I REALLY wanted to give this game a fair trial but holy shit, it's just so boring. Even with mods to speed up traveling the empty fucking world map. I cannot overstate this, 75% of your time with Outward won't be survival, combat, planning, listening to dialogue, or doing quests, it will be the endless WALKINGGGG.

And in the middle of all the walking, a random bandit comes at you from over the hill, you drop your backpack, and you have to wait AROUND 30 SECONDS FOR YOUR STAMINA TO COME BACK TO FIGHT!

All the cool "survival" elements like hunger, poisons, and 30 different status effects are just busy work with no real meat behind them. You need to carry 50 bazillion potions for colds and other nonsense debuffs that light up as soon as your toe toches a fucking micromilimiter of water. Not to mention that if you want to craft one of those things you are 100 thousand inputs away from doing so because you need to find and gather wood, craft a campfire, set it up, interact with it to start it, go into your menu and whip out the alchemy kit or cauldron, craft the bloody thing, and hold interact again to dismantle the campfire to retrieve your crafting thingy. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Enemies on the second map immediately jump on the power scale as you go from one arc of Dragon Ball to the next for no fucking reason or rhyme, because you won't be any stronger on the second map compared to the first one because of the genius way this game handles character growth. In short: there is no growth. The only thing that decides your armor, or attack is the gear you have, I got 2-shotted on the second map by a fucking skeleton in the best armor you can get in the first town. Well, where do you get the better armor to survive the skeleton? In the second town of course, DIRECTLY BEHIND SAID SKELETON. And how do you find out you shouldn't fight the skeleton and maybe go around him? GET KILLED BY HIM OF COURSE, because as soon as you start combat and realize you are in too deep you can't disengage. There's no such thing as an aggro range from what I've seen, and this mf could keep up with me easily.

I decided to play this game because SsethTzentach made a compelling video on it, but ever since his review 3 years ago, the game is literally the same, despite getting the "definitive edition" and DLCs. The devs were simply not interested in adding a different voice actor for some shopkeeps, balancing the game, or making sure the maps don't look as barren as fucking Sherwood Dungeon, the shitty browser MMO. The game basically also doesn't feature any world-building that I could stumble upon. Nothing about what the fuck you doing, where are you, or why should you care about the pixels in front of you.

There's no other way to say this, Outward doesn't feel like a passion project, it doesn't feature any neat ideas or gimmicks, and it feels like some devs saying "Survival open-world games are popular on Steam, let's slap pseudo Souls combat on top off that and rake in the cash." I'm sorry, but after playing this right after Kenshi and UnderRail it really feels like that.

Just to drive this point home, this game currently at the time for writing has 66% on Steam, a "mixed" rating. Do you know how bad your game needs to be to reach 66% on Steam? It needs to be almost non-functional. Lords of the Fallen, the 2014 one, has 62%! And I would rather eat drywall and taze myself for 15 hours straight (which is the length of the main campaign) rather than play the game ever again. This ironically enough is a perfect comparison, just like LotF 2014 Outward feels empty, without passion, and it just copied whatever seems popular and wished for the best. Absolutely vision-less game.