Bigger ain’t always better. It’s a cliché, but it’s also the best way to sum up my thoughts after spending 50 hours with The Outer Worlds 2. Developer Obsidian added more of everything to the sequel to its 2019 sci-fi RPG — more humor, enemies, weapons, traits, and locations, everything that matters in games like this. And it works remarkably well — for a little while. But the weight of all those ambitious ideas makes the game wobble as the hours wear on.
The Outer Worlds 2 makes a strong first impression. You belong to the Earth Directorate, a do-gooder organization dedicated to restraining corrupt governments and corporations. After some capital-D Drama, you end up in the Arcadia system, a colony splintered by war between Auntie’s Choice (the result of a merger between the first game’s two big corporations), the Protectorate (collectivism taken to its worst logical conclusion), and the Order of the Ascendant (like the Catholic church, but with math instead of Jesus). There are also a bunch of rifts tearing holes in space and time, but right now, you really need to reach a relay station for urgent communications purposes. The problem is that it’s in the middle of a warzone, and you need to figure out how to get there.
Like its predecessor, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person RPG with an overarching story and dozens of side quests spread out across different planets or zones (big areas with a lot to uncover, but not open-world). The first zone and the process of reaching that comms station are spectacular. You’ve got some goofy encounters, of course, like one that involves a farmer who has fed too much sugary cereal to their favorite crab. Most lead you to something useful, though — an unexpected new path or some new bit of intel that might open a different path forward.
In one memorable sequence, you can encounter a Protectorate deserter near the bridge who’s about to be executed. No quest is tied to it, and the only way to find it is by exploring and listening to the ambient dialogue. If you’re fast and careful enough not to let him get killed, you can save him(and then save his deserter lover from getting killed by monsters in their hideout later), but more pertinent to the task at hand is a power line hidden in the grass nearby. If you follow it, you’ll find a hidden entrance to the relay station. There’s another entrance to the station’s sewers tucked away in a cave that you may or may not notice depending on when you pursue a specific companion quest. You can find an easily missable character who’s key to saving someone’s life 20 hours later. (And there’s a stuffed animal who indirectly convinces a squad of soldiers to fight with you, if you’re nice enough to save it from a minefield.) This opening chapter is dense and exciting, and it feels like it’s brimming with rich storytelling potential that rewards you for your curiosity.
Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those initial expectations again. The second main area is structured similar to a map in the first Outer Worlds or Avowed — a large region dotted with points of interest and side quests. They’re all thematically relevant to the conflict between Auntie’s Choice and the Order of the Ascendant, but they’re also vignettes isolated from the main story narratively and geographically. Don’t expect any environmental clues leading you to new choices like in the first zone.
Despite forcing you to make some tough decisions, what you do in this zone’s side quests doesn’t matter. Like, it really doesn’t matter, to the point where whether you enable war crimes or lead a group of refugees to their death results in nothing but a throwaway line or two of dialogue. A game doesn’t need to let every quest influence the story in some big, dramatic fashion, but if you’re making me choose a side and pretending like my decision matters, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect something more when it’s over. When the game’s already shown that it can be better, anything less seems like a compromise. You get more of everything like Obsidian promised, but at the cost of depth.
The game’s second act tries something similar to the main setup from the first planet, but with noticeably less panache. The concept is a bold one: an interconnected mission that spans two planets and encourages you to seek aid from different factions if you want a smoother path toward your objective. Aside from the repeat setup being a little tiresome, it’s also just missing the tension that this kind of scenario should have. It’s a “pact with the devil” moment. There should be tough compromise. Your relationship with either faction should matter beyond making them like you more by doing new tasks for them. All of this is absent, because you can just blitz through on your own and clear the objective anyway. The game even goes out of its way to hand you means of doing this, pointing out alternate routes as optional objectives and having allies tell you where to go.
It’s a side effect of a broader issue in Outer Worlds 2: the fear of letting you be unhappy with your choices. It frequently goes too far out of its way to make sure not only that there’s an alternate route in most cases, but that you know it exists. Locked rooms almost always have multiple entry methods signposted, or nothing worthwhile inside if they don’t. If you can’t hack or engineer your way through a puzzle, it’s okay. There’s likely a keycard you can use to bypass the challenge or some essential information on a nearby terminal that gets you what you want. Heck, even one mid-game dilemma that penalizes you for choosing the ethical option immediately gives you the tools to get rid of that penalty, regardless of your skills and traits. Having options is all well and good, but there needs to be some sense of consequence that makes my choices feel worthwhile. Otherwise, why even let me have them?
