Outriders seems to want you to play like you’re playing Gears of War, which isn’t a stretch, given its developer.
Polish studio People Can Fly is the studio behind 2013’s Gears of War: Judgment, and there is so much of that game here. To a fault, really. Last, last generation level design is all around. That Xbox 360 brown fudge, that convenient hip-high cover dipped generously into a war-torn flan. Chunky enemies and chunks of enemies, bad guys exploding in a puff of blood for no real reason at all. The chug of a rifle, a shotgun blast when someone gets too close. Hold a button to observe. Even the name of the game sounds like something Spark Unlimited would have come up with the decade before last.
The story is one I’ve heard a million times before. It revolves around a soldier who mysteriously gains powers and must fight to save humanity on a harsh alien planet called Enoch. There’s a quite incredible tonal whiplash as your soldier shifts from utter bemusement to wise-cracking asshole and back again. Outriders is trying to be a gritty, cool sci-fi romp, but its demo is too often undone by unintentionally hilarious cutscenes whose character deaths ought to be accompanied by canned laughter. The story teases that you’ll eventually uncover the truth about the alien planet’s mysterious energy, but when the writing’s this bad it’s hard to care.
