For all the struggles that Xbox has suffered over the last year, one thing that can’t be said is that gaming’s biggest publisher hasn’t enjoyed some bright spots. One such gleaming piece of their unwieldy portfolio is Obsidian Entertainment. The California-based studio, most famed for role-playing adventures, has already enjoyed success this year with Avowed and an early access release of Grounded 2. They’ve saved the best for last, though – The Outer Worlds 2 is the best of this hearty trifecta.
The Outer Worlds 2 reviewDeveloper: Obsidian EntertainmentPublisher: Xbox Game StudiosPlatform: Played on Xbox Series XAvailability: Out 29th October on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC (Steam).
I’ll begin this review with an entreaty for you to not allow yourself to be misled. I have a minor bone to pick with the quirky, quippy advertising campaign for this game. This tone does represent something of what The Outer Worlds 2 is about, to be fair – it’s irreverent and often has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. But this is not a Borderlandisan game of constant folly, either. Nor does it have the subtle sneer of a pseud when taken as a whole, even though some of the advertising whiffs of that. This is a deeply thoughtful, mechanically rich role-playing game where the three letters of that acronym are scrawled big, bold and proud. It is an RPG sicko’s RPG.
The Outer Worlds 2 Review: Obsidian’s Mass Effect 2? Watch on YouTube
The core setup of the game is much the same as the last. The Outer Worlds is the brainchild of Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky; a pair vital to the creation of the Fallout series. Obsidian, of course, developed Fallout: New Vegas – and this new series was intended in a sense as Obsidian’s swing at a similar sort of action RPG. A post-apocalyptic earth is swapped for a jury-rigged, barely-held-together swathe of colonized space. With that comes some anachronism and tongue-in-cheek humour, but also thought-provoking character and faction writing, tough role-playing story decisions, and so on.