Written by Patrick Orquia
Title: The Outer Worlds
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher: Private Division
Genre: FPS, RPG, Action, Adventure
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: June 05, 2020
Price: $59.99
Also Available On: PS4, Steam, XB1
I'm not a big fan of first person shooters in general, probably because I only have a Nintendo Switch and there are only a few FPS games on the system. I played some on PC, like Half Life 2, which would often make me dizzy after a few hours of playing it, and the awesome Call of Duty: World at War, back when Call of Duty was still good. I also played ZombiU on the Wii U, which I immensely enjoyed.
I can't quite remember any other FPS games that I have played.
Upon booting up the game, I knew right away that this game would be grand, both in content and scope. The game starts with a scene of a "mad" scientist named Phineas Welles, recently thawing a colonist that had been in cryogenic sleep aboard Hope, a colonizing spaceship. This colonist is the character that you will control. At the start of the game, you will get to name and customize the look of your character and give it the character traits that you would want to have, like being strong or intelligent or with a good temperament, etc. Anyway, Phineas Welles tells you that the Halcyon colony, your destination, has devolved into disarray due to different squabbles and disagreements of big corporations that control much of the lives and economy of the communities in Halcyon. These corporations are collectively known as The Board, and in your journey throughout the game, you get to encounter different NPCs that either work for the Board or who have been struggling to go against it.
After you are finished customizing your character, you are given the mission to seek for a power regulator that will make your own spaceship, the Unreliable, fly across the system in search for different components and chemicals that will make it possible for Phineas Welles to wake up the rest of the colonizers on Hope, which have been in frozen hibernation for more than half a century.
After going through some tutorials and training within the initial area of the game, you will get the opportunity to visit other planets/moons and different communities/cities on them, meeting a wild variety of people to get different pieces of info and accept a large number of quests. Along the way between these locations, you will have to contend against deadly groups of marauders and wild monsters. These enemies will go on an all-out attack mode against you and your party at first sight. You will then have to shoot your way to victory against them (or hit them up close, if you are of the melee kind). You get experience points if you win, plus you get to loot the hell out of their corpse and their belongings for goodies, such as weapons, armor, component parts, money, etc. You will a lot of these battles, and they are a lot of fun, and will be even more fun the further you progress and level up.
Your main hub in the game is your spaceship, the Unreliable. It previously belonged to a character who quite hilariously died at the beginning of the game. You assume his identity, introduce yourself to the ship's AI controller, ADA, who would often say witty and sarcastic remarks about you, your party, the ship, and other stuff, and off you go into a grand adventure. You can set your destination and fly straight to it, if you can already go there.
Image is from the PS4 version
You will also meet and recruit allies that can be part of your party. You can bring along up to a maximum of two allies an any given time outside of the Unreliable. And to make them at par with your main character, you will also get to upgrade their traits and abilities, albeit in a much limited capacity. They can also wear armors and be equipped with weapons for them to assist you during battles. It will be very hard to win against the baddies alone, so you have to give yourself the most advantage that you can to guarantee a win.
When you are not out and about killing and avoiding getting killed, you will get to talk to people. Lots of them. This aspect of the game is as exciting as doing battles, if not more. Almost all of the NPCs that you get to talk to have a story or more to tell. You can respond to what they have to say with more than a few lines of varying tones and content to either make them tell you more about what you are asking or stir the conversation to another line of thought that could lead to another set of stories. This dynamic conversation system flesh out more of the world that you are in as well as delve more into the psyche of these wonderful and engaging NPCs. You may get a few more quests out of them, and thus will take you and your party to different other areas and meet a few more people and so on. This game is really great at expanding the world around you without making you feel completely lost or insignificant. By the way, all story goals, people to talk to, places and persons of interest, and other mission-related elements are clearly pointed out in the game and marked on the map, so literally, you won't get lost at all. It will all boil down to whether you want to stay within the main missions or do more of the side missions first. Talking to different NPCs in this game is quite addicting, and I myself would often explore all the available responses during dialogues to talk more to NPCs and truly know that they have on their minds and what their motivations are.
Talking about quests, this is what you will be doing most of the time in the game. The game is divided into main missions, and these missions compose of many different quests, with some of the quests even subdivided further into side quests. Some of these quests are optional, or appear to be optional, until you hit a dead end in the main mission which will then compel you to try other ways to get past them. This system is both good and bad: good, because you get to explore more of the world and meeting new characters; and bad, because it could be frustrating at times because you don't know where to go next exactly, especially when you have already accumulated many different quests, with each of them can be done at any time or two or more simultaneously. Most of the time, the NPC who gives you the quest will tell you exactly where to go and what to do, but there are times when you will be given multiple quests at the same time, and it is up to you what to do first. For me, I liked the quests and did as much of them as possible, even going back to those that I don't necessarily have to do anymore because they are just fun to do and I just wanted to know more about the world and its many interesting characters.
So, the game is really fun to play, but let's address the big elephant in the room: how does the game look and perform?
I can honestly say that this version of the game doesn't look very good, especially compared to other versions on other platforms. Virtuos, the game developer that ported the game to Switch, had to do lots of compromises to even make the game run of the console. They did make it run, but at the expense on the visuals and performance. The Switch version looks very much downgraded compared to its counterparts, with lots of pop-ins, blurry and muddy-looking textures, frequent frame rate drops, and very long loading times. Virtuos said that they aimed for 1080p docked and 720p undocked, but they definitely didn't, and the supposedly 30fps frame rate will often dip to the lower 20s when there are lots of action happening on screen. They could have done a better job, and I wish Saber Interactive (who ported Witcher 3) or Panic Button (who ported Rocket League, Warframe, The Hob, Doom 2016, and Wolfenstein 2) did it instead.
