The Outer Worlds was one of my favorite games of the last several years. When The Outer Worlds 2 neared launch, I knew I had to review it. While I hoped for more of the same, I also wanted to see some evolution. I wouldn’t be happy if TOW2 turned out to be a big DLC pack. And I’ll admit, for the first couple of hours, I wasn’t very happy. But that didn’t last long. Nearly every part of The Outer Worlds 2 is better than the original, and what isn’t better (spoiler alert, it’s combat) is secondary to what I came to TOW2 for in the first place.
Character Progression – Get More Choice With Auntie’s Choice.
The Outer Worlds 2’s main strength lies in choice. Right from the start, you have choices to make, and how you build your character will influence how you approach the entire game. And all throughout your gameplay, you will have choice after choice to make, each one affecting your playstyle.
Character Creation
The irony of paying to jump into The Outer Worlds 2’s head start, only to spend the first two hours messing around with the character generator, isn’t lost on me. But it is a pretty decent character generator. It’s not the most robust system around – you don’t have a slew of sliders to change every shape and angle of your face and bod – but there are plenty of preset faces and hairstyles to choose from.
Only two hours to create this handsome man!
Once you have your character’s physical appearance locked in, it’s time to get to the real RPG choices. First up, you will pick your background story. All of your scruffy nerfherder spacer classes are here: Ex-convict, Gambler, Lawbringer, Professor, Renegade, and Roustabout. Each background has some down-and-out moment that resolves with you becoming an Earth Directorate operative. Your background is mostly just flavor text for your character, but your choice will add themed dialog choices during conversations with NPCs.
Your first truly game-affecting choice will be choosing your Trait. Your choice will give you either a combat or non-combat advantage. For example, Nimble gives you added crouch speed and combat sprint speed. I went with Brilliance, which granted an extra skill specialization during character creation, and my specialized skills started at 2 instead of 1.
Skill Up
Your last choice during character creation is picking your starting skill, or two if you took the Brilliance trait like I did. There are 12 skills to choose from, and as you would expect, these skills provide all types of bonuses to your character. At each level up, you will gain an additional skill point. These points can be used to increase a known skill’s effectiveness or to branch out into additional skills. Skill checks ramp up quickly in TOW2, so rather than taking the Jack of all trades approach, you’ll probably want to focus on a small selection of skills.
Choosing the right skills for the job
More than just a stat-builder, skills help define your approach to overcoming obstacles in TOW2. This includes both combat and non-combat methods, so whether you want to run and gun, talk your way out of combat, or avoid it altogether by sneaking around, there’s a skill for you.
Get Perky
If skills define how you want to play your character, Perks are the toolkit you’ll use to get things done. Every two levels, your character will gain a Perk point. Your starting selection of Perks will depend upon your original Skills. Starting with the Guns Skill, for example, will unlock a few Perks that will increase your effectiveness with firearms: Commando to unlock an additional weapon slot, Point Blank Artist to increase sneak attack and close range damage, and Sharpshooter to increase sneak attack and ranged damage.
You can’t collect them all
Perks are a progressive system. As you rank up individual skills, additional Perks will become available. Some Perks will also require lower-tier Perks as prerequisites. For example, Makeshift Armorer requires Engineering 3, while the Master Armorer Perk will need Makeshift Armorer, Engineering 20, and 9 or more total Perks purchased.
I’ve Got Flaws
Big brother is always watching. And if you think being an Earth Directorate operative keeps you from prying eyes, think again. No matter what I did or where I went, the ED was always there, watching, reporting. And they never had anything good to say. “The Earth Directorate found a flaw in you!” seems to be their favorite type of correspondence, and I have to say, I kinda like the Flaw system in TOW2.
The Flaw system works in conjunction with your skills to define your playstyle. This isn’t the first time I’ve played an RPG with a flaw system to add a dark side to character progression, but it is the first time that it felt like that system was always aware of how I played the game. Instead of random assignment or me dissecting a long list of flaws and picking the ones that work for me, TOW2 tracks how you play and then presents Flaws as you hit performance milestones. Do something enough times – steal, eat, get your companions downed during combat – and the Earth Directorate will find a Flaw in you.
My first Flaw, Consumerism, was identified because I was willing to throw away money for a five-day head start and pre-ordered the game. The ED also identified that I liked to steal items, ate a bunch of food to restore health, got my companions killed a lot (it’s their fault, I promise), and constantly veered from the main story to complete secondary quests. I was even offered a Flaw for accepting three Flaws. It seems that no matter how you play TOW2, the Earth Directorate will find a Flaw in what you’re doing.
