Outriders

A really unique take on the sci-fi shooter genre. Enjoyable grind with rewarding progression makes this game a blast. Though there is an incredible amount of violence be it blowing peoples heads off or literally incinerating them down to ash. This game has pretty much every word in the book as well. SO its safe to say this game is not meant for kids. Though I really enjoyed it.

If you can get past the horrific hellscape of a story intro, it's cover based beginnings and loot/ mod system keep things interesting for awhile. Strategy, knowing when to take cover whilst using the enviroment / enemy placement, and how to enter combat with the best setup all all engaging. As you progress, gain powers and customize your character, possibilities for loadouts and powers open up and you are introduced to some boss fights and interesting challenges. Combat is fluid (when it works) and staying alive feels like a real struggle that's earned overall. Most of this is alleviated exponetially as you buddy up in a squad (up to 3 in tota)l as you inflict different stats and damage to enemies along with the benefit of not being the only target on the field for enemy aggression. Enemy variations become rather samey and stale near the last half to quarter of the campaign with no real surprises toward the end. The worst offense is that the difficulty spikes change the game entirely. Cover based shooting is almost completely abandoned at some point in the latter half requiring you to have a build to "withstand" damage outright or have your equipment powerful enough to put up with the nonstop bombardment of enemies while and the game just changes most of the interesting startegies of planned movement and tactics with a nonstop onslaught of aggression. Once you get to the Challenge Tiers, this endgame time based loot system ramps it up to "kill, kill, kill" level that abandons cover or thoughtful movement completely. Yes, the launch was terrible, but 3 months later most of the connectivity bugs have been worked out. Anthem suffered similar problems with a release that was unstable at best and fell apart once released into the wild, but, it was a coherent product finally at the end of it's life cycle, although being too little too late and inevitable being axed. Unfortunately, Outriders has succumbed to many of the same issues and bugs that have killed off other titles in similar fashion. If you enjoy this "type" of game, it's current state is worth a playthrough, although it wasn' the case upon release. And, although you can adjust difficulty at any time, going solo especially is nigh impossible with some of the outrageous difficulty spikes. As it stands, Outriders is still a work in progress, and with it's lack of inspiring endgame and often horrific RNG, the time you spend with it isn't going to keep most players locked in for the long run. Improvements are definitely needed in several key areas, especially end game content, if this is ever going to be a viable franchise that people would actually look forward to. In it's current state, Outriders is way behind the curve compared to content and stability of the Destiny or Borderlands franchises for instance. Meaning, creating competition for a studio that's been doing it for decades now like Bungie or Gearbox has these franchise rival wannabes playing catch up, and seemingly encountering major problems being schooled with the complexity and difficulty of creating a rival game that even comes close to the best out there.