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.