But what exactly does that mean? Flaws are one-time offers that give you a chance to lean into a particular playstyle. You can choose to ignore them, but accepting a Flaw assigns both a positive and an adverse effect to your character. That Consumerism Flaw I took? It gives me a 15% discount at vendors. On the downside, it drops my sale value by 20%. I rarely sell items, so this was a no-brainer – yes, please!
Later, when I was crafting some bullets, the ED found I had the Self-Sufficient Flaw. My do-it-yourself attitude had pissed off the vendors: I could get additional materials when breaking down equipment, but they would jack their prices by 50%. My rapid-fire pistol build goes through bullets faster than I can make them, so the negative was too much to bear – I had taken this playstyle far enough, no thanks.
Mechanics like this aren’t uncommon in RPGs, so why have I become so fond of TOW2’s Flaws? In this case, it’s the system’s pseudo-randomness. I’m sure that min-maxer players will cringe because they can’t pick and choose which Flaws they want and when they want to add them, like they do with Perks, but that is exactly why I like it. For my first playthrough of any RPG, I always go in blind, picking traits, skills, and buffs on the fly. Sometimes that means I end up with a broken character, but that’s part of the fun. I’ll eventually find my way through whatever trouble I get into, and the world will feel more lifelike for it. During future playthroughs, I can put together an overpowered build, look up every hidden weapon, and kill every NPC and pillage every village.
The Story – Saving Humanity…Again
Usually, a sequel tries to outdo the original’s story, but that isn’t the case here. Obsidian’s story telling follows the adage, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. A good storyteller can take an average story and turn it into a masterpiece, and Obsidian always seems to find a way to take a tired story – in this case, it’s a single man saving humanity – and turn it into something special.
So many story elements feel exactly like the original game. We find ourselves floating frozen in space again. There’s still the same disregard for human life, with factions doing whatever it takes to further their goals. Even the local fauna looks and feels the same. We have already saved one solar system from greed and corruption, and now we are back to do it all again.
Fortunately, Obsidian has crafted some excellent dialogue, even if the overall story is a little lackluster. The wit is cutting, and individual conversations carry weight. Dialog choices matter, and your decisions can change the outcome of nearly every interaction. With so much evil to thwart, I often found myself trying to convince one NPC or another of the error in their ways. Sometimes I was successful in defusing the situation, and when negotiations inevitably went south, I wondered whether a different dialog choice could have prevented unnecessary bloodshed.
Good luck unlocking every conversation option
It’s in these conversations that character building really shines. Everything, from the trait you chose during character creation, the skills you choose as you level up, and the companions you have in your party, affects the choices you can make. Success or failure in past interactions will change your faction standing, affecting your current dialog choices, and sometimes it’s just better to shut up and let your companion take the lead.
Throughout it all, The Outer Worlds 2 is dripping with satire. Dialog can be punchy, comedic, and outright zany. And it goes well beyond the juvenile fart jokes you find in the Borderlands series. The underlying themes in TOW2 are prevalent in today’s world, and the humor always cuts through the tension without resorting to fifth-grade responses. And the writing can catch you off guard, going from a mildly humorous tirade to a WTF moment in a heartbeat.
The best part about the story is that no faction is left untouched. Whether you’re fighting against the corporate greed of Auntie’s Choice, dealing with the brainwashed math fanatics of the Protectorate, or just helping a crabble rancher on a random side quest, odds are you’ll be working in some morally gray area. What side is right if every side is wrong? Are the mid-tier lackeys evil if they’re just trying to do the best they can? And does any of it really matter when every member of your crew will justify ending a conversation with a bullet to the brainpan if it helps further their own faction?
Gameplay – Black Market Convenience
Nothing bogs down a good story more than tedious gameplay mechanics. Obsidian has leaned into player convenience in several gameplay mechanics. You won’t have a hoverbike to travel long distances quickly, but you do have unlimited sprint and fast-travel spots near most points of interest. Other conveniences, such as double jump, are granted through gear found during secondary quests. All of this does make the already small maps feel even smaller, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have plenty of exploring to do.
