Outriders is a new People Can Fly studio game made for one to three players and set in a dark sci-fi universe. Before this game, the developer released titles such as Painkiller, Bulletstorm, and Gears of War: Judgment, and their recognizable stamps can also be noticed in the new game.
Outriders were first announced at the E3 event in 2019, and since then, from time to time, I check how the work on the game is going and what news the developers have released. Like most of the games being worked on during the pandemic, the Outriders had to move the date when they originally planned to release the game but they surprised us with a free demo.
A practice that has long been forgotten in the gaming industry. Can we then get an idea of whether this is a quality game if we play a demo?
Great problems befell our planet and the human race decided to look for a new home in the deep black universe. You are one of the spaceships that managed to escape from the devastated planet and land on a new destination which is the last and best hope for the survival of the species.
As with all expeditions, things go very quickly upside down in the new location, and a special problem is anomalies like aurora borealis on steroids that cut everything in front of them. But not you. The story is interesting enough in my opinion but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.
The demo takes you through the entire introductory part of the story and the first chapter of the game, and this is one of the few games of its kind that supports crossplay, but requires you to be constantly connected to the Internet.
Since the game contains mild RPG elements, it goes without saying that the right thing to do is to create your character. I have to admit that this content has never been very important to me, but I think gamers generally like it when they have a lot of options in the character creation section. Outriders don't offer many possibilities here, but I've seen worse solutions.
However, all those who want to spend a lot of time on this screen will probably be disappointed with the limited selection, but when we put all the equipment on ourselves, we will probably not see the face of our hero often. In the options, you can turn off not seeing your helmet if you want to admire your creation.
The prologue is a kind of tutorial that introduces you more to the story and teaches the controls and basics of the game. When the action starts, you will probably notice that Outriders resembles some games you have seen before.
Shooting is based on moving from one shelter to another, and it is seen very early on that the game forces you to move smartly and systematically solve problems and opponents from bigger to smaller.
Outrider is a kind of mix of the Division, Destiny, and Gears of War series and the gameplay starts to get complicated when an anomaly passes through you and you get the option to choose one of the four classes in the game.
- Devastator - is a tank that is best for close encounters
- Pyromancer - fires opponents in various ways and uses medium-range weapons
- Technomancer - can create grenade launchers and similar devices while sniping opponents from a distance
- Trickster - is for all those who want to easily move around the map and eliminate enemies at close range.
I recommend going with
Devastator or
Pyromancer as they inflict good damage and better withstand attacks. By selecting a class, the prologue ends and you enter the first war zones where you meet more serious enemies.
You can only level the characters in the demo to the seventh level and World Tier (the weight of the game grows as you progress) 5 is the highest weight you can reach. With the levels, new abilities are unlocked and by the end of the demo, you should have three, while in the final version of the game you will be able to choose between eight different ones. The magic mostly revolves around demigods, enemy control, and the abilities that clean groups.
We don't have the opportunity to see all the content that will come with the whole game in this demo, such as crafting, progressing through skill three, etc., but we got a good idea of what the action will look like.
You can go through the demo in about 3-4 hours, it all depends on how detailed you want to explore this world, which is very similar in structure to Destiny, just like the inventory of your character.
You have a base where all the expected NPCs and vendors are located, and from there the roads fork into various parts of the map that contain hidden quests and new details about the life of your comrades on the planet Epoch. You will also come across mini-bosses who, just like you, have several abilities that they throw during the fight.
When you run the camera moves a little more behind you and blurs almost everything on the edge of the screen, so you can say goodbye to peripheral vision and that really bothered me in a couple of situations.
For some reason, the characters can't take just one step, but stop as if they were standing out from a full sprint. There is always another additional animation no matter how many steps you have taken before.
The game also starts quite slowly. Surely a good half hour or more should pass until you see serious action, and you will probably spend a good part of the demo watching the cinematics. A very strange detail is that the image in the cinematics sometimes just shakes.
The general impression is that this is a very solid basis for a shooter game and contains all the details you want to see in a game of this genre. We will have to wait until the first of April to see how many items fall out in the later stages of the game, what crafting looks like, how much skill three, and other details mean, but my impressions are that the game looks exactly as the creators presented it.
Outriders do not bring anything spectacular but use elements from other games very well and shape them in his universe. I noticed on the internet that the game review channels are divided as far as impressions are concerned.
For a while, there was no Loother shooter that works and has mechanics that make sense. The big players in this scene are Warframe, Destiny, Division 2, and similar titles that are already several years old, and we’ll see if Outriders can intrigue Loother shooter fans.
From everything I've seen and experienced so far, I would say that the potential definitely exists, and in addition to the flaws, I still managed to have fun as a fan of games like this.
