 The last console generation ended up being the era of the huge, expensive, open-world action game. It seemed like every big franchise spent most of its resources on resolution, cinematics, and map size and very little on focused, tight gameplay systems. It was the era of bloat, huge, sprawling skill trees and games that didn't need them, pointless, grindy crafting systems, and maps bursting with annoying collectibles but little in the way of tight level design. It also ended up being a generation that saw a massive decline in the number of AAA titles, with games becoming so expensive to make that most publishers weren't willing to spend money on games that weren't surefire massive hits. Just sequel after sequel, man. Obviously, lots of people loved the generation's focus on size above all else, but personally, I think the 360 generation produced a wider variety of good games. Even in the AAA space, the 360 generation was more focused on smaller, tighter experiences and not dragging a 15 hour game out to 55 hours for no good reason. If Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the quintessential 8th generation game, then something like Gears of War was the quintessential 7th generation game. I made a few videos where I've talked about how disappointing it is to only ever get games like Assassin's Creed or Celeste with very little in between. Games are huge mega titles or small tiny little indie titles with very little oxygen in between for the small, focused, mid-budget game. For instance, games like, say, Bulletstorm. Bulletstorm was a perfect example of a 360 PS3 era game. It was a small, tight little game that featured a B-movie story about big beefy dudes shooting the badmens. It was a game that spent its resources on that focused gameplay hook. People Can Fly never got a chance to make a Bulletstorm 2, which is a damn shame. But they did release a new game this month. Outriders isn't a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, and it has an awful lot of problems. But it's also the most Xbox 360 game I have played in many years. Let's take a look at People Can Fly's new Gears of War meets Diablo meets Bulletstorm title and talk about why, even with all of those flaws, and there is a shitload of flaws, it's a good thing that Outriders is a hit. Outriders, after the logo. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't want a bunch of bloated chaff in my video games. I want my games to get to the point, do their thing, and then the moment they run out of things to do, to fucking end so I can play another game. This is why it is my unshakable belief that Bulletstorm is approximately 3.1 million times better as a game than Red Dead Redemption 2. I spent like 2% of my time in Bulletstorm walking. I spent like 70% of my time in Red Dead 2 walking. Ergo, Bulletstorm is better than Red Dead 2. That's just like math, dude. People Can Fly's Bulletstorm is a great look at the 360 era. It's a small little shooter that tries interesting things that would be considered too gamey for one of the huge triple A shooters that need to be hashtag realism. It's about a bunch of beefy dudes saying stupid shit and being tough guys, but it also has a score system that revolves around being a badass tough guy. The DNA of Bulletstorm is all up in Outriders, it is in Destiny. Outriders was covered as a sort of Destiny competitor, but it has nothing to do with Destiny, Anthem, Avengers, and the rest of the live service genre. Outriders is best described as a double A mix of Diablo, Gears of War, and Bulletstorm. Like all the best double A games, Outriders has the strange ability to constantly remind you that it's not all that good, while simultaneously somehow keeping you playing hour after hour. And that's the real reason I decided to write about the game. There were times where I would sigh because I'd entered yet another identical arena with the same enemies, and yet after clearing that arena I would end up opening the map to make sure I'd done all the quests in the area. I did every single quest in the game and played through a bit of the end game, even though the map is the worst piece of shit ever, even though the entity variety is pretty pathetic, even though there are a bunch of seemingly broken balance issues and horrendous performance issues, and straight up constant crashes, even though all that's true, I kept playing. Why? Because even though the game is extremely narrow and repetitive, the core of it is quite good and all the systems are simple but enjoyable. The Division 2 keeps you playing because its production values are so high and the map is so huge that the game never really feels like it's repeating itself. Outriders keeps you playing because there's a ridiculous variety of enemies and locations and loot and skill systems, so it actually isn't really repeating itself. And even Destiny keeps you playing because there's a wide variety of stuff to do. Outriders does one thing, and it does it really well, well, when it isn't crashing or running at 11 frames a second. Outriders has like three different arena setups, it has four types of quests, it has like five animal enemies and five or six basic human enemies that it repeats over and over. But the actual gameplay loop works so well, it doesn't really get old. Like Bulletstorm, it takes a genre that's been done a billion times but tweaks it just enough to stay fresh. Outriders at its best isn't a cover shooter, but a run and gun combat game that revolves around skill combos and managing cooldowns. In fact, the only time the game really bogs down or the moments when it forgets what it does well and decides it's suddenly going to be the division for ten minutes. The division is the rare great cover