There are plenty of hidden areas to find – even on your own ship – so anyone not wanting to race through the main story will find a slow, methodical pace very rewarding. Secret caches are just one of the benefits of a thorough search. There are also hidden crawl spaces that will route you around a brutal fight, or even better, take you to a room with a control panel that can be used to flood an area with gas or reprogram an auto bot to turn on its master. Or you can skip all of the exploration and subterfuge and just go in guns blazing.
Is that a secret passage I see?
Another game design choice Oblivion has taken to make The Outer Worlds 2 more convenient is inventory weight management. Or lack of weight, to be more precise. There is a lot of junk to collect, buy, and steal in The Outer Worlds 2, and unlike many RPGs, you don’t have to worry about encumbrance. You won’t want to keep every single item you find – you’ll do plenty of selling or breaking down items for crafting materials – but you don’t have to race back to a town to unload everything until you are darn good and ready to do so. And should you decide to keep him in your party, Niles acts as a mobile crafting station.
Combat – Not The Perfect Equation
Let’s get this out of the way before we dig into anything else – if you’re looking for a looter shooter, you aren’t going to enjoy The Outer Worlds 2. Obsidian has crafted a true RPG, with combat being secondary, albeit abundant, to other RPG elements. You’ll likely spend more time talking, searching, and reading logs than actually fighting, and the real reward for all your hard work isn’t exotic gear, it’s a good story.
There are some rudimentary shooter mechanics at play. Pre-combat stealth is an option, and sneak attacks can knock an enemy out before a fight ever breaks out, but you’ll have to spec heavily into this playstyle to have any reasonable chance of success. Enemies do have weak spots to target for increased damage – headshots for humans, and glowing spots to shoot on mechanical foes to rapidly remove any heavy armor – but it’s just as easy to spec into critical hit chance and grab a high fire rate, fast reload weapon, and pump out as much hot lead as possible. And of course, choosing the correct elemental damage type for a given enemy will also expedite their demise.
Cover? I don’t need no stinking cover!
The basic gunplay doesn’t mean combat in TOW2 isn’t fun. Just don’t expect some grandiose shooter full of squad tactics, elaborate cover mechanics, and dazzling combo attacks. At best, ranged combatants – both enemy and player companions – will duck behind cover for a couple of seconds before popping back out to shoot. Anyone or anything using melee weapons will make a direct line towards an enemy and hack away regardless of any other fire they are taking, only breaking off the attack when a different target deals enough damage to gain aggro.
Your companions’ combat effectiveness isn’t much better than that of your enemies. You don’t have any direct control over your companions, and they will generally stand out in the open and fire at whatever target they deem most dangerous at the moment. I’ve even seen instances where a companion will crouch down to avoid enemy fire while standing out in the open. Each companion does have a unique special ability that you can activate, but charging these abilities up during combat takes time, so you’re only going to get to use them once or twice per fight. And that’s assuming your companions didn’t stand out in the open, firing away until they go down, screaming for you to come and revive them. And that isn’t easy since every enemy will be focused on you.
Final Thoughts – Better Than The First Time Around
The first few hours (after character creation, that is) of The Outer Worlds 2 felt more like a giant DLC pack than it did a full-on sequel. However, the longer I played, the more I noticed the changes Obsidian had made. The story, though tried and true, does add more weight to your choices than it did in the original. Picking a specific dialogue branch no longer boils down to just being peaceful or aggressive. In TOW2, I truly felt like I was making a moral decision.
Throughout the story, the one thing I really noticed was just how much my companions influenced my decisions. Early in my playthrough, I had to load up a save because I forgot to flip a switch before leaving a room, and one of my party members left me because I didn’t act the way they wanted. Yeah, maybe a town got destroyed and I deserved it(I really did forget to flip the switch and I was going to save it), but what really stood out was that during the following dialogue, there was a speech option (that I didn’t have access to) that could have kept the companion from leaving.
A similar situation occurred later, when, during a conversation, I decided I would just kill the scientist I was talking to. That royally pissed off one of my companions, and although she didn’t leave the party, she made the ultimatum that if I did it again, she was gone. And I never did it again because I wanted her to stay. Maybe she was bluffing, but I didn’t want to find out. I was being held accountable for my actions, and that factored into how I approached every interaction the rest of the game. And that is the type of RPG I want to play.
Overall, The Outer Worlds 2 was exactly what I wanted in a sequel. Obsidian has honed its skills, spec’d into storycraft, and its only flaw is uninspired combat. Yep, I’ll take that, even at a price that would make Auntie’s Choice blush.
