Outriders
PC, PS4, PS5, Series X, Xbox One
Though nearly a decade has passed since its release, the game most of us think of when we think of People Can Fly is still Bulletstorm. Which is remarkable given the Polish studio worked on Fortnite, back in the days when it was a long-brewing tower-defence shooter rather than one of the biggest games in the universe. At the time, it was part of Epic Games, a satellite studio helping out on Gears Of War and other properties that didn’t offer much chance for the developer to imprint its own personality on the final product.
“We worked with Epic and it was a great collaboration, but we were working on their
games – so we decided we want to do something that’s ours,” game director Bartosz Kmita says. “‘Okay, let’s break with Epic and let’s start a new journey’.” So, in mid-2015, three years after it was acquired and two years after it was rebranded as Epic Games Poland, the studio flew the nest to develop its own IP, where its identity could shine through. Four years later, this project emerged as Outriders, a thirdperson co-op shooter-RPG hybrid which lead level designer Rafał Pawłowski calls “our most ambitious project to date, for sure”.
Not that you’d know it, playing the game for the first time. Outriders is immediately familiar, the kind of experience best described in terms of others you’ve already had. Imagine a Gears- style cover shooter married to Destiny’s
cooldown timers, bottomless arsenal of lootable weaponry and obsession with numbers that keep getting bigger. Those same influences come through just as strongly in the visual design, with a touch of Mass Effect that hints at the game’s RPG ambitions. In the opening section, we catch a welcome glimpse of Halo’s Pacific-Northwest-turned-alien landscapes – all greens and blues with outcrops of grey, populated by fauna just a couple of steps into the uncanny – but this gets quickly trampled by the inciting incident of Outriders’ story.
You play as a human colonist, fleeing a doomed Earth for the uncharted but seemingly inhabitable planet of Enoch. All is going well, until the colonists encounter a phenomenon known as the Anomaly, a sort of metaphysical storm which causes everything it touches to go a bit Annihilation. While most of their crewmates simply spark out of existence, your character is infected by it, and is put into cryosleep. The game fades to black, you pick a character class – and wake up 30 years later.
“We wanted to put the player in an environment where the character and the player are learning at the same time about what happened and why everything looks this way,” senior narrative designer Szymon Barchan says. It’s an effective trick. The game snaps from the world before to the world after, and reintroduces characters from the prologue who have lived through three decades, all in the passage of a single loading screen. This
makes for a striking contrast, but leaves you with a world that’s less colourful and distinct. Pawłowski drops descriptors like “brutal” and “savage”, but in truth this is yet another muddy Mad Max- inflected wasteland, with masked bandits and metal plating strapped to every surface. (At least, in the section that’s being demoed – we glimpse some more interesting landscapes in the game’s various trailers.)
Kmita offers a different way of looking at Outriders’ familiarity. “Making a cover shooter, we knew we would be compared to Gears Of War – but if we make a firstperson shooter, we’ll be compared to Bulletstorm,” he says. “We decided, ‘Okay, let’s use our experience from all those games to give the player a possibility to choose how they play, so they can almost make their own shooter in this game’.”
The implication is that, if you’re a fan of cover shooters, you can approach Outriders that way – but it’s equally possible to ignore cover completely. It’s not clear how exactly you can balance these two to make the experience satisfying for both sides, but we quickly find ourselves abandoning the waist-high walls in favour of a classic strafe-and-blast approach. Clearly, the People Can Fly we remember from Bulletstorm, and before that Painkiller – which came of age in the glory days of Id Software, yearning for a return to that era’s guns-andgibs shooters – is still in here somewhere. “We think old school is still cool,” Kmita says.
As if to underline that point, the end of Outriders’ tutorial section hands us a rifle that causes its victims to explode so hard their bone shards turn into shrapnel, slicing the skin and armour of nearby enemies so they gradually bleed numbers. It’s an excellent gimmick weapon, of the sort you’d see in shooters of old. In the context of a Destiny- style loot game, it’s also the kind of characterful perk that helps a single gun stand out from the endless conveyor belt of weapon upgrades. Alas, this is also the only such example we discover in three whole playthroughs of the demo, and it gets cruelly snatched away the moment the tutorial is over.
Instead, Outriders largely relies on players’ class abilities to spice up combat. See, it turns out that when your character came into contact with the Anomaly, it gave them magic powers, in one of four flavours. There’s a Trickster, capable of warping space and time; Pyromancer, equipped with area-of-effect fire powers; Devastator, the muscle of the operation; and a fourth class yet to be revealed. (All four will be available at launch, Kmita confirms – part of the developer’s old-school positioning is a refusal to dirty its game with lootboxes or any monetisation hooks.)
We only get to explore the shallows of these characters’ skill trees – each class has three, letting you guide their development however you choose – but it’s clear that their abilities provide the bright spark the rest of Outriders’
combat huddles around. We initially plump for the Trickster, won over by their description as a hit-and-run assassin type, but struggle to find room for their abilities amid the chaos of threeplayer combat. The Devastator proves to be more our speed. As first glance, it’s your standard tank class, but its powers have just enough specificity to enliven a tired archetype.
The Devastator has control over gravity and earth. In practice, this means one ability where you pull back into the sky and then slam into enemies, like a lethal version of Mario’s ground pound, and another where they coat themselves in a golden exoskeleton of rubble. For us, it’s the clearest fulfilment of Kmita’s promise that you can simply avoid cover, especially as the Devastator can only heal by killing enemies at close range. Every class has an equivalent condition – the Pyromancer must mark victims with fire, then finish them off to receive a health boost – and it helps differentiate them from one another, and from similar characters you’ve played a dozen times before.
We’d hesitate to say any of this feels new, but the class powers do give Outriders a splash of identity that, on first impressions, is sorely lacking. It remains to be seen whether there’s more under the surface, but it’s clear that People Can Fly – having divorced itself from Epic and opened three new offices to support Outriders’ development – believes it has found the project that can finally supplant Bulletstorm
and become its signature game.
Part of the developer’s oldschool positioning is a refusal to dirty its game with lootboxes