I've put in about 30 or so hours into the Outer Worlds (PC), I've beaten the main story line and have done all my companion quests and as many side quests as I could find. Let me start by saying my thoughts come from the perspective of someone who's never really delved into the RPG+shooter genre, I generally stick to indy FPS games, so this was a new experience for me.
I absolutely loved the story telling, this was made obvious to me when I walked into the first town and had my first dialogue with a bartender. What I would usually expect to be a mundane conversation of "hey, I need this, go get it for me and bring it back", I was instead met with an engaging conversation that made me genuinely curious about this person, this place and the people around us. I also loved that companions reacted to what I was saying, and would even contribute to the conversation. I also enjoyed doing their story quests, the different characters you end up encountering along the way and the interesting places you end up going to, these were all really good moments. Overall, I think most of us can agree that the RPG parts of this game has been done pretty damn well.
Here's where I think the game falls short: Combat. I realized this as I was progressing through the game, at this point about level 27 with ultra grade weapons and armor that suited my build. As I was playing, I kept thinking to myself, there's gotta be more weapon variety than this right? I was mostly a long gun user, with a heavy weapon in my 4th slot. I also tried reskilling into a melee build, but it seemed like the science hammer / science build overpowered any other melee builds and was the most entertaining to use. Without getting into the weeds, there just isn't that much variety when it comes to combat. I see what they tried to do, making more options by giving us different types of ammo, but even that offering feels limited. I'd love to see more creative weapons like science ones and overall an increase in gun variety, melee weapon variety and damage type variety as the game grows over time (I'm guessing there will be expansions / updates).
Anyhow, I have more to say about what I loved and what I disliked, just wanted to get this out and see if anyone else felt the same way. I watched a few reviews before this and saw that all the reviews were super positive, which makes me happy - but at the same time, I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses going on. Not because the game isn't good, it's great, but I think we're ignoring some of its shortcomings and the devs aren't hearing everything they need to hear to improve this game further.
