The Outer Worlds 2 review: choose your own adventure

I didn’t like the original Outer Worlds. As much as I appreciated the tone it aimed for, and the attempt to capture what made classic RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout so moreish and iconic, I felt it missed the mark. The humour was crass and over-the-top sarcastic, where it needed to be subtle and biting. The world which promised open exploration felt limiting, instead.

In The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian Entertainment has clearly learned great lessons from this past, with so many of my concerns addressed in the new freedom, and brighter humour, of this adventure.

You could mistake The Outer Worlds 2 for an entirely different game, from an entirely different franchise. There’s no early game information dump. No smug nods to past events. You just enter the game, create your new character, and you set off on a space-faring journey that charts wild adventures, betrayal, rebirth, and the dangers of space capitalism.

Starting fresh is a good decision here, allowing The Outer Worlds 2 to kick off without the baggage of the past. There are certainly folks who enjoyed the original Outer Worlds, and that’s not to knock their experiences, but with a ground-up rethink of exploration, adventure, and player freedom, this sequel is a more layered, player-first game.

Your path through The Outer Worlds 2 is up to you

What becomes immediately clear when entering The Outer Worlds 2 is that choice defines your every movement through this world, with a plethora of viable options to guide your travels. This game is generally quite linear, with missions taking place on siloed worlds. Your path is defined by goal posts, with each taking you one step closer to a central, slowly-unravelling mystery. But as you follow along the path to discovery, there’s many threads that may divert you, and you may choose to grab them, or not.

Even the smallest choices in The Outer Worlds 2 can have consequences. Perform a particular behaviour too often – reloading your gun, lying, or buying too much stuff, for some examples – may net you a particular flaw, which will impact gameplay (although you can choose to accept or reject the game’s judgements of your behaviour). If you choose to become a liar, you’ll end up with significantly worse dialogue options, but may succeed better in subterfuge.

Being a consumer might net you better prices, at some other detriment. It’s all give and take here, with a variety of quirks to make your character feel like you, inspired directly by your choices.

That extends to your character builds, and how you choose to spend perks. This actually has a direct correlation to gameplay and missions, which can be delightful and frustrating in equal measure. Say you’re really keen to hack your way through computers to obtain valuable information, so you put plenty of points into the hack skill. This means you’ll have an advantage in missions where information is currency, and sometimes, you’ll be able to get past mechanical doors that would be otherwise inaccessible.

Watch the trailer for The Outer Worlds 2.

But that means missing out on other skills – for example, the ability to open special chests with rare items, medical skills that might save a life, or lockpicking skills that might net you a quest-saving clue. You only have yourself to blame.

While there is an element of chance here, in that you’ll be frequently surprised by the high demands for certain skills in certain missions, when you actually do have those needed skills, you’ll be able to bypass quest requirements, fulfil extra side-missions, or otherwise speed your journey. It’s encouragement to build your character well, and be mindful of what might be asked of them.

Building your Outer Worlds 2 character like a battering ram

Another beautiful element of this choice-based system is that you can personalise your play style to suit your preferences, down to whether you prefer ranged or melee combat, or sneaking around like a little thief. The way The Outer Worlds 2 is built, you have that creative freedom, and you’re never really disadvantaged because you choose one form of combat over another.

Personally, I’m a big fan of melee fighting in games. Just running in with a hammer, bonking the bad guys on the head, then running for cover. And with a separate skill line to improve melee damage, I became an incredibly resourceful melee fighter in this game.

Pouring skill points into the melee tree, I strengthened the damage I could deliver with melee weapons significantly, allowing me to focus on stealth (sneaking up behind enemies and bonking them) as a means to get through even the toughest combat encounters. While that did mean sacrificing my hacking and lockpicking skills (until I was able to buff these later), I had a grand time plowing into combat, and getting the job done as a battering ram.

And with its freedom of choice, The Outer Worlds 2 generously allowed me to follow this path.

Any way you want to play the game, there exists a path for you, even if it’s through enemies, or down lesser-trodden roads.

A lighter-touch story works wonders

With this wide-open freedom, there is one element of The Outer Worlds 2 that struggles somewhat, and that’s in the delivery of the game’s story. By nature, an adventure where freedom is key will need to have a vagueness, to keep personalised characters part of the plot. But this does mean the game’s story plays out with a hint of airiness that makes it difficult to grasp what’s actually happening, which warring factions are which, and who exactly is on the ‘right’ side of history.

It also doesn’t help that most quest dialogue is fairly slow and wordy, so that pertinent plot points arrive in long-form interactions you might accidentally skip.

So many times, I found my mind straying in dialogue, to the point where I accidentally selected a game-changing bit of dialogue that locked me out of certain interactions (at which points, I had to double back and reload an older save).

You’ll also find essential context to your journey in blog entries found on computer terminals or handheld devices, with these telling long tales about space factions and various dramas that all blend into each other. If you’re keen to learn more about The Outer Worlds 2 and its lore, there’s ample texts to study – but when you need to analyse these texts for missions, it all becomes very wordy, and difficult to follow.

Humour provides a more compelling reason to pay attention

What’s slightly more effective is the game’s focus on humour, and lighter-hearted interactions with various citizens you’ll meet in your quests. It provides ample reasons to pay attention and explore widely, so that you might uncover some new, silly joke, or a quirky character that brings a smile.

Where The Outer Worlds relied on cringe humour and loudness to be funny, The Outer Worlds 2 is much more subtle in its delivery. There’s moments of clever, bizarre situational humour that you might only stumble across in the wild if you’re paying attention. Some characters are well-designed caricatures, underscoring a social commentary about the state of the world. And most importantly, this game knows when to hold back.

Putting comedy in video games, as in all media, is difficult. In a narrative that takes itself seriously, the humour must be peripheral, but supportive. It can’t undermine the story told, or the characters present. In the delivery here, Obsidian Entertainment does well to avoid these traps, for a game that’s outright funny in moments, but knows exactly when to clam up.

Hitting it out of the galaxy

In this mix – a subtle, clever humour, a loose but engaging story, and an ample variety of choice in every step – The Outer Worlds 2 is an impressive achievement. It’s a game that frog-leaps its predecessor easily and simply, with a variety of systems all working together to serve a brilliant choose-your-own-adventure experience that allows players to feel like an intrinsic, influential part of its world.

_{An Xbox code for The Outer Worlds 2 was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.}

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