The Outer Worlds

The game feels like a pale shadow of Borderlands. The combat is dull and simple, so there's little interest in upgrading your gear, and the best armors are available for very little money at any vending machine. I didn't even bother to repair anything; I simply purchased or captured new gear. Unlike Borderlands, there's no effort to make it feel like a sandbox, and the loot is so useless there's no point in scouring odd corners, because all you're going to find is the same junk you always find. They have a 'slo-mo' mode ala Red Dead, but not with RD's planned shot aspect, so it is of no real benefit. It has a Fallout-style inventory, but the stuff you find is so generic it doesn't matter. To pad out the consumables, each item is presented under 3-4 different images and names, but with identical effects. You can mod weapons and armor, but better stuff is available at such regular intervals, so why bother? I used an unmodified plasma weapon for half the campaign, and had little difficulties. Consumables have an interesting feature in that you can set up a custom mix for your Inhaler of Health, but the combat is so tame its hardly worth bothering with. The story is generic in the extreme: Deliver, recover, find, rescue, with the occasional 'moral choice' which is usually so ambiguous that your choice of A or B doesn't really matter. There's a Reputation feature, but since you seldom return to the same area, it doesn't matter what you do, short of going man-dog and gunning down shop-keepers (but even at's OK, because the vending machines have the best stuff. Overall, a bland mish-mash of other games, with a careful screening so that no really great stuff slipped through. There's no grenades, either. Although given the weak combat, that's probably OK. It is a pretty game, and there's some humor. I think if you played it without wearing armor and only using handguns, it might be OK. Not great, but OK.