A new ‘Looter Shooter’ enters the scene, to compete with renowned titles such as Borderlands, Destiny or The Division. This is Outriders, the new game from Square Enix, with the developer People Can Fly.
Currently this new game has "varied" reviews on Steam, and no wonder; its positive and negative points go hand in hand, and we will see why.
The tutorial
But first, let's see a little history ... of the game
It all begins with the need for humanity to flee from planet earth, which is in its last stages, and look for a new home beyond the stars. The plan: take out a couple of ships loaded with people, in a state of cryogenization, to reach an exoplanet capable of supporting life. During the way they lose one of these ships, it is not really known why.
The surviving ship finally reaches the planet "Enoch", after eighty-odd years, and without thinking twice they send a military exploration ship. This is how they wake up some soldiers, among them our hero and that is how the playable part begins.
Many cinematics
Please let me play
Or well, that's how the long-suffering first part of the game begins, loaded with many, MANY, cinematics that put you in context with the story behind the game. They also teach you how to play, and here are the first 'hits' of the game:
The game showing you the way of the mission in progress
The bad about the gameplay
The game has a third-person perspective, with gameplay similar to Gears of War or The Division; that is, hide behind elements of the environment to evade bullets, reload, etc. However, they do not feel that they have implemented well the way the actions are executed. It feels hard; it doesn't flow like in the games mentioned above. Sometimes it responds to the orders of the control, sometimes it does not, and this affects your life bar…. although ... Wait, and my life bar?
No, there is no life bar. That is, the game does have a life bar, but in our first game session the HUD did not appear anywhere. We play blind, without a graphical interface. The sight of the gun was not even showing. Already in the second session it appeared, but in the third session it disappeared again.
The good thing about the gameplay
A small innovation: when your non-existent low health bar takes damage, the screen turns red, and if you protect yourself, you heal a little. Just enough. So to gain life you must use the special abilities, and here comes the interesting thing about the game: the powers.
It turns out that our protagonist is struck by lightning, in the middle of a strange storm on the planet Enoch, and he is very injured. One of his comrades from the militia leaves him in cryogenic ecstasy again, to save his life. But oops! They forget to wake him up and 31 years go by. By chance of fate, his capsule is activated and he reawakens, in the midst of the chaos of a battle. He has no idea what's going on and in addition to being forced to kill some rare human beings, he realizes that he has powers. What kind of powers? Those that the player chooses between 3 types: pyromantic, something similar to a magician, and a sniper with powers. As we level up, we will acquire new powers (although only three can be used) and improve a huge branch of character improvements.
But going back to the gameplay and the life bar, we can use the powers quite often, which in addition to doing damage, mark the enemies, and when dying (as a result of the damage of the power or by shots), we absorb life to continue the game No problem. And it's actually a lot of fun going around burning enemies to steal life from them (yes, the first choice was the pyromantic).
Conclution
The game promises, and a lot. You just have to give it a little more time, to see if with some patches it improves. We do not recommend buying it the first time ... maybe with a Steam discount, I don't know ... fifty percent? We only hope that the same thing that happened to another looter shooter does not happen to him: Anthem, which has already been abandoned and without a future.
And that's it for now, we will continue to track Outriders, whatever it may be, it gives a break to the looter shooter genre.
available now: https://mercadogames.com/products/outriders-day-one-edition