I played Outriders on Xbox Game Pass, and I don’t think anyone should play it otherwise. You also shouldn’t play this game if you’re not playing it on an Xbox Series X. In fact, I put this down after my first 10-ish hours and I probably shouldn’t have picked it back up.
Outriders looks like Gears of War, but if you play it like Gears of War, you’re going to have a bad time. The game’s 4 classes restore health for different things, and, at least the class I played, meant doing the old stop-and-pop would not work. My class restored health with close range kills, so I spent the game running up to groups of enemies and whacking them with my time knife. It took time to figure that out, and the game seemed inordinately difficult until I did.
Also making the game inordinately difficult is the world tier system. This is a game that is meant for coop multiplayer. You’re supposed to go through it Diablo-like, over and over, with friends or coop randos. The world tier sets difficulty, increases the loot and XP you get as it goes up, and can be set to auto-increase. This might be fine if you’re playing with friends, but I played solo. I’m mildly competent but I ran straight into a difficulty wall because I was doing well and the world tier kept ratcheting up until I was no longer doing well. I had to dial it down and turn off auto-increase to progress, and then I had to turn it down another notch at the final boss because I was tired of getting mopped.
I’m sounding very down about this game, because I am, but one thing kept me going: the story. It starts strong but it quickly dangled a worm in front of me that it used to lead me on through the rest of the game to an unsatisfying conclusion. Its worst sin is committed in the last couple levels as I was monologued at by the equivalent of audio logs explaining what happened instead of just showing me what happened.
By playing this coop loot shooter solo on a previous generation of console hardware and caring about the story, I played this game wrong. Even though it was sometimes too difficult and ran like garbage, the real knife in the gut was the disappointing end. Since finishing it, I’ve gone back to play some of the side quests on my Xbox Series X, which plays the game much better. It’s still an always-online game that can be played solo for masochists like myself, and I’m still a People Can Fly fan, but this game is a miss in a lot of crucial ways.