Developed by Painkiller and Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly, Outriders is the latest high-profile entry in the genre of co-op focused looter-shooters. Despite a rather rocky launch, impacted by server issues and a few major bugs, the end result is a rather compelling shooter, providing a surprisingly engaging story mode and enjoyable endgame content. However, more improvements may still be required for Outriders to fully meet its potential.

The Final Frontier

Set in the far future, Outriders’ story mode involves your player character as part of a landing party on the alien planet Enoch, seeking a new home after Earth has become uninhabitable. Unfortunately, things go wrong very shortly in, and a mysterious storm results in many of the colonists becoming ill and gaining strange abilities. Placed in cryogenic suspension for over 30 years, you awake in a world gone to Hell, where the colonists and their descendants are at war with each other and Enoch’s hostile wildlife. You are an Altered, one of the lucky ones to develop superpowers from Enoch’s atmosphere. Tasked by a survivor of the original landing to seek a strange distress signal from beyond the valley, your Outrider and their growing band of companions must venture out to discover the history behind Enoch and potentially chart a new future for humanity.

I found myself quite engaged by the story in Outriders. Each of the supporting characters grew on me during the journey, and can be conversed with at camp to flesh out their history and the world a bit more. That said, I would say that aside from the characters that travel with you, Outriders has a bad habit of anticlimactically killing off antagonists and supporting characters shortly after they are introduced. Sometimes it works to create a tense atmosphere where anyone can die. However, other times it leaves potentially interesting characters short-changed, as they only get a scene or two before exiting the narrative forever.

In terms of visuals, Enoch definitely trends towards the drab and brown end of the spectrum. It works to emphasise how much of a dystopian war zone Enoch has become after 30 years of chaos, but also leaves most of the areas feel quite similar to one another. The gear you can find as well tends to not look too spectacular or distinct, outside of some Rare and Epic gear that can be found.

Shoot and loot

In terms of gameplay, Outriders is a third-person cover-based shooter that really doesn’t expect you to be using the cover very much. There are four playable classes, each with their own mixture of offensive and mobility powers and method of healing. Each class can regain health and shield by taking out enemies in certain ways, encouraging an aggressive style of play as you force your way through the oncoming hordes of foes.

My favourite class that I tried out, the Trickster, gained health and shields by killing enemies in short range, and providing powers that can teleport across the field and damage close-up opponents. It kept the pace fast, and encouraged a thrilling run and gun style where every shootout felt like it could turn on a dime. Other classes had some similarly great abilities, like the Pyromancer’s fire-based powers or the Technomancers turrets.

Oddly, the tutorial encourages playing the game as a Gears of War-style slow-paced cover shooter, despite the mechanics practically necessitating a more aggressive playstyle. Considering People Can Fly’s history with fast-paced arena-based first-person shooters, Outriders may have been better served as an FPS rather than a third-person cover-shooter. You will have a much better time as soon as you stop relying on the cover the game provides you. Still, despite occasionally getting stuck on the chest-high walls when trying to run towards enemies, the actual gunplay and use of powers work very well, for the most part.

Outriders also does what it can to mitigate the tedium of sifting through your inventory and speed things along. Features such as being able to mass-mark all items of a certain rarity to sell or dismantle makes it easy to get rid of vendor trash. That said, an option to rank items by stat number, rather than just rarity, would certainly be desirable to more easily identify the best items in your collection.

The World Tier system is an interesting feature that I appreciated. Alongside your character level, a different meter called World Tier also levels up as you play. The World Tier acts as a kind of difficulty level, with each subsequent level featuring stronger enemies and better loot. While you can power through and continue to level up the World Tier all the way for the best rewards, it can also be scaled back for those seeking a more relaxed experience. In the endgame Expeditions mode, the Challenge Tier similarly allows the player to scale the difficulty to their liking.

Weak connections

Unfortunately, Outriders has many technical hurdles that it still needs to overcome. Despite the game being effectively playable solo, a constant internet connection is required at all times. This sets it apart from many other games with optional online co-op, such as Borderlands or Dark Souls. This would be fine if the servers were solid, but two weeks after release, I still am often unable to even log in, getting stuck at the Signing In page for minutes on end. Many of my co-op sessions felt rather laggy, and my session crashed at one point due to a server issue. Either Outriders needs an offline mode, or needs to beef up its servers ASAP. Even weeks down the line, many players are still not able to play Outriders when they want to.

We’re going on an Expedition

Once you have finished the main story mode, Outriders’ gameplay focus changes substantially. The endgame is comprised of Expeditions; timed raids to locate a Drop Pod containing loot. You can technically play Expeditions solo, but Outriders strongly encourages you to play multiplayer for these missions. If you play solo, you have to start the whole thing from the top if you die, which is particularly aggravating when they can last as long as 25 minutes.

If you are playing with others, however, you get a self-revive, as well as friends to revive you. I can’t think of why solo players could not at least have had the self-revive, or some kind of checkpoint system. If you have been playing solo up to that point, the endgame may be where you start looking to matchmake with others. After setting a challenge tier, players gain higher-tier rewards for completing Expeditions within a certain time limit. While I appreciate the added element of taking down the enemies as efficiently as possible, the focus on completing Expeditions quickly penalises character builds not designed strictly around damage-per-second.