‘Outriders’ Review (Xbox Series X): A Legendary Drop

It’s always a bit hard to know when to review a game without an embargo, especially one where you can’t just beat the campaign and move on, you must pillage and raid the endgame for loot.

But at this point in Outriders, I’ve done every quest and sidequest on my Trickster and have run a bunch of endgame expedition challenges. I’ve nearly completed the game again on my Technomancer. And I’m a ways into a Pyromancer run on PC instead of Xbox.

So yeah, I’ve been playing Outriders a lot.

I wrote an article before Outriders was released wondering if the game could be “The One,” a rare looter that gets things right at launch, rather than needing to wait for endless patches and buffs and full on expansions to get where it needs to be. Games like Diablo 3 and Destiny (1 and 2) needed that full year. Others like Anthem and perhaps, Marvel’s Avengers, may never get there at all. A while back it looked like Outriders, what appeared to be a relatively generic sci-fi IP trying to capitalize on the looter craze, would probably fail. But over the months leading up to launch, smart marketing showing the depth of the gearing and skill builds, and a free demo showed off how fun gameplay could be. Minds started to be changed, including my own.

Here at full release? I am deeply impressed with the final product Outriders has produced. I am, above all else, a looter player, and have either dabbled in or become obsessed with pretty much every game in this genre at one point or another. And Outriders stands out as a significant, extremely good entry in a genre where it’s easy to screw things up.

Outriders is the most literal interpretation of “Diablo with guns” in history, even more so than the original series that tried that, Borderlands. The game is structured with small, somewhat linear levels. You are free to mix and match skills with skill modifiers on armor (a stand-in for gems/runes). There is set gear that combines for powerful effects. The are endgame “rift runs” (expeditions) where you’ll farm the best gear once you’ve beaten the main story.

What works the most about Outriders is how its gear systems intersect with gameplay. I went through a period where I was skeptical about Outriders’ reliance on essentially two encounter types, a room full of human enemies behind cover, and a room full of monster enemies swarming you in empty space. And really, that’s true through the entire game, but what changes is how you deal with them. I have never been more impressed with a game’s combination of gears and skills than I have been with what I’ve seen with Outriders here. The freedom to gear up not just in the endgame, but even by level 10 or so with blue gear opens up the possibility to freely switch between builds, all of them fun, using various skills and mods that transform them.

There simply are no bad classes in Outriders. Whatever class you might think is bad early on in the game, you just haven’t put enough time into yet. There are incredible, viable endgame builds for Trickster, the teleporting hunter, Technomancer, the toxic/freeze mage-type, Pyromancer, the fire-caster and Devastator, the boulder tank, all of which can serve rolls as support or DPS depending on how you build them. All of them are fun. None of them stands out as being decidedly worse than the rest, which again, is highly unusual in a game like this.

The key to combat in Outriders is that despite the chest-high walls everywhere, you’re almost never meant to be in cover, and rather, the game is far more engaging trying to play it like DOOM, hyper-aggressively. Not so gung-ho that you get overwhelmed, but you can get into a tactical flow of moving around a room dismantling groups of enemies in a ballet of destruction that is among the best I’ve seen in the genre.

You might think that with good loot and build potential, the story probably suffers as it does in most looters. Strangely, this is…also not true? While it may not be an all-time great video game narrative, I found myself actually enjoying the “road trip” vibe of the tale, getting invested in the characters, especially my own whose “annoyed superhero” attitude actually makes them quite likable, and gives them more personality than say, a voiceless Guardian or Division agent. I was also genuinely taken aback by many plot surprises People Can Fly buried in the game as it went on, stuff they kept out of the marketing deliberately. The ending was a bit off for me, but the journey to get there was fantastic.

So, any downsides? A few. The linearity of the level design is somewhat exhausting, especially when there’s a canned animation scene between opening every door or ducking under every log to get to a new area, and each map, already quite small, is broken up into 6-7 of these zones. The explanation was that this was built to accommodate co-op play, and yet almost everyone is going to play at least the campaign solo, so it feels pointless. It also begs the question of why this game couldn’t have launched with an offline mode period, which I suppose is not unique to the genre, but stands out here as misguided, particularly with the early server issues the game had near launch.

The endgame Expedition grind can be fun, but some are stupidly hard and others a cakewalk, and they don’t seem very well balanced so far. I also hate the matchmaking system, not only because it doesn’t work most of the time, but because it will usually not put you directly into a run, but rather in “town” where you will stand around waiting for players transfixed by a vendor menu for ten minutes instead of actually starting up the activity. In a genre all about efficient grinding, having this much downtime between runs is incredibly annoying, and this is best done with friends you’re all on the same page with.

There are some basic features missing here. Locking items, loadouts. The waypoint system is extremely broken the deeper you get into the game. So clearly some stuff needs to be patched in still, be that quality of life or bug fixes.

And yet, Outriders has surpassed my expectations in almost every way. Months ago, I figured this would be another looter flop, but now, it’s one of the best current entries in the genre, and even with no “live service roadmap” at hand, it’s clear you could potentially extract hundreds of hours from it regardless. I plan to do just that.

Square Enix provided a review code of this game.

Developer: People Can Fly

Publisher: Square Enix.

Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Stadia

Score: 9/10

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.