Copyright Wccftech
The Outer Worlds 2 arrives six years after Obsidian Entertainment launched The Outer Worlds on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. At the time, I was excited to play it and to see what the studio was building in this space-faring adventure. I picked up my copy right at launch, and thought, like many others, that it got off to a great start. It was funny, the world felt interesting, and I liked the game's premise. Unfortunately, I soured on it long before I would even get close to credits, due to a mix of the gameplay and the story losing me after a short while. But I know, like so many others, that Obsidian is a talented team, and has been for a long time. One game I didn't entirely gel with doesn't mean the rest won't work, which is why I was still optimistic about The Outer Worlds 2, even if it came with a heavy dose of caution. After spending over 30 hours with The Outer Worlds 2 to hit credits, the first chunk of my time spent mostly playing on the ROG Xbox Ally X and the second half more on my Xbox Series X, I'm happy to see that Obsidian stepped it up with this sequel. It's a much more refined experience in a lot of ways. The gunplay feels meaningfully better than it did before, and I don't just mean the actual shooting, but also the arsenal of weapons available to you as well. The RPG elements are made more interesting due to the new Flaw mechanic introduced here, which can drastically or only slightly change your gameplay experience, should you accept each Flaw as they come. And the cherry on top of it all is that it is visually stunning, and a much, much, much better-looking game than its predecessor. All together, The Outer Worlds 2 is undoubtedly a better game than The Outer Worlds, but its issues keep it from being amazing. It's great, don't get me wrong, but a plot that fizzles out before the end, poor pacing, a difficulty curve that felt off the entire time, and a few more rough edges like a pretty abysmal menu system, not to mention a few bugs here and there, all hold it back from the latest and greatest action-adventure RPG to hit the wire. I want to start with the story, though I will hold back details to avoid spoilers. I found the plot to be a bit more enticing this time around, even if it failed to go anywhere by the time I reached the credits. The basic throughline is you play as an Earth Directorate agent sent to Arcadia to figure out a way to close rifts in space and time that threaten to destroy the universe. It's fairly simple, but the way it kicks off had me far more intrigued compared to how it ended. The shining stars of the story are, unsurprisingly, the characters you meet, and not just the companions that join you on your journey. Even with the improved gunplay and the larger, dense worlds to explore between the five key planets you'll visit, I had more fun talking to people in my playthrough than I did in combat encounters. The character writing is incredible, from start to finish. Not everyone I talked to felt like they had a rich history and background from which they came and within which they'll continue after I'm done talking to them; some of the conversations just felt like chatting with videogame NPCs. But even those conversations were fun, and more often than not funny, to be a part of, while some of the characters you meet are truly excellent, and carry that genuine feeling of them being a part of the universe in The Outer Worlds. With the strong character writing and stunning animation work for the close-up view of each conversation, I never had a bad time talking to anyone, and that was a huge element of what kept me so glued to The Outer Worlds 2, not just because I was playing it to write this review. On top of some solid characters you meet in the wild, the companions you recruit across your adventure are the highlights of the game's characters. You'll recruit up to six companions: Niles, Val, Inez, Marisol, Aza, and Tristan. You can take two of them out with you when you're off adventuring, each of them having different special abilities they can use in combat, and outside of combat, having them in your party can lead to different outcomes for conversation, and more hostile, or a warmer reception from NPCs, depending if the members of your party are in an opposing faction. I definitely have my favourites, like Aza and Marisol, but that's not to count the others out. Save for Tristan, perhaps, with whom I didn't necessarily gel, but wanted to recruit to fill out the squad. That said, he's great to have in your party for combat encounters. They're all part of different factions, making your ship a home to a motley crew of characters. Tristan is a member of the Protectorate, a tyrannical faction run by a Sovereign that is never meant to be questioned, and if you do, you'll be sent to 'Mental Refreshment,' which is a fancy way of saying your brain will quite literally be scrambled and made flat to avoid having any 'impure thoughts' such as wanting to think for yourself and make your own choices in life. The Protectorate are, at least for the most part, the antagonist of the game. Marisol is a member of the Order of the Ascendant, a faction constantly striving for the betterment of humanity by pouring itself into scientific study and research. It also believes the universe can be explained with math and probability, making decisions based on calculations and predictions that somehow do occur, even if they're not exactly as they were predicted. Aza is a member of the Glorious Dawn, a cult that believes they will be reborn again in perfection by jumping into these rifts that are appearing everywhere. Jumping into a rift is not something you can do and survive, so their 'rebirth' comes in the afterlife. Niles and Val are both Earth Directorate agents like yourself. Val is also a robot, so her beliefs come from her Earth Directorate programming. Niles, like any 'good' Earth Directorate agent, takes to heart the mission of the Earth Directorate and wants to clear the universe of evil and corruption, wherever they find a home. Lastly, Inez is an Auntie's Choice corporatist who prefers the freedom that Auntie's Choice provides, even if it means a lifetime employment contract and dealing with the non-existence of workers' rights within the Auntie's Choice ultra-capitalist society. Each of them believes their way of life is the only way of life that should be considered, though their differences don't stop them from working together, and it often made for interesting side conversations heard across the ship, where everyone would mingle, and between the two companions you bring with you outside of the ship. How each faction and their ways of life play off each other in your adventures, having to mind different temperaments in conversations while playing to whichever