shooter because the actual cover system works better than in any other game. And because it's pretty judicious about how many enemies it throws at you. Outriders cover system is, I mean it's bad, it's pretty bad frankly with all the classic issues that mediocre cover shooters deal with. Luckily these sections aren't all that common and most of the game is spent doing the things it does well. What makes the game able to be played like a third person doom is how the healing works. Outriders only has recharging health through the first twenty percent of the bar. Any other damage needs to be refilled by killing enemies. The precise method depends on the class but generally you heal yourself by killing enemies in specific ways. The Devastator has to kill enemies up close. The Pyramancer needs to kill enemies who've been marked by his fire skills. This means that you can't simply stay in cover and take potshots. You've got to get out and get close to enemies to gain health. It also makes the fights against monsters the ones that work best with this system. The human enemies are fine most of the time but many of the later arenas feature a ridiculous amount of dudes using hitscan sniper rifles or assault rifles which grinds the game right back into being gears of war except without regenerating health. The game is at its best when you're running around an arena lighting things on fire or turning them into pillars of ash before burning their skin off leaving the skeleton standing there for a few seconds before they crumble to the ground. In fact the game would have been even better if the actual cover mechanic had been removed and replaced by just cover objects that you could simply get behind like in Remnant or Destiny or Doom or whatever. If anything the game is held back by still fitting itself into the cover shooter box. If all those cover objects were just six feet tall and you can kind of just dip in and out instead of having to play around with a finicky cover mechanic it would have been better. I mean it's got all the classic problems. You will stick to cover when you're trying to roll or roll when you're trying to get into cover. Half the time you'll get shot through cover for some reason. Even these hardest arenas with the snipers are best played just not using the fucking cover system. You'll die a couple times figuring out how to do it but you won't end up annoyed that you died because a crucial system feels like it was designed in 2008. While Outriders plays pretty smoothly aside from its Mass Effect 1 cover system it still has got some sweet ass Xbox 360 going on. Walking into an arena in Outriders basically looks like walking into a cover shooter from 2010. Arenas are filled with identical sandbag emplacements that make the levels look like cover shooter levels and not like real places. Is this like a huge deal? I mean sometimes the levels against humans can be annoying because they're so cluttered and you can't run two feet without bumping into a pile of sandbags but for the most part the game is unabashedly gamey so it's not that big a deal. It's a video game doing video game things. The early levels are pretty weak. They're tiny little hallways that connect rooms full of sandbags ending in a boss fight. Most games put all their best levels up front. Destiny 2 is the king of this where the first mission of a new expansion is always insanely beautiful levels full of remarkable skyboxes and unique maps but by mission 3 you return into patrol zones to collect drag skulls and public events. Outriders worst levels and maps are jammed up front. It seems pretty obvious to me that the earliest areas they designed are the first because about halfway through the game the levels get significantly bigger with far more interesting skyboxes, wider arenas and much more beautiful art design. It's so obvious that I can only assume they got a massive budget increase about halfway through the game's development and were able to hugely expand what they had the time and money to do. It seems pretty clear that the later levels were designed by a bigger team than the early levels. The first few levels feel like an Xbox 360 game. The last few levels feel like a modern remake of that same Xbox 360 game. It's the same thing but bigger and prettier. In fact this whole it gets better as it goes along is sprinkled throughout the whole game. Enemy types, levels, bosses, art design and interestingly the story. Start bad and less bad. Outriders story starts out an awful lot like Bulletstorm. It's about a bunch of beefy dudes who are badass cool guys talking about all the badass cool guys shit they did back in the badass old days. It's like the most B-movie thing ever. It's so ridiculous it flips over into enjoyable. By the second level my son was joking about how cool your player character is. He started saying this guy is so fucking cool he started smoking in second grade. When the player character would throw out one of his terrible warmliners we'd say aw dude he's so fucking cool he's the coolest guy who ever cooled. When he would brutally execute a defeated enemy we would be like aw so cool. In fact it's so bad that early on I was discussing with my wife how much it continues to amaze me that professional writers can be so amazingly terrible. This happens to me all the time. I'll play a Destiny campaign with rising fury as I realize the guy who wrote this piece of shit got paid like 10 times my salary to catastrophically fail at his task. I constantly play games and I'm positive I could write a better story for on lunch breaks from my actual job. I will cut down trees all day, come home and write the next Destiny 2 campaign for $20 an hour and do a way better job. And Outwriter's Story