The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds is an open world RPG FPS developed by Obsidian. It is currently on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

The game is overall very good. It is however rather short, taking less than 40 hours to complete. If you are a fan of the modern Fallout games, you will definitely enjoy this game. That is the short of it, it is good, from here on there might be spoilers, this is your only warning.

The story is not overly complex. You are saved from suspended animation aboard an abandoned space ship by a mad scientist. The scientist wants you to help save all the other people from your ship still trapped, and save the colony that you will be having adventures in. Of course you can get through this a number of ways, being helpful, being greedy, being a complete asshole, and many other options beside, all depending on you and your play style.

The world is slightly different than most open worlds. As the game takes place on several worlds that you can freely travel between. So rather than one large sandbox, you are given a series of relatively small sandboxes. Most of them have a few quests do. Oddly despite being different worlds, many of them have the same wild life.

Your character progression has some twists too. You gain level as you might expect, but you then put points into categories that give you improvements to multiple skill, to a certain amount. After a certain point, you must then level up each skill individually. Lots of varibles effect your skills, nearly every piece of equipment will modify your skills in some way, and the NPCs you choose to take with you in your travels will also effect your skills.

The NPCs are well voice acted. The ones you get to follow you will give you bonuses. Each one also has a very short quest. Some of them are better written than others.

The gameplay takes several forms. Out in the world you are mostly shooting things. In towns you are mostly talking, and in nearly every conversion you will find a way to apply one of your characters skills, assuming the skill in question in high enough. You get quest, you turn in quests, you get experience, and maybe another piece of the story.