yes_commander

The cult of Kojima will throw out 10s no matter what he does. But for anyone evaluating this on its own merits, it's a pretentious game about not-Daryl throwing his turds at ghosts and chugging Monster Energy.

I've spent something in the neighborhood of 40-60 hours with this one. I feel I gave it a very fair shake. I don't have a problem with the graphics, the writing, the systems -- all of it is fine. Except for the combat. I think the decision to allow a coin toss to decide which direction a unit attacks is utterly horrible. It undermines player decision-making. Many games use randomness to much better effect. Mostly decent 4x game, but I feel the attempt to innovate on combat mechanics is a huge failure.

The skyboxes are pretty. >.> That's honestly the only thing I consider well done about this game. No single element stands on its own as something unique or innovative. Now, not all games need to innovate to be enjoyable, sure, but the mechanics are weak with no exceptions and the gameplay loops themselves simply aren't entertaining, let alone compelling. Character development is a joke. Collecting items has no purpose -- this diminishes the importance of exploration massively. Dialogs are an attempt at a literal joke that falls flat. The characters are just... bland. The story suffers from such a severe lack of [insert literally anything you would want from a game plot here]. There's more personality in a voiceless Rimworld pawn than you'll get from any character in TOW. I might have enjoyed this when I was ten (the demographic I have to assume all the high scores are coming from) but this is not worth the time or money if you value either. I expected better from Obsidian, but now I'm going to pass on their games for a few years thanks to this profoundly unsatisfying release. Defenders will excuse shortcomings on it having a lower budget than the big boys. First of all, Obsidian should be keenly aware of budgetary concerns by now, after decades of working with less than AAA budgets, and secondly, good low-budget games focus on their strengths and trim excess fat. The Outer Worlds simply fails to focus on anything. They overextended, they underdelivered, and everything about this game suffers as a result. I'm not leaving a bad review out of spite or some misguided blind-faith loyalty to another company. I've followed Obsidian for years, back in the Black Isle days, through the Troika phase, all the way up until today. I've supported probably dozens of their games over the years because they delivered really enjoyable games more often than not. I wanted to enjoy this, I tried, but after 20 thoroughly disappointing hours I truly just feel that this game utterly fails to deliver on everything it set out to do.

~10 hours in. It's pretty decent. Poor translation may be charming enough for some people to toss out 9s and 10s like candy, but makes trying to comprehend the ability descriptions pretty awkward. I don't really care about poorly translated story, it's not what I want from the game, but clarity in the technicalities of combat is essential, and this is a bit lacking there. I am not a fan of anime, neither the art nor the tropes, but the maps in the game are nicely detailed, some of the animations are surprisingly good, and while I may not be a fan of the art style, I can appreciate that it's well done while keeping the typical anime s#it relatively subdued compared to a lot of other games. There are still high school kids doing backflips off of buildings just because they can, and prissy edgelords in fur coats that I think are supposed to come across as dangerous, compelling figures. Right... Thankfully I haven't seen any cat ears. Yet. Fingers crossed. I grabbed this because tactical games are my jam but I'm unwilling to support Chimera Squad and Gear$ Tactic$ is way overpriced for a spinoff of a series I don't follow. This was the compromise I chose, and the combat is genuinely enjoyable. Unfortunately, the menus in the HQ are needlessly obtuse (again, not helped by machine translation issues), but there seems to be quite a bit of customization and depth in every layer of the game. Personal taste aside, this is a pretty solid tactical game. If the menus were more intuitive and better translated, I might give it a 6 or 7, and if it continues to get mechanically deeper over time (I read that it's potentially a 100+ hour game), possibly reaching toward an 8 but we'll have to wait and see. The devs do seem to be supporting the game like mad, so that's a big plus.