The Outer Worlds 2

It is absolutely fantastic. I do not understand the haters. This is the most fun I have had in years of being a gamer.

As a huge fan of the first game I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate this game. The first game was a charming double a rpg that felt engaging and inspired but they fell off so hard here. The intro immediately caught me off guard and after about 3ish playthroughs I've come to understand that you will be nothing but an earth directorate agent no matter what choice you make and that irks me so very much because of how narratively restricting that is. The companions in this game just don't have that same charm like they did before and not one of them clicked with me like the first game's did. They feel whinier, like they add less to the story than the first game, and with them CONSTANTLY being at odds with each other their interactions feel less meaningful and more like i'm babysitting a bunch of children. The factions are uninspired and boring snooze-fest yappers, like they didn't really try on em... at all. Auntie's presence alone makes me feel like the first game was for nothing and i don't like really interacting with them because of that. The order are just annoying, boring, yappers whose dialogue is 100% skippable as they talk for like 20 minutes at a time no lie, most of which is just filler. Sub rosa is like an off-brand sublight that adds nothing to the story (unlike sublight from the first game) other than a handful of dull sidequests. I ought to mention the protectorate who were a completely missed opportunity who, despite being the most powerful faction in the game, don't even appear on the faction screen nor are they interactable. A complete shame too because the first game also let you side with the bad guys so idk what they were really thinking here. The ending is nothing more than disappointing, all however many you can get because by the time you've made it to the final mission the only thing on your mind is "thank ♥♥♥♥ its over". Not to mention the character building that feels so restrictive compared to the first game. You get in total 60 points over thirty levels to spend on 12 different skills. It's designed to waste your time with replays through a game that's already ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Overall this games bad, if you haven't already play the original it's way better than this game that feels written by AI that was given a barebones description of the first.

Game is completely unplayable due to the well known crash of: "UE: Arkansas Fatal Error" Nothing solves this error: ANY listed fix does not work, and the game still crashes Once this is fixed/addressed, I will update and gladly rec the game, but until then, this dev team needs to take notes from other game devs that have successfully optimized and worked the UE engine for no crashes

"I am a very important upper-middle-lower-lower manager and the way I advance that status scantly involves learning the names and faces of my peons."

скучне гамно

I was a huge fan of the first game. This one doesn't quite hit the mark. First, the tonal shift: all the tongue-in-cheek side-eye toward late-stage capitalism, the witty humor, the memorable NPCs with fantastic dialog (like Callahan, the Spacer's Choice rep on the Groundbreaker)... it's all missing here. The dialogue is dry, humorless, and played completely straight instead of the sarcastic irreverence of the first game. Gone is any feeling you could relate the game's world to that of Joss Whedon's Firefly. The combat in the game is atrocious. Enemies are way, way too overpowered, even in the medium difficulty, and your weapons are largely ineffective. They feel like they lack any real punch. Burying a triple-barrel incendiary shotgun in a bad guy's abdomen and letting loose with all three barrels doesn't so much as stagger him. He just one-shots you with a big ♥♥♥♥-off hammer. The weapons are... lame. Kitschy. Feels like they took too much inspiration from the Borderlands series. Enemy AI is ridiculously simple and broken. For example, I was in a firefight with a group of perhaps six enemies, trying to lure them through a choke-point: an open doorway. I had mined the doorway and was standing by with frag grenades and the aforementioned shotgun. But here's the thing: enemies will only pursue you to a point. They won't leave their assigned rooms in an interior area. Fill a room with melee-equipped enemies and you can safely plink at them from just the other side of the doorway; they won't leave their room to engage you. I've played games from the DOS era with better enemy AI. Perhaps worst of all is the lack of agency. The game funnels you into experiencing it in a more passive way, by heavily restricting what you're allowed to do, gatekeeping play options behind skill point requirements you can't possibly meet at that point in the game. Other games that impose skill-based attempts, like say, Baldur's Gate 3, do so by allowing you to do skill checks. Not so with TOW2. You either have the skill points invested for the thing you want to attempt, or you can't do it, period. And you often won't KNOW the thing you're going to want to do until you reach that part in the story. By then, it's too late. This horribly limits play options and funnels players into playing the way the developers WANT you to play. Not ideal for a role-playing title. During the early portion of the first game, you are presented with a choice; a sort of ethical dilemma. Route electricity to one of two human settlements, isolating and crippling the other settlement. The decision has weight. There's real meaning behind your actions. Your companion at the time speaks with you before you make the call, urging you to make the decision in favor of one of the settlements. The second game tries a similar approach with a spaceship that's hurtling towards a settlement, about to wipe it out. You can reroute it safely to space, keeping it from annihilating a bunch of innocents.. ONLY if you had the foresight to gather pertinent information ahead of time and ONLY if you'd invested enough skill points in the hacking ability. You are given no other options. There are many such spots in the early game where you are offered multiple ways to approach a situation, only to have the rug pulled out from you because you didn't spec correctly for the decision you'd LIKE to make. The story falls disastrously short. There's really no impetus for us to get invested in the main quest. In the first title, you were the sole escapee of the Hope, the one person responsible for rescuing those thousands of colonists in suspension and bringing the Board to task for their horrible behavior. In this game, your motivation is simply revenge for the death of your team, with whom you as a player spent a whole fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before they all died. Then you're in suspension for ten years, so... why should we care? i'm about 8 hours into the game and I think I've given up on it. I feel as if some 80-90% of things I could have possibly chosen were choices made for me by the developers. And a lot of the ways I would have liked to approach situations, those options were listed, but greyed out and locked behind arbitrary skill requirements. The whole experience feels neutered, and is exceedingly frustrating. This game is a far cry short of the original title, and not a worthy successor.

Have I enjoyed this game? yes. is it as good as the first game ABSOLUTLY NOT there are way fewer choices which is what made the first game so great and they dumbed down the companion system significantly, I was thinking when I went in well there were a lot of naysayers for the first game so the second game is probably the same or similar in that regard and I ignored the somewhat mixed reviews but so far it has failed to meet the standard by quite a lot that the first game set I will update the review upon completion of the game just in case it gets any better but unfortunately I highly doubt it