starts out like Destiny 2's story but at like a 4th grade reading level rather than Destiny 2's 6th grade reading level. But about halfway through the quality of the storytelling and writing noticeably improves. It's like the first half of the story was written in 2009 for a 360 game and the second half was written in 2018 for an Xbox One game. It's still pretty simple but it's at least interesting and characters suddenly start being more than just cool ass thick boy 2 or science nerd guy 3. By the end I was actually interested in what was happening. That's pretty remarkable for a game that started out so terribly my son and I had a little thing where we'd yell skip as soon as the cutscene started. Now don't get me wrong. This isn't the last of us. But it's pretty competent B-Sci movie schlock held together by some surprisingly poignant character moments and an overall story that's predictable but well told. It's a lot like Bulletstorm man. It's stupid but it wins you over by being earnestly stupid. The last thing to talk about in the positive section here is the loot and the progression. Now this isn't some super deep RPG but it also is in a Ubisoft game where you've got a massive skill tree filled with 80% useless garbage, 10% imperceptible stat upgrades, and 10% actually useful stuff buried all the way at the end. Instead it's a relatively focused progression system that provides a surprising amount of diversity and depth without being a painful grind through mostly boring stat bumps. The only stat bumps on the skill trees are actually noticeable. Here is a node for 20% weapon damage boost and the health nodes are 10% each. Now that's not awesome that they're stat boost but at least you notice when you pick those. The actual skills are all pretty varied and all have utility because the game seamlessly weaves an MMO style interrupt system into its magic shooter gameplay. The cooldowns on skills range from 10 seconds at the low to 45 seconds on the high end and you can spec into builds that give you multiple charges of the most useful skills. And crucially, the skills work together almost as a primer and detonator combo system. For instance, the fire dude I mained can light everyone on fire and then turn them into ash consuming the status effect for huge damage. Later I found I could switch the blast to consume ash instead, making me able to turn everyone into pillars of ash that froze them in place and then blow them all up in a massive radius. Bosses and elites all cast obnoxious magic powers that need to be interrupted, which means very carefully managing your cooldowns to make sure you're able to interrupt their most deadly attacks is a big part of the game. Like the final boss constantly summons turret orbs and if you fail to interrupt him you will be surrounded by like 20 orbs and killed. It's a pretty simple and intuitive system that adds a ton to the combat, separating it from every other third person shooter out there. In fact, it's a system that makes it one of the better combat systems around. It adds a great layer of complexity to it without being annoyingly rock paper scissors. By the end of the game, I was convinced it was one of the most artfully designed combat systems I've seen in a good long spell. Now what about the loot? The weapons themselves are pretty forgettable, with only a few of the normal types. There's two types of shotguns, there's LMGs, SMGs, assault rifles, pistols, snipers, and bolt action rifles. The guns themselves are fine, the sound design is fine, they feel pretty good, but that fine system is held up by a pretty excellent mod system. You unlock these mods by disassembling guns that have them. By the end, you will have a huge variety of mods to choose from on both armor and guns with a tremendous variety of builds. My only complaint is that this is a game that's kind of a one-time playthrough without a new game plus, and you end up unlocking all the really cool stuff near the end. Also I hate that legendary weapons end up getting outleveled pretty fast. It feels bad to get a great new legendary and then dismantle it four levels later when you're picking up blues that do 40% more damage. Still, near the end, I was using an SMG I had modded to apply slow to enemies and also bring down lightning strikes and an LMG that turned enemies to ice and then made them explode into ice shards when I killed them. Plus, a ton of armor mods that changed how my skills worked. It's nothing like Destiny 2 in this regards. Every piece of gear fundamentally changes your actual skills, which means that even blue items basically behave like exotic armor in D2, and you're wearing exotic armor in every slot. It is much more like Diablo or Pillars than it is Destiny. And also like Diablo, it's not really a live service game. It's a game you beat, mess around in escalating tiers of procedural missions, and then put down. Now, there is one way it's not like Diablo however, and that's because it's a broken mess. You'd think this game is like a 9 out of 10 from the way I've described it, but that is not the case. It's sort of hard to score, because on one hand, based purely on the gameplay itself, it's probably pretty close to an 8. It's a really well put together game with a few dozen hours of content to play through and then three more classes if you want to do it again. It's also pretty fun to play co-op, but then there's the fact that the game is in a truly embarrassing state. It is shockingly unpolished. For instance, the game has the very worst piece of shit map I've ever seen in any game aside from control. This is the map. It doesn't show you which direction you're moving. It doesn't really show you where you are. It doesn't show you any geography