Image is from the PS4 version
So, the game is really fun to play, but let's address the big elephant in the room: how does the game look and perform?
I can honestly say that this version of the game doesn't look very good, especially compared to other versions on other platforms. Virtuos, the game developer that ported the game to Switch, had to do lots of compromises to even make the game run of the console. They did make it run, but at the expense on the visuals and performance. The Switch version looks very much downgraded compared to its counterparts, with lots of pop-ins, blurry and muddy-looking textures, frequent frame rate drops, and very long loading times. Virtuos said that they aimed for 1080p docked and 720p undocked, but they definitely didn't, and the supposedly 30fps frame rate will often dip to the lower 20s when there are lots of action happening on screen. They could have done a better job, and I wish Saber Interactive (who ported Witcher 3) or Panic Button (who ported Rocket League, Warframe, The Hob, Doom 2016, and Wolfenstein 2) did it instead.
I could live with these compromises, and I anticipated that they will be there from the start, given that the Switch is not a very powerful console, but of all the compromises, I really hated the very long loading times the most. Each time you transition from one area to the next or wait for your game save to load, you will have to wait an average of 30-40 seconds. Since you will have to visit different areas in the game, these long load times accumulate, and could result to a very frustrating play time. Good thing I found the load screens somehow interesting, as they show different illustrations for many aspects of the game, like advertisements, anatomical artwork of monsters, descriptions for weapons, etc. There are also multiple game tips shown per load screen, which are pretty helpful, as this game doesn't provide an expansive tutorial beyond the basics.
While the visuals and performance take a big hit in quality, the audio did not. The game has a beautiful musical score, which oftentimes can be subdued yet conveys the right atmosphere and emotion needed for the scenario you are in. Plus the voice acting on this game is simply amazing. Every NPC you get to talk to becomes instantly more interesting the moment you hear them talk. Kudos to the voice actors in this game, they did a really good job.
By the way, like most ports of old AAA games on the Switch, the game is full priced. Yes, $60. But hey, you can now play the game everywhere! If you don't care about portability and that price is too much for you, and I think it is, maybe wait for a sale, if you are buying the digital version. The game is also available physically, and you may want to buy that instead if you don't have the extra 14 GB on your microSD card. Hopefully, the developers of the game will release a patch soon to improve the visuals and performance of the game, so maybe wait for that, too. Also, if you have other consoles/PC, buy the game for those instead. Much more bang for your buck, as it is probably cheaper plus the game looks better on those platforms.
Overall, The Outer Worlds on Switch is one hell of a game. As I have already said earlier, I personally enjoyed playing the game, and I did enjoy it a lot. Yes, the visuals are not that great, but since I really don't have any means to compare the looks of this version of the game to the other ones and I prefer gameplay over graphics, I almost instantly forget about the game's shortcomings and I just get transposed into this wild yet amazing world, full of many different interesting characters to interact with and enjoyable quests to do. And you would, too. The long load times could be maddening at times, but after the long wait, more of the game awaits to be explored.
REPLAY VALUE: Very high
PROS
Image is from the PS4 version
While the visuals and performance take a big hit in quality, the audio did not. The game has a beautiful musical score, which oftentimes can be subdued yet conveys the right atmosphere and emotion needed for the scenario you are in. Plus the voice acting on this game is simply amazing. Every NPC you get to talk to becomes instantly more interesting the moment you hear them talk. Kudos to the voice actors in this game, they did a really good job.
By the way, like most ports of old AAA games on the Switch, the game is full priced. Yes, $60. But hey, you can now play the game everywhere! If you don't care about portability and that price is too much for you, and I think it is, maybe wait for a sale, if you are buying the digital version. The game is also available physically, and you may want to buy that instead if you don't have the extra 14 GB on your microSD card. Hopefully, the developers of the game will release a patch soon to improve the visuals and performance of the game, so maybe wait for that, too. Also, if you have other consoles/PC, buy the game for those instead. Much more bang for your buck, as it is probably cheaper plus the game looks better on those platforms.
Image is from the PS4 version
Overall, The Outer Worlds on Switch is one hell of a game. As I have already said earlier, I personally enjoyed playing the game, and I did enjoy it a lot. Yes, the visuals are not that great, but since I really don't have any means to compare the looks of this version of the game to the other ones and I prefer gameplay over graphics, I almost instantly forget about the game's shortcomings and I just get transposed into this wild yet amazing world, full of many different interesting characters to interact with and enjoyable quests to do. And you would, too. The long load times could be maddening at times, but after the long wait, more of the game awaits to be explored.
REPLAY VALUE: Very high
PROS
- Excellent story and visuals (despite the downgrade)
- Superb voice acting
- Subdued yet effective musical score that brings about the ambience needed to whatever scenario you are in
- Dynamic dialogue system
- Good fast travel system
- Good level and character design
- Expansive character customization options
- Tons of collectibles and support items
- Lots of quests
- Very engaging NPCs
- Wide variety of weapons and gears to equip and customize
- Wide variety of monsters to battle against
- Points of interest for quests are clearly marked on the map
- The game menu is well-organized and easy to follow
- Game UI can be customized
- Difficulty can be changed on the fly (except for the Supernova (Very Hard) difficulty)
CONS
- Video capture is disabled
- No mini-map
- Enemy AI could be better
- Frequent frame rate drops and constant pop ins
- Blurry and muddy-looking textures and much scaled-down assets used
- Very long load times during area transitions and reloading of game saves
RATING: 4.5/5 Bits and monsters
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