The Outer Worlds - Review @ PCWorld

PCWorld has reviewed The Outer Worlds:

The Outer Worlds review: A stellar argument for deeper games, not wider ones

While it bears surface-level similarities to Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian's created a deeper and more meaningful role-playing experience in The Outer Worlds.

Half an hour into The Outer Worlds, someone criticized my fashion sense. Thawed out from intergalactic stasis and thrown into the crumbling hypercapitalist nightmare that is the Halcyon Colony, I of course did the standard role-playing game thing: Ditched my paper-thin clothing for the first beefy set of armor I could “borrow” off a dead foe. Marauder armor, as it turned out.

And then the first civilized human being I ran into called me on it. “You uh...you may not want to wear that armor around here, lest people think you’re a marauder yourself. I’m pretty open-minded, but...”

My jaw dropped. Sufficiently chastised, I switched back into my civilian clothes and only wore clean and corporate-friendly space armor for the next 25 hours. Lesson learned.

[...]

Bottom line

I hope Obsidian gets to make more games like The Outer Worlds. That’s my main takeaway, when all’s said and done. I love Pillars of Eternity, don’t get me wrong. I want Obsidian to keep making little isometric games as well. But very few studios get the chance to make RPGs of this sort, and even fewer do them justice. The Outer Worlds isn’t as fresh-feeling as Fallout: New Vegas was circa 2010, but it does demonstrate once again that Obsidian approaches its worlds and its stories with more care than most developers. Best case scenario, Microsoft’s support allows for many more games of this size, even denser and more detailed.

And maybe other studios will take note as well. This generation’s been one of extremes, where even series like Assassin’s Creed have ballooned out to enormous sizes once reserved for the grandest of epics. The Outer Worlds proves there’s still value in the 20 to 30 hour RPG, that there are more ways for this industry to grow than outwards.

Score: 4/5