The Outer Worlds

A delightful space adventure, which is at once lighthearted and dark in tone. It features (with the strongly recommended DLC) a sizeable "open world", fun combat, a terrific story, elaborate weapon and loot and systems, and a good amount of characters and side-quests.

For the most part the game rewards exploration. You can ignore the main quests and set off on your own, discovering new or secret locations and possibly unlocking side-quests. You don't get whole planets here: the game environment is usually a tiny area surrounding a small town or two, meaning that all in all there's not that much to explore. Also note that if you follow the main quests you would eventually cover the entire map. So, what you're really achieving by going off on your own is changing the order of events and allowing for more emergent storytelling.

Though there is a decent diversity of quests, and most are fun and original, the game design does suffer from the usual excesses of the "open world" formula. There are quite a few tiresome fetch quests that involve backtracking. A fast travel option makes backtracking less annoying, but it also totally breaks immersion and trivializes these quests. I will also mention by name, without spoiling it, one very poorly designed quest: "Long Distance". I strongly recommend looking up a walkthrough if you get this quest because it's easy to make reasonable choices that would unfairly ruin your ability to make subsequent choices.

Yes, it's very much a "choices matter" game. You can side with different factions, be a hero, or be selfish, and all of these paths are supported with their own special quests, dialogs, characters, and rewards. Decisions are depicted in moral shades of gray leaving no clear "right way" to play. There's a decent replayability in this respect: you can restart the game making totally different choices and get different content. For the most part the developers did a good job at matching dialog, behavior, and events to your decisions, making the world feel quite organic and responsive. However, for every natural behavior you'll also find immersion-breaking failures due to scripting gaps, mindless repetition, or glitchy environmental response. It's a hard feature to get right and indeed this game doesn't always succeed. If you really enjoy this aspect it's highly recommended to invest in dialog skills, because there are many opportunities to use them.

Let's talk about balance: it's all wrong. The game begins as challenging and exciting, but if you invest any attention at all to the combat skills and perks then it's easy to break the difficulty ramp, even on "Hard". Add the DLC and, wow, you can max out pretty much everything around the mid-point of the game and stop caring about XP and loot. Loot is generally far too plentiful even if you don't want to steal everything you see. There's just no good reason to engage in buying/selling/upgrading. You'll never run out of ammo, and repairing your gear is only a few clicks away. It's just all far too easy. The basic ideas behind the loot system are solid but unfortunately it falls flat due to poor balance.

Finally, the game has load screens between parts of the world, which really breaks immersion as it underscores its behind-the-scenes structure as just a series of levels. Other games pull off seamless transitions and it's too bad that The Outer Worlds doesn't. At least game saves and loads are fast and easy. Generally performance is awful and the game is a jittery mess at 4K even on high-end hardware. Just stick to 1080p and change shadows to "low" if you want a smooth experience.

I've mentioned a lot of flaws, but all in all I've thoroughly enjoyed the game. Its strong points are very strong. Outer Worlds is a wonderful and memorable adventure.

Pro-tip: When you create your character, give it below-average intelligence in order to unlock hilarious "dumb" responses in many conversations and even uniquely dumb endings. (A nod to this feature in the original Fallout games.)