and how you’ve built out their abilities makes a huge difference in how you play–I was able to take my time to fidget with my gadgets and aim down sights because I knew the enemies would reliably be targeting Niles. Plus, each companion has their own specialized weapon and armor, and level up automatically with you, sanding off some of the busywork of managing a party. In addition to your companion abilities and perks, each companion also has their own mini-questline, which unlocks even further customization like increasing a particular damage type, and changing their cosmetic appearance.
The added benefit of companions, from a story perspective, is that they help to flesh out the world. Many of them come from different backgrounds and are allied with different organizations, giving you more perspectives and fleshing out the galaxy. My personal favorite was Marisol, an aged black ops agent who formerly worked for one of the factions. Aside from just being cool as hell to bring along a greying female secret agent, I appreciated her cold and calculating perspective on events as they unfolded, and her multi-part companion quest was a neat spy story set against a sci-fi backdrop.
The story is heavy with satire, which is not subtle–think Mad Magazine more than the New Yorker–but half of it is delivered with a blunt earnestness that makes it feel righteous and timely. That half is the one that envisions a future ruled by fanatical, quasi-religious devotion to unchecked capitalism, represented by the mega-corp Auntie’s Choice–the result of a merger between Auntie Cleo’s and Spacer’s Choice from the first game. None of it is specific enough to take aim at Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft, but it lands as a broader and fairly incisive critique of our current moment.
The other main target of mockery is the Order of the Ascendant, equally fanatical but devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and science, with the misguided notion that they can unlock the secrets of all existence and rule everything with perfect mathematical precision and clarity. They’re portrayed as more noble and humanitarian, but also aloof and unfeeling. You can sense how this is meant to be a counterweight to Auntie’s Choice, which is all about appealing to baser instincts and maximizing profits, but the satire lands with a thud. Rather than seeming well attuned to our current moment like the critiques against capitalism, taking aim at scientists and researchers right now just feels like punching down.
As you traverse across multiple planets in the star system, you’ll find much more expansive environments than existed in the first Outer Worlds, with wide open spaces full of land to explore. The visuals in The Outer Worlds 2 generally aren’t stunning–this style of RPG is more about the machinery of the world than the aesthetics–but the scope of some of them is impressive regardless. This is slightly undermined by there being no particularly fast way to travel–as far as I can tell, you just have to hoof it everywhere–so most of the time you’ll just stick to sprinting in straight paths. That can lead to problems, because the waypointing isn’t always clear about how to reach your next destination, especially when you’re in an enclosed building with winding corridors and multiple floors. Sometimes your waypoint is a broad area to search, other times it’s a pinpoint spot without clear directions. You just have to figure it out.
And once you unlock later missions, it can be frustrating that there is no fast-travel between planets, forcing you to fast-travel to your ship, then to a planet, then to the closest waypoint for the next step in the quest. Load times can also be long for some larger areas (at least on Xbox Series X, where I played), so there’s a fair amount of waiting as you planet-hop. Similarly pace-breaking are the multitude of computers that you encounter on each planet, which deliver chunks of information and story details, but often feel bogged down in corporate-speak and back-and-forth correspondence. This seems intended to exemplify the setting, which is full of corporate and scientific bureaucracies. So while it plays well into those themes, it also means the action is punctuated by a lot of reading breaks.
To its credit, those breaks would be more of an issue if the rest of the game weren’t so strong. The Outer Worlds 2 feels like the series coming into its own, carried by flexible combat options and great role-playing progression. The first Outer Worlds felt like Obsidian trying to recapture the magic of Fallout’s apocalyptic future in a new spacefaring context. The Outer Worlds 2 cements this setting as its own identity that can exist alongside its sci-fi contemporaries to deliver something that is familiar, but also distinctly its own.
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