Fun co-op looter shooter, really has this 360 era vibe to it, which I actually enjoyed. There's not much to say about this one to be honest, it tries to be a 3rd person Destiny, but also just a regular co-op linear shooter. The complete edition tends to be on sale often, so it's worth trying.

I know many disagree with this, but I liked that there wasn't any grinding required to progress through the main campaign. While some might not like this "end game", I think it fits this game fairly well. Any longer and it would be dropped, since the gameplay loop isn't engaging enough to sink tons of hours into.

Square Enix has been smoking a lot of something these past years. They've released a lot of schlock, to say the least. Outriders, I think, was the telling sign.

I actually bothered beating this with a friend in co-op. Mechanically speaking, it's a game that tries very hard to be dynamic, despite its cover shooter aesthetics. In fact, cover shooting in this game is discouraged. Enemies can easily wipe you if you don't keep moving and gunning. It kind of reminds me of Bulletstorm- Now wait a minute, who made this game?

The problem with this game, if I were to actually compare it with Bulletstorm, is that it's a god damn RPG. An RPG shooting game is bad news: Enemies are insane bullet sponges, and with the dynamic difficulty mechanics in place, you're going to take way too much time to gun down your enemies. The final boss fight took me and my friend over 30 minutes to beat because of how many bullets it took us to just whittle down the boss' HP. I've never seen anything like it, and I played Borderlands enough to know what I'm saying. At least, with Bulletstorm, you could just kick an enemy to a spiky wall and be done with it. Fast, easy and satisfying is nothing that this game has to offer, unfortunately.

So we beat the final boss and stopped there. This is the kind of game that wants you to keep on grinding, however. My patience, on the other hand, was eyeing elsewhere. Make a compelling plot for once, and maybe I'll care about playing your game some more. As it is with Outriders, it's all secondary thoughts.

They made a DLC at some point, too. Good on People Can Fly for trying, but, like, you had to deal with Square Enix, as well. It just wasn't meant to be, after all.

Completely ignoring the issues (which WILL be fixed eventually), this is a solid game. The loot feels satisfying, legendaries are unique, really nice gameplay loop because the combat is fun. Just don't treat it like a cover-shooter, as it is not. The cover is for your enemies.

I haven't even touched the endgame Expeditions mode yet, took me about 40 hours taking my time with the main & side quests without rushing anything, and I'm still having lots of fun. Some might call the story mediocre, I thought it was nice, it especially starts picking up after the middle.

Utterly unpleasant game. I am so low on "Loot" in general so maybe this game was an uphill battle for me in the first place, but the first 75% of the game was a thoroughly depressing experience of trudging through damage sponge enemies to finally reach a mediocre equilbrium, to then hit a new difficulty spike sending you back down to the bottom. Only towards the end of the game do you feel like you have really started to outclass the difficulty curve, but even there it only reaches passable time waster. The fact that the game feel like 20% like Gears of War, maybe my favorite shooter series of all time, only serves to make the experinece even more baffling.

Outriders sells itself on the fact that it is a single player story experience and not a endless online grind, a fact i might commend it for if it wasn't the most miserable misanthropic stories i've played in a long long time. Gears without the heart, Borderlands if it tried to take itself seriously. The story is grimdark dreck that drunkenly weaves from dark comedy to painfully obvious tragedy, climaxing in some of the most thematic inappropriate final plot points that the game utterly fails to earn.

Even playing co-op, a feature that usually earns a game a lot of goodwill from me, didn't do much. We were both completely sick of this thing at the end. Be kinder to yourselves, don't play this.