![]() But at the end of the day, all you do is walk and shoot. Snipers will try to keep their distance from you, monsters will juke out of your aim before rushing you. The Combat is a slight improvement over Fallout: New Vegas, which came out ten years ago. ![]() To me, the gameplay can be broadly broken down into three categories: Combat, exploration, and scrounging/leveling. No matter what a game gets right, it needs to have good gameplay for people to keep coming back to it, and The Outer Worlds does not. The classic comedies aren’t funny like Monty Python or Leslie Neilsen movies aren’t funny because the characters keep telling jokes to each other, they’re funny because of the situations the characters create for each other, and TOW doesn’t have any of this. There are a couple good jokes, but jokes aren’t enough to make something truly funny. Most of this game’s humor comes from making someone do something stupid, and then saying “Ha! Wasn’t that stupid?”. Corporations torture and kill their own workers, rather than exploit them, for example. TOW has plenty of jokes, and some of them are even funny, but the game consistently prioritizes making the corporations evil over making them funny, or even competent. We’ve had plenty of movies and books that tackle some of these themes, from Brazil to Catch 22, but there hasn’t been any video game I can think of to tackle this subject matter in a funny way. The idea of hypercapitalist/corporatist bureaucratic dystopia is ripe for a funny satirical video game. The bad guys always prioritize being evil and incompetent over their own well being. Because of this, the game fails to achieve satire, and is only a superficial parody of any real-world economic system. There’s no message in the game’s world that can be applied more broadly to how you think about the real world. The corporations in TOW aren’t evil because of any particular problem with the Capitalistic system, or because of a deeper problem with the human condition. Maybe you don’t agree with this perspective, but at least there’s something for you to disagree with. It tells you that rugged individualism can’t work because humans naturally want to group together into cohesive societies, and exert forceful control over each other. Bioshock isn’t just a criticism of Andrew Ryan and Rapture, but of Objectivism overall. Why do they kill and torture their own workers? Because they are evil. Why are the corporations evil? Because they kill and torture their own workers. It’s not even one-sided political commentary. This game isn’t a many-sided political satire. The developers will tell you that this game offers many-sided political commentary, and that they took care to fairly portray political ideologies that they don’t agree with. I might as well talk about the overt political commentary this game is known for, since that’s what everyone wants to talk about (except, apparently, for the developers). Then, you get your spaceship because you accidentally kill the guy who was supposed to pick you up. You don’t know or care about the rest of your crew, but the scientist who you just met is basically telling you the main plot of the game right off the bat. The scientist tells you that he only had enough wakey-wakey chemicals to wake up one person (you), and you need to find a way to get more chemicals to wake up the rest of your crew. ![]() You are awoken from cryosleep by a scientist. The scope of the game world opens up slightly in the games “first act” of Megaton, but you aren’t introduced to major players like the Brotherhood of Steel or the Enclave until much later in the game, when the player is decently familiar with the game’s world and mechanicsĬompare this to the opening of TOW. As the game world is very small, the scope of the plot is also very small: leave the vault and find your dad. The vault section serves to a) tutorialize the games RPG and shooting mechanics, b) build a relationship between your character and his/her father, and c) give you a hint of what the game is about. The game starts with a very small scope, just you and your father, before quickly introducing the rest of the vault. ![]() To me, the gold standard for video game openings is Fallout 3. While the over-hyped marketing certainly didn’t help, I would argue that TOW isn’t just disappointing, but shockingly bad. I took this to mean that, as expected, the game failed to live up to the impossible expectations set by marketing, the success of FNV, and the vacuum in futuristic open world RPGs left by disappointing Fallout games. When my friends played The Outer Worlds, they told me it was “disappointing”. ![]() If you’re dead-set on playing this game, or haven’t finished your playthrough yet, I would recommend skipping this post. This review contains spoilers for The Outer Worlds. ![]()
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