The Outer Worlds 2 review – a strong sequel with a canny sense of when to iterate and when to reinvent

For all the struggles that Xbox has suffered over the last year, one thing that can’t be said is that gaming’s biggest publisher hasn’t enjoyed some bright spots. One such gleaming piece of their unwieldy portfolio is Obsidian Entertainment. The California-based studio, most famed for role-playing adventures, has already enjoyed success this year with Avowed and an early access release of Grounded 2. They’ve saved the best for last, though – The Outer Worlds 2 is the best of this hearty trifecta.

I’ll begin this review with an entreaty for you to not allow yourself to be misled. I have a minor bone to pick with the quirky, quippy advertising campaign for this game. This tone does represent something of what The Outer Worlds 2 is about, to be fair – it’s irreverent and often has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. But this is not a Borderlandisan game of constant folly, either. Nor does it have the subtle sneer of a pseud when taken as a whole, even though some of the advertising whiffs of that. This is a deeply thoughtful, mechanically rich role-playing game where the three letters of that acronym are scrawled big, bold and proud. It is an RPG sicko’s RPG.

The core setup of the game is much the same as the last. The Outer Worlds is the brainchild of Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky; a pair vital to the creation of the Fallout series. Obsidian, of course, developed Fallout: New Vegas – and this new series was intended in a sense as Obsidian’s swing at a similar sort of action RPG. A post-apocalyptic earth is swapped for a jury-rigged, barely-held-together swathe of colonized space. With that comes some anachronism and tongue-in-cheek humour, but also thought-provoking character and faction writing, tough role-playing story decisions, and so on.

Like Fallout, Obsidian has opted to have something of a clean break with The Outer Worlds 2. There’s a new director (though the creators remain involved), and instead of a direct story continuation, we hop to a different sector of space in the same world, with Easter Eggs for players of the first game but no direct connections, like how Fallout hops state-to-state. The setting is not the most significant change, though: rather, it’s that aforementioned dedication to push the hardcore role-playing decision-making.

One related choice cuts through the entire experience, the flag-bearing resolution to underscore this mindset. That is this: The Outer Worlds 2 has no character respec option, meaning the only way to reset your character experience is to start the whole game over. Choices you make in the character growth process across thirty levels are final, and therefore often agonizing. I know this won’t be to everybody’s taste, but I love it and I love the director’s explanation for why even more.

“You’ll see games where they allow infinite respec, and at that point I’m not really role-playing a character, because I’m jumping between — well my guy is a really great assassin that snipes from long range, and then oh, y’know, now I’m going to be a speech person, then respec again,” he told me back in June. The implication is clear: this is a game that wants you to make choices, and in truest role-playing tradition the consequences for those choices aren’t always going to be immediately clear.

This goes for narrative stuff, of course, but it also sticks just as hard in gameplay. If you have a mental blocker around the idea of missing out on stuff and want the most perfect, pristine playthrough at all costs, this game probably isn’t for you. The very nature of this system and the number of skill points available across a play through means you are going to constantly encounter speech checks you can’t pass, terminals you can’t hack, locks you can’t pick, and puzzles you can’t solve. There is power in this, however: it engenders a role-playing experience where you need to plan ahead and make your peace with that planned path. It also allows strange twists on your original thinking to suddenly establish themselves, most often through a perk system just as expansive as in this game’s predecessor.

I ended up speccing towards a gun-toting leader of men, picking skills and perks that made me relatively competent with a rifle but my chosen companion characters to be more deadly still. This left me with skill points to spare – into Speech, Hacking, Lockpicking, and just a smidge of engineering to open up the odd jammed door.

The flaws system returns, where your actions trigger optional perks that cutely reference how you choose to play. I’m one of those people who constantly reloads even when guns aren’t empty, which eventually triggered a flaw where all my magazines became 50% bigger, but if I did allow a magazine to completely empty I’d suffer a brutal temporary damage debuff. This completely changed the way I approached combat encounters for the rest of the game, and prompted me to pick up further perks or weapon mods that’d increase magazine size or even make weapons automatically top themselves up before the magazine could hit zero.