so that you can even deduce where you are. It is so bad it's functionally useless. But that's okay, because it has this handy feature. If you press Tab, a nifty little line appears in the ground to take you to the next objective. Well, alright then, I guess you don't actually really need a map. It still should have a map, but you don't really need it. Oh, oh, wait. The little line is totally broken. Like 75% of the time it will take you to the wrong place. You will follow the line all the way somewhere, only to realize it's taking you to a door that doesn't work or a wall. It will literally lead you away from where you're going into an entirely different area. It's mind-boggling. The two systems that exist solely to let you know where you are and where you are going do not work. This is highly fucking annoying, man. Then there are the crashes. This game crashes all the time, all the time. If you launch in DX12, it runs at like eight frames a second and then eventually crashes. Sometimes in DX12, it will literally crash out in the opening scene you get during the game's logo. Launch in DX11 and it will run okay for a bit, but you're still dealing with their totally broken servers, oh right, even when you're playing solo you're playing online. Awesome. The game's framerate is terrible. Embarrassing. This isn't an ugly game, but it's also a very, very small game with tiny levels, simple skyboxes and pretty basic AI. There is no excuse to be dropping to 30, 40, 50 frames a second on my 2070 Super in 8800K and those frame drops in combat will kill you. And then the game crashes the desktop. There's a bug that completely wipes away your inventory. They released a patch for that and the patch made it worse. Finally, there's Outrider's worst Xbox 360 style feature. Constant loading screens and ridiculous cutscenes. Every single room in Outrider's is an instance. I'm not kidding about that. You must load into a new instance all the time. Sometimes this is hidden by having a little in-game thing where your cool-ass beefy dude breaks a rock or pushes a wagon aside. But more often, you will literally get a cutscene of your dude opening a door. You'll press T in my case to open the door. It'll fade to black. You'll watch an 8 second cutscene of him opening the door. It'll fade to black and then you'll wait a couple seconds until you can move again. There's the cutscene for the door. There's a cutscene for jumping over a hole. There's a cutscene for shimmying through a gap. A cutscene for climbing a rock. There are several missions that require you to open the door, watch the cutscene, wait until you get control, walk over to a spot on the ground, press the button, watch an in-game cutscene of your beefcake dude kneeling down, and then go back over to the door and watch the cutscene again. It is comically awful, like amazingly terrible. And keep in mind, a game can crash at any moment. And usually when that happens, it will keep crashing a few times just to keep you guessing before magically working again. I can only assume that half of these performance issues are tied to being online even when I'm playing offline. It sucks. It seriously drops any score you have to give to this game. Wrapping up. So what's the deal with Outriders? Is it worth 60 bucks? That's complicated man, here's the deal. The game is so riddled with bullshit it's hard to say. The cutscene thing constantly had me putting my face in my palms. I spent so much time cursing this game as a broken piece of shit. I ran around in circles following busted ass waypoints then trying to figure out where to go with a busted ass map. Then the game would drop to three frames a second, then there'd be some terrible dialogue, and then the game would crash. I'd log back in and it would be awesome until suddenly I'd come across a weird ass difficulty spike where a boss would have like six million hit points for some reason or a room with like no cover would feature 29 hitscan snipers or I'd get locked into a knockdown loop. Oh yeah by the way, Outriders loves to knock you down which I fucking hate in games. It doesn't need to be a thing ever but it keeps being in games for some reason. Then it would be great and then the game would crash four times. Then it's awesome and then my HUD would disappear for two missions and then it would come back and even with all that bullshit that got me angrier and angrier I kept playing the game because there's something kind of addictive about the combat. Even with its dated ass level and map design and its Xbox 360 beefy dude dialogue and its boring ass art design I kept playing the game. In its current state it is objectively not worth 60 bucks because it's broken but I still didn't feel bad paying that because when it worked it works pretty damn well and I hope it will eventually not be broken but you're not going to buy Outriders and have a bug free game okay this isn't one of those things where your mileage will vary the game is broken but it's also pretty damn fun and has a surprisingly decent story by the end. If you're okay paying 60 bucks for a really fun double A game that happens to be half busted then I say go for it. I had a really good time every time I wasn't incredibly pissed off at another crash and of course as I've always said we need more games like Bulletstorm. I don't need everything to be a hyper polished triple A call of duty experience and everything else to be Celeste. Once Outriders is fixed properly it'll be that rarest of gems a really great focused double A game. It doesn't do a ton of different stuff but the few things it does it does really really well when it's not a broken piece of shit. All right that's it for today thanks for coming I'll see you next time bye.