It had been about eight minutes since the Outriders demo started when I realized I hated myself. Or rather, I hated my Outriders character; an avatar that I had taken a significant amount of effort to customize to look as much like myself as possible . In my mind, Alexikins was a lovely idiot who joined the army as part of a drunken joke, only to find that years in journalism games had actually made him pretty skilled with a shotgun, despite his pacifist tendencies stressing every turn. of restless tension.
But this Alexikins was far from adorable. Spitting out military orders to his inferiors, awkwardly remembering his time as a "street rat" on Earth, and offering phrases like "I know bullets, not children" without a hint of irony, his one-note personality and alpha male expressions made me realize why other live service games and MMOs keep their playable heroes silent. How can I feel that this is my character when they already have an established identity of their own, especially when that identity is hideously unattractive?
It is the first mistake made by Outriders in its obligatory prologue, which sets the stage for the new IP of People Can Fly with a linear series of narrative jokes before opening the whole world to the player and anyone who wants to join them in co-op. . It is not only that this prologue is ugly, but misrepresenting; a bad first impression of what the true Outriders experience has to offer and an immediate postponement before the game has really started. Get past that opening chapter, however, and Outriders slowly proves to be a competent live shooter with a bit of a crunch to the bone.
Despite only lasting about an hour, the Outriders prelude feels much longer, with plenty of walking, talking, and watching exposure-rich footage, none of which are particularly gripping and often ridiculously humiliating. People Can Fly's Starship Troopers Meets Gears of War set is an archetype fit for a live-service third-person shooter, but it's archetypal nonetheless, and the writing of the game only makes those clichés painfully clear.
In short, your Outrider, a veteran soldier, has been honored with special powers by a mysterious entity on the alien planet of Enoch, which humanity has decided to claim as its new home after the decimation of Earth. Your new abilities may be the key to helping your people fight against the various enemy factions on Enoch, even if the lines between good and evil aren't so clear-cut.
Likewise, once you get through the incessant editing of prologue footage (I counted at least ten), and People Can Fly is content to have taught you all about the basics of third-person shooters, the game finally enters its proper experience, equipping your soldier with those supernatural powers above. And it is here, in the flesh and blood of its core combat gameplay, that Outriders steps out of its self-imposed shell.
While other RPG-infused shooters might allow players to use their special abilities as a sporadic equalizer, Outriders pushes them to the forefront of every firefight, with fast refresh rates that will have you using every time you reload the game. your gun. You'll also need to do this, since enemies are aggressive, flanking your positions to push yourself out of cover and force you to play offensive that prioritizes mobility rather than stacking.
Better yet, those powers are good no matter what class you're playing in. The internet seems to have already decided that the time-manipulating Trickster is the best of the bunch so far, but I'm having a lot of fun with my Devastator and their ability to teleport to the other side of a battlefield amidst a flurry of rubble. meteoric. While the shootings don't seem as impactful, they certainly work as intended and the variety of enemies and bosses I've encountered so far suggests that the Outriders fight will keep its novelty until the end of the campaign, just less.
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