Rare loot and above always drops with a ‘mod’ which is essentially a perk that significantly alters your play style. As expected, loot is categorised from common all the way to legendary. This loot system is Outriders’ single most brilliant gimmick that, in my opinion, absolutely schools every other looter on the market right now. The combat really comes into its own when you throw gear and perks into the mix. The arsenal you’re given in Outriders isn’t as diverse as the ones in those previous games, but the guns still look cool and feel satisfying to fire. People Can Fly have a well-established pedigree within the shooter genre with Gears of War: Judgement and Bulletstorm, both of which had some phenomenally designed guns. The powers all feel great to use, as do the guns. Dropping a time bubble that slows all enemies trapped within it as a Trickster, only to have your Devastator buddy leap into the air and slam right in just as a Pyromancer causes a literal volcanic eruption beneath their feet, resulting in a tapestry of blood and guts and limbs, cascading in slow-motion, is something that never fails to make me cackle with glee. Since everyone is responsible for their own well-being, the team synergies are almost exclusively of the offensive kind. This immediately gives the battles in Outriders a very different rhythm than any other co-op shooter because you’re free from relying on your teammates for healing in all but the most dire situations. The tanky Devastator heals by dealing close-range damage, the roguish Trickster heals using temporal abilities, the self-explanatory Pyromancer heals by setting enemies on fire, and the Technomancer - the closest thing to a support character in this game - has abilities dedicated to healing themselves and the team. Each of the four playable classes has its own way of healing. This is usually done by tying healing to player aggression, which stops players from turtling and encourages them to get into the fight as often as they can. As the name suggests, this kind of combat is designed to encourage players to constantly push forward and be aggressive. People Can Fly have employed what’s come to be known as push-forward combat, originally popularised by Bloodborne and subsequently named so and canonized by id Software with 2016’s DOOM. Beneath the dude shooter veneer, Outriders is a very different beast. And while the game does resemble Gears in a quaint sort of way with the grey-brown colour palette in the early stages and the combat arenas shamelessly littered with waist-high walls, the resemblance is only skin-deep. Leading up to launch and through early impressions from the demos, Outriders was garnering some rather unfair comparisons to Gears of War (a series that People Can Fly have previously worked on). And I wanted to get all of the caveats out of the way before telling you why Outriders is easily the best game I’ve played in 2020 so far. I’m trying a different approach here because through all the server shutdowns, technical issues, and inventory wipes, I still enjoyed the living hell out of it. If you’ve read my reviews before, you know I tend to start with the good stuff and leave the bad stuff for the end. Now, a little over two weeks from launch, the servers are rock solid, the inventory wipe bug has reportedly been rectified, and multiple patches have improved technical performance across all platforms, but I still can’t progress beyond that one mission on PS4. Stuttering issues on PC, a hilarious bug on consoles that made a button prompt fail to appear in a main quest, completely barring any story progress beyond that point (that one happened to me). The much touted and anticipated cross-play feature simply did not work for a long time, people on PS5 were falling through the floor, other people’s entire loadouts were disappearing, rendering 40+ hours of grinding completely void. The server issues were virtually non-existent within a week of launch, only to then give way to potentially more damning technical issues. But if you’re worried why a narrative focused single-player game that’s not a live-service needs always-online servers, I’m wondering the same thing. The thing that kept me patient and waiting was the “we got this” attitude demonstrated by the developers and community managers at People Can Fly (seriously, shout-out to community managers, they have one of the toughest jobs in gamedev). Near-constant server issues made it impossible to get into the game, and if you did, it wouldn’t be long before you were kicked out. For the first three days or so after launch, Outriders was essentially unplayable.
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