Looting and shooting is familiar futuristic fun
PS4, PS5, XO, Series X/S, PC, Stadia
OUTRIDERS
There’s a simple recipe for making a successful looter-shooter: introduce weird and wonderful weapons to keep the shooting frisky, then tuck away said weapons in increasingly hard-toget loot and – hey presto! – fans of the genre will come running. It’s a fairly easy formula to remember yet looter-shooters have a habit of overshooting their remit, of trying to be too clever and ending up with a squidgy mess of errant bullets and painful memories forged in pixels.
That’s not the case with People Can Fly’s third-person sci-fi adventure, where familiarity acts as a steady hand on gaming shoulders in the most unusual of real-life times.
The setting for Outriders is the usual futuristic fare. Humans have done a runner from Mother Earth and moved to a planet called Enoch. Waking up 30 years after the trip, you find that not only do you now have supernatural powers, gifted to you from the strange electrical storms of your new home, but also that humankind is at odds with creatures who don’t look like they’ve popped over to ask to borrow some milk. Yup, it’s time to lock and load, then kick serious alien butt.
Choosing from four character classes – some use speed and deception to do their worst, while others just dish out the damage with gritted teeth and an automated turret – Outriders’ ultimate sell is
endless customisation, mixing weapons, skills and character mods to create a mean, lean killing machine that would make Arnie quiver in his size 13s. When coupled with the wild and wonderful weapons and responsive gunplay, these perks and powers, which range from teleportation to petrifaction, create utter pandemonium as fights descend into a maelstrom of bullets and blood.
Outriders is a game about looting and shooting, about picking things up and blowing things up – nothing more, nothing less. Done well, though, sometimes a little chaos is all you need.
THE VERDICT Bone-destroying ray guns, sci-fi battle zones, bloodcurdling character builds… what’s not to love (and loot)?