Outriders Demo First Impressions
As a game, Outriders is making a lot of potentially risky bets; it’s a complete package with no live service elements in a genre that more or less lives and dies at the hands of constant content updates, it pushes the story to the forefront and has a fully fleshed out campaign in a genre that doesn’t do the story in that manner, and it opens up the gear grind in ways that can be only be described as “Fuck waiting for Endgame for this wild shit, we’re giving you power from as early as level 5”. How confident that these bets will pay off? It’s so confident that the developer of the game, People Can Fly, has released a demo a good month before the full game’s release that has all of the game’s playable classes in it, on top of the entire prologue and first chapter of the game’s story. And I gotta say, I like what I’ve played so far.
The game starts with you, an Outrider (basically an advanced scout), touching down on an alien planet named Enoch to see whether or not it’s suited for colonization after the remnants of humanity leave a ravaged Earth behind. Once you start looking around, things go almost hilariously wrong and you get caught in a storm called “The Anomaly” that kills every Outrider but you and are put suspended animation until doctors can patch you up. You awaken 30 years later and discover that you have superpowers and shit’s gone to hell and you team up with the settlement of Rift Town to find a way out of the valley you’re all in. As far as opening chapters go, it does a decent job getting the ball rolling, it’s a nice hook for a post-apocalypse.
The main gameplay thrust of Outriders is that it’s a cover-based third-person shooter like Gears of War mixed with the short cool-down based abilities of an action RPG and it’s reflected in the class design. There are four classes in total:
- The Devastator: an up close and personal earthbending master of magnetism
- The Trickster: a time manipulating hit and run specialist
- The Pyromancer: a mid-ranged manipulator of fire, ash, and magma
- The Technomancer: a long-ranged support specialist that focuses on both keeping the team alive and buffed and the enemy locked down with deployable turrets, traps, ice, and poison.
They all play radically different and I found myself largely gravitating towards the Technomancer because the flow of that class’s Combat reminded me, strangely enough, of the Mass Effect games of all things. Mainly in the ways that the abilities complimented my gunplay and you can combo those to just wreck shop. I can see how the other classes can be equally deadly, but for now, I’m just content to be the guy who throws up freezing turrets and rocket platforms while cackling evilly in the process.
This also ties into healing, which Outriders handles by giving each class a means of getting health back when they kill something: Devastators when enemies are too close and they gain extra armor on top of the heal, Tricksters when in close range as well, but gain a shield instead of the aforementioned armor, Pyromancers by killing enemies marked by their flames, and the Technomancer by dealing any kind of damage (turrets and traps included) to compensate for being way squishier than the others. This all makes for a combat experience that, while like Mass Effect in comparison, is way more aggressive. You’re encouraged to keep attacking the enemy and never stop until they are just a pile of gibs.
Now for the gear grind. Normally, I would not comment on gear while in the early hours, but Outriders makes good on its promise to loosen up the restrictions on early game gear. The demo only goes up to level 7 and the fourth level of its world tier system (their main difficulty modifier inspired by Diablo 3’s Adventure Mode) but the second you start getting blue gear is when the kid gloves come off. Each blue piece of gear and above you get has passive skills on it that drastically changes the way you approach combat by way of augmenting your skills with new synergies and bonuses. My Technomancer currently has an assault rifle that burst heals based on the number of enemies killed in a single magazine before reloading and gear that focuses on making my Decaying Rounds and Cryo Turret more effective. And if this is available at the early game, then I’m fucking interested in the later tiers of equipment.
As a slice of what it could potentially offer players as a full experience, the Outriders demo is a dang good sale pitch. It gets right to the meat and potatoes of what it’s about and that kind of early game transparency is deeply appreciated. I was holding off on getting it on release, but with Guilty Gear Struve being delayed until June (I’m so sad about this) I might get this. Well played, People Can Fly. Well Played.
