You end up tackling whatever quest they need you to do, even if that means transporting a slave from one town to another, since these towns block the path of least resistance to the signal. They’re not pretty: Any outposts that aren’t barely scraping by in ramshackle housing and tents are under the thumb of some despot or another. As you meet back up with Jakub and the rest of the crew from the prologue (now 30 years older), you travel through some of the human settlements that have sprung up while you were gone. After getting those new magic powers, you’ll get tasked with tracking down a signal that could reestablish contact with the Flores, still in orbit and packing the supplies that might salvage humanity’s botched attempt to settle Enoch. In Outriders the cover is for your enemies, not youīut then, after you clear several rooms of bad guys, who include human “Insurgents” - the term that the Enoch Colonization Authority, the organization in charge of settling Enoch, uses for defectors - and alien monsters, Outriders hits you with another reminder of just how bleak everything is. The pop of a well-placed headshot, the sliding into cover, the raw power of unloading a 100-round magazine into a boss, managing swarms of monsters by sweeping the area with bullets to stagger them all - shooting bad guys here is just simple enough to let you get into a flow, but involved enough to avoid being tedious. Running, dodging, taking cover, and shooting all strike a balance between allowing nimble movements and making them all feel substantive. Despite that, you can often tune it all out, because the combat loop of Outriders is a pretty good distraction from its bummer of a setting. The plot of games like this tends to be background noise, but Outriders spends a lot of time setting up its story and characters. You do get magic powers out of the whole deal, so at least there’s that. In the chaos, you’re thrown into a cryogenic pod and wake up 30 years later to an Enoch where storms continue to destroy the planet and the people who managed to stick around have formed warring factions, repeating the same cycles of violence they’d left behind and hoped to prevent. After your conversation with Jakub, a powerful storm caused by something called The Anomaly destroys most of the early settlements. It’s an oddly depressing and elaborate prologue for a third-person squad-based shooter in which you mostly end up shooting droves of bad guys and poring over the guns and armor you find on their corpses. ![]() Image: People Can Fly/Square Enix via Polygon
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