I was hacking everything in sight, and eventually was offered a flaw where the act of hacking would cost twice as much in raw resources, but offer double experience. I jumped at the chance to take that. And, because the code Microsoft PR delivered for Eurogamer to review the game was for the Premium Edition, I was automatically bequeathed the ‘Consumerist’ flaw, which as well as being a cheeky bit of mockery also made shops cheaper (but also made them buy my junk for less, too).

I think it’s in this mingling of systems – skill points, the unlockable perks, and the hidden triggering of flaws – that the harsh world of no respec most works. I muddled my way through the character build process over a lengthy playthrough, and ultimately ended up with a satisfying character build that was distinctly mine, crafted from both my gameplay predilections and the circumstances I found my character in. To the end of the game I was still finding tantalizingly locked doors, or realizing a combat encounter could’ve been skipped entirely if I was specced slightly differently – and I was fine with it.

It’s a good job all of this stuck for me, because on the narrative side I do admit I found The Outer Worlds 2 a little less compelling. There’s a bombastic opening, but then I just found it took a while to find its feet and spin up. The game is essentially composed of four main planets plus a smattering of smaller side locations that you zip between in your ship, The Incognito. It was really only once I hit the second ‘half’ of the game, with all four planets unlocked, that I felt the story truly sink its claws into me.

Even then, there’s an airiness to this that doesn’t feel as substantial as the gameplay and RPG progression it’s paired with. Back in 2019 Edwin described the game as “more often cute than cutting”, and the same applies here. That fluffiness, even in a game where enemies can explode into a dismembered mess if hit with enough force, feels to make the narrative a little more difficult to fully engage with. One good way of expressing this is in The Incognito, which is a fine-looking bit of sci-fi design with a charming visual look inside and out – but unlike something like the Normandy, it never really feels like a character in its own right. I enjoyed using the ship, but it never really felt like home – which feels evocative of much of where The Outer Worlds 2’s delivery struggles.

It eventually gets there, though – and certainly in a more complete manner than the first game. Part of that transition comes in the halfway-point mission, where the cast catch up with a vital character and the stakes are raised. Like pretty much all of The Outer Worlds 2’s major ‘tentpole’ missions, this is an excellent piece of mission design that ratchets up the tension and gives players numerous tools to move through to their objective, meaning any character build should have at least a few different routes at their disposal.

Less critical missions and locations do somewhat lack this designerly touch, however – but in a sense that makes the tentpole moments all the more exciting. That halfway point mission is a thriller, but it also marks the point at which you can start digging deeper into factional allegiances, the secrets of the narrative, and the individual stories of the well-drawn but archetypal companion characters.

While the RPG systems feel like more of a ground-up rethink, its elements like the mission structure, narrative, and moment-to-moment combat that all feel like more iterative upgrades. Everything is just better than the first game – some things a little, some a lot. Gadgets, for instance, are I think more fun to use and more cleverly utilized here. The gunplay and movement is stronger, meaning it’s easier for someone less invested in the role-playing systems to pump points into ballistic-focused skills and play like a shooter.

At its best, The Outer Worlds 2’s ebb and flow reminds me of Mass Effect 2 in terms of how it processes through and lightly interpolates on the nature of the original, and in terms of how its most important narrative moments press home comfortably. I was satisfied with how my narrative choices threaded into different outcomes throughout the game, especially with how my actions towards various factions appeared to have a pretty significant impact on the final missions of the game, too – which isn’t always easily accomplished.

At its worst, this is a sequel that slips into the same comfort food zone as the original – inoffensive, breezy, but also not necessarily all that memorable. When the worst on offer is ‘pretty good and unobjectionable’, that seems like a win of sorts all the same. While this is an issue shared with the first game, where this sequel excels is in getting out of this zone more often and more effortlessly. That’s thanks to a more refined experience at every turn – companions, shooting, movement, role-playing, the branch of the narrative. It’s all better. These strengths combine with the gameplay variance offered by robust RPG systems to have me seriously considering a second and third playthrough, which just wasn’t something I was ever compelled to consider with the original.

So, it’s once again not quite the all-timer that the promise of a spiritual successor to Fallout New Vegas suggests – but it’s a firm-footed and valiant step closer to that goal. The more hardcore your interest in RPG progression systems, the more mileage you’ll get as a bonus.

A copy of The Outer Worlds 2 was provided for review by Microsoft.