Ironically ,for a choice-driven narrative game, combat is where you end up having the most freedom. Outer Worlds 2 has more weapons compared to the first game and, despite still having limited enemy types, gives you more reason to experiment with different fighting styles. Battles frequently feature a mix of monsters, humans, and robots, so you need a plan before diving in recklessly. I became a walking arsenal of silenced sniper rifles, pistols firing exploding rounds, frost guns, poison revolvers, and a rocket launcher I didn’t even remember picking up. A lot of the weapons are just freaking cool, too, including my favorite – a two-handed hammer that you can load shotgun shells into, which is just as chaotic and fun to use as it sounds. Violence might be the primary focus, but stealth is also viable and fantastically rewarding, though you do have to make it the focus of your build in a way that melee and gun options don’t require.
Before writing this review, I went back to an earlier save file and pursued one of the optional alliances in the second act to see how distinct the experience was, and the process of reaching your goal is much different. It makes you interact with people and places differently, uses traits and skills in deeper ways, and it’s where you’ll find some of the juicier bits of storytelling. Which makes it all the more bizarre that these optional paths are presented as if to say, “Hey, there’s more game here. Please check it out during another playthrough.”
And I will do subsequent playthroughs. For all my complaints about inconsistency, Outer Worlds 2 is very good when it’s good. The main story is consistently excellent, even if it’s a bit familiar. The evils of corporatism are still very much a focus, but Outer Worlds 2 adopts a perspective that’s simultaneously broader and more intimate. Yes, capitalism is bad, and there’s a lotta (well-written) jokes about it again, but this time, Obsidian is more concerned with how it affects the way an individual sees themselves and their role in the world. That’s true for the other, non-corporate factions as well, and Outer Worlds 2 gradually builds a picture of how human greed and selfishness birth all the evils of society, no matter what that society is or how its people think.
It’s handled remarkably well at every point, and Obsidian sidesteps a lot of the issues that plagued the first game and other narrative-driven RPGs. The goal is making you think about parallels between the overexaggerated state of affairs in the game and in real life, and since the focus is broader than just “company bad” this time, the humor stays witty and incisive, unlike the first game where it wore thin by the end. The big plot twists are a bit predictable, especially if you have any knowledge of political history, but the general thrust of the story means betrayals and revelations are less important than what they mean for your companions. In the best moments, a climactic event in the story even coincides with a big shift in a companion’s personal narrative — a noteworthy achievement in a genre where you usually get a strong story or strong character writing, but not both.
One of the best things Outer Worlds 2 does involves ditching the familiar setup where you have a handful of “milestone moment” conversations with a companion, those pivotal chats where your choices determine how things develop for the rest of the game. Instead, its relationships build over time based on a pattern of interactions, with room for massive screw-ups and moments of redemption as you get to know each other. You still have big moments, of course, like whether to blatantly disrespect a friend’s beliefs or leave them for dead. But the more mundane interactions — commenting on one’s nature drawings or accidentally calling another a stupid bastard when you thought he wasn’t listening — are just as important over time. It makes these relationships feel more fluid and natural, and it’s immensely satisfying when you end up in a dramatic scenario where the build-up of your actions is the reason you can reach a positive (or terrible) outcome.
And yet Outer Worlds 2‘s reactivity is just as spotty with companions as it is with side quests. The tension of balancing competing convictions, which the game makes a big point of talking about as you start onboarding more allies, is mostly window dressing. Unless you routinely murder members of a faction that one of your companions belongs to, they don’t much care what you do or who you do it with. At one point, I was even walking around with the skull of one faction’s founder in my pocket, and the companion from that faction — who saw me loot her tomb and steal her son’s clothes from a museum exhibit — was perfectly fine with it. There’s no tension amongst companions, either. They’d kill each other on sight under normal circumstances, but once they join up, they just occasionally make passive-aggressive comments about the other person’s background.
The Outer Worlds 2 is defined by its whiplash, alternating between deeply rewarding storytelling and outcomes that feel rushed and stilted. I largely enjoyed the time I spent (mostly) making Arcadia a better place; it’s just disappointing to see such strong potential in the opening hours that doesn’t show up again. There’s a middle ground between the first game’s brevity and the sequel’s overly ambitious nature, and I hope Obsidian gets the chance to find it in a third game.
The Outer Worlds 2 is available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC on Oct. 24 for those who purchase the premium edition and Oct. 29 for everyone else. This game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by the Microsoft. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
