On April 1, 2021, a game from the Polish studio “People can fly” was officially released. The developers are already known to a wide audience for the projects “Painkiller”, “Gears of War” and “Bulletstorm”. The new brainchild was called “Outriders”.
By genre, this is a third-person shooter with character upgrades and role-playing game elements. The plot is extremely simple: a global cataclysm has occurred and the conditions on Earth are no longer suitable for life. The survivors decide to move to another planet. The main character is a pioneer who must conduct reconnaissance and find a place to land the rest of the colonists. In the process of wandering, the hero finds an anomaly, as a result of which he acquires additional abilities. Well, then the gameplay begins: completing tasks, killing groups of enemies, collecting items that have fallen from them, putting on suitable equipment and accepting tasks again.
There are several character classes in Outriders. The Technomancer can deploy auto-firing turrets, which also inflict a negative effect on the enemy, such as poisoning or freezing. Pyromancer, as the name implies, sets fire to enemies and the space around him. Trickster controls time and is able to teleport, which helps him inflict increased damage in the back of enemies. The Destroyer acts as a “tank” and can withstand damage thanks to its stone shell. Each class has 8 abilities, but only three can be selected and activated at a time. If desired, abilities are replaced by others, but this will not be done quickly. The player must go to a special menu and confirm the choice. The game does not have a pause mode. Your hero may well get killed while you’re thinking about what abilities to take.
It would seem that what else is needed? Shooting looks very high quality, the action does not let the player go for a minute, something is constantly happening, animations and secondary characters look alive. But after an hour of playing, flaws begin to rush into the eyes. First, the same type of level design. I mean not the external design, but the layout itself. The character walks along a long road, where there are no turns or forks, reaches the place of battle, and after the battle goes back along the same “corridor”. Secondly, transitions between locations are implemented through the loading screen. The image is darkened, the inscription “loading” appears and after a while the game continues. It is clear that not all games have a “seamless world”, but in “Outriders” downloads are too frequent.
At one point, the hero had to jump over the abyss to the other side. After pressing the jump button, the loading started again, and when the game resumed, the character was standing in the same place. I had to repeat the jump again. And in combat, the jump does not work. The character defends himself from attacks only by rolling or hiding behind cover. Another drawback of the game is the unbalanced difficulty. A parameter called the world level is responsible for this. It also affects the frequency of item drops and their rarity. If the hero often dies, then the level of the world goes down. Next time, items with worse characteristics will fall out, or even nothing at all will fall. Players have described instances where a character made it to the first boss with only the starting pistol.
With the technical part of the “Outriders” is also not going smoothly. Many users complained about lags and freezes in the reviews, although their computers met the requirements of the game. In the first days after the release, it was impossible to play over the network, the servers gave a connection error.