tOuter Worlds 2 was originally announced in June for £70/$80, making it the most expensive Xbox game at the time. This was short-lived: Microsoft backed down just a month later and kept it at the standard £60/$70 price. While The Outer Worlds 2 is technically bigger than its 2019 predecessor, that decision was a smart one – this isn’t a £70 game.
However, it is a completely fun adventure that can easily consume hours of your time and improves on the original game significantly. With much better combat and deeper role-playing mechanics, The Outer Worlds 2 expands smartly without going on too long, even if its story doesn’t delight.
It is not necessary to have played the first installment To understand the broad strokes of the sequel: you are an agent of an obtusely “benevolent” space police force known as the Earth Directorate, charged with bringing order to a galaxy known as Arcadia. Like Halcyon from the original game, Arcadia is fractured and frayed as a result of unbridled capitalism, and you have unlimited power in your quest to forge new bonds or repair old ones between wildly different ideological groups, all armed to the teeth.
You’ll regularly find yourself caught between warring factions, but there’s a bigger problem than divisions between them: real divisions in space. You are introduced to them as the game begins, tasked with investigating the engines invented by the authoritarian collectivist group Protectorate, which are causing these tears in the fabric of space. Upon his arrival, he is quickly betrayed by a trusted associate and forced to spend a decade in suspended animation.
When you wake up 10 years later, Arcadia has changed dramatically and divisions continue to spread unabated. You have to form a new team to try to save the galaxy.
Unfortunately for The Outer Worlds 2, nothing reaches the narrative peak of the game’s opening; a disappointment that you don’t fully understand until you’ve immersed yourself in it for about 30 hours. I kept waiting for a character to surprise me or for stories to develop in unexpected ways, but I found myself consciously nodding at almost every turn. While there are interesting characters to align yourself with, including a psychopathic cultist and a spy, I struggled to connect with this team as much as I did in the first game.
Even though there are three main factions constantly competing for your attention and sympathy, there are few options in The Outer Worlds 2 that seem impactful. Prickly conversations with narrow-minded capitalists force you to consider your own participation in the real-world economic system, but the two-dimensional shots of the characters provoke more eye-rolls than insightful moments.
If you have a high enough “speaking” skill, you will be able to get in and out of most situations. This feels especially incongruous when a blind Protectorate devotee does a complete 180 after selecting a specific voice line, although it can be very satisfying when you make it out of a boss fight. Yet at the end of almost every one of these major moments of conflict, you’re left feeling like nothing you did really mattered, although maybe that’s the point.
Because of this, I found myself struggling to connect with the story. My peers may have had strong opinions, but they never seem to get angry with me, even when my decisions challenge their beliefs. There’s a lack of conviction in The Outer Worlds 2, which is especially disheartening because its clever humor often elicits a laugh but is rarely used to make a sufficiently scathing ideological statement.
The game offers impressive depth with its combat and role-playing systems, which have been drastically improved over the original. While the gunfights still have their tedious and frustrating moments, the sheer variety of weapons and how that affects each encounter is exciting: elemental damage has varying degrees of impact against enemies, and each requires different ammunition. If you run out in the middle of a grueling encounter, you’ll be forced to get creative. I would often enter a fight with a weapon rotation in mind, only to run out of ammo faster than expected and be forced to try something I’d never used before. I really enjoyed having to think and exchange on the fly.
Building your character is even more thoughtful than the original game, introducing “flaws,” a system that tracks your behaviors and occasionally offers you to accept a trait, often with both negative and positive effects. For example, my reliance on crafting items results in the “Hermit” defect, which doubles vendor prices but adds a 25% chance to double items when breaking down trash. This was obviously useful in my sneakiest moments, but it was a problem when I was low on trash and needed to rely on vendors – a fun little situation that made me readjust my playstyle.
Developer Obsidian has had a big year, releasing the fantasy adventure Avowed and the bug-filled survival game Grounded 2. All three are testaments to the studio’s ability to create wildly different worlds that adapt and change at the player’s will.
Even if The Outer Worlds 2 rarely blows me away and suffers direct comparisons to Avowed, whose smaller scope resulted in a tighter experience overall, there’s inherent value in an RPG that sucks you in so effectively for hours on end. It’s not about breaking molds, but about improving its structure: offering you something satisfying and solid that rarely surprises, but manages to regularly delight.