faction the NPC you're talking to is with, on top of what are some seriously silly situations you'll get to deal with all made for fun melodrama and quests that were, realistically, repetitive in their gameplay, but my desire to see them through to get even more of the game's narrative and character storytelling didn't make any of them feel like a chore. Except for the few bounty quests that exist on the various planets. Those are shallower, but still good to earn a few Bits (the in-world currency in The Outer Worlds 2). Speaking of the quests, and the game's pacing and progression, it's lacklustre, to say the least. The quests themselves aren't bad. The companion quests are all a lot of fun to do. It's the amount of XP you earn from completing quests and from other in-game activities in the early hours, and that really throws the pacing off. In my first 10 hours with the game, it felt like it took forever to level up, a problem that's almost immediately a non-issue once you leave the first planet. As a result, the early hours felt far slower than they probably should have, and I had a difficult time getting a sense of the character I was trying to build in relation to where to deposit my skill points based on what I had encountered that required skills to bypass. Combat encounters were a much greater hassle as well, since I felt grossly underlevelled for most of the fights I faced in those opening hours. Then, as if a flip was switched, without changing the difficulty, it felt like I was grossly overpowered in fights, levelling up twice or three times in a single session, and barely breaking a sweat in combat encounters with the weapons I was finding and my improved skill stats. I'm all for a power fantasy, but that fantasy was almost a fully-formed reality when I was barely halfway through the game. It felt like I had seen everything worth seeing regarding the combat, and there wasn't much else, so I might as well be mowing through enemies I would have tried to avoid just a few game-time hours before. Even with the few difficulty spikes that occur across the rest of the game, after a certain point, combat felt trivial. An element of the gameplay I really appreciated throughout the whole game, however, is the improved Flaw system. Throughout your playthrough, at various junctions and in response to how you're playing the game, a message will pause you and appear on screen declaring that the Earth Directorate has found a flaw in you. That Flaw has both negative and positive impacts, and it's entirely up to you if you want to accept or reject the proposed Flaw. Of course, having flawed characters in RPGs is nothing new, but the execution of the Flaws here felt like fun call-out moments, and like the Obsidian team is in conversation with the player by responding to how you're playing. Stealing a lot of stuff? You'll probably get the Kleptomania flaw pop up, which would automatically steal things, potentially throwing you into tense scenarios when walking through a town, but you'd also be able to sell stolen goods to vendors at a high premium. Crouching all the time to be sneaky? The Bad Knees Flaw will find its way to you, which makes your knees creak and make noise while you're crouching, but you're also much faster when crouching. Going for a stealth build? Then you'll probably have the Treacherous Flaw suggested to you, which greatly increases sneak attack damage when you can pull one off, but reduces your health and keeps enemies aware of your presence for longer. These are just a few examples, and each one of them can add something to your gameplay experience that will meaningfully change how you play the game. I didn't accept every Flaw; part of what makes it work is that you can just say no and keep playing as normal (though there is a Flaw that makes you accept all Flaws if you don't want the option to refuse). What should come as no shock, based on where I've already said I had the most fun in this game, I especially loved how the Flaws played into conversations when applicable. 'Consumerism' is one of the funnier Flaws, because it's earned by purchasing the Premium Edition of The Outer Worlds 2. It's a Flaw that makes you sound ridiculously dumb in conversation, to the point where NPCs look at you with deep concern about the fact that you didn't understand the very basic sentence they just said. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight the visuals and graphical fidelity in The Outer Worlds 2. It looked great playing it on my 4K TV on my Xbox Series X, with bright colours and striking vistas. It also looked half-decent on the ROG Xbox Ally X, which was honestly a shock when I was first playing it, because I didn't expect much. I was even more shocked then when a patch released days before this review went live made the game look leagues better on the newest PC handheld on the market. Speaking of the ROG Xbox Ally X, a quick note on performance is that prior to the patch, I was able to get the game looking half-decent while staying at a solid 30 FPS at 1080p while playing on both the 17w Performance and 35w Turbo mode, with ray tracing off and the graphical settings on High. After the patch, not only did it look way better, but the framerate improved under the same settings to be a consistent 40 FPS. More optimization should be coming, if it's not already here by the time this review goes live, so hopefully it'll improve even beyond what I'd already consider to be a solid experience. That's assuming you don't run into any bugs, that is. I did see my fair share, some funny ones like one of my companions constantly flying off a ledge to try and melee enemies that were too far away from our current position to reach, and could only be taken out with ranged weapons. Despite this, melee-combat-focused Tristan rapidly flew himself off a ledge before returning over and over again until the fight finished. I also had a bug that's still in my game, where Aza has a constant speech bubble over her head as if to indicate you should ask her something, but there was never a new dialogue option whenever I tried talking to her. The worst of my technical issues was the game crashing, but thankfully, that only happened once. Your experience may differ, of course, but nothing I experienced from a technical standpoint made The Outer Worlds 2 unplayable in any way. However, the menu system and the map in The Outer Worlds 2 frustrated me to no end. Both suck, to put it bluntly. Navigating through the menu to find the weapons and items you want is a chore at best, made worse by the fact that any sorting settings you adjust when in the menu are not saved the next time you open it. The map for regions, particularly Paradise Island, the very first area you'll see, barely helps you navigate your way across these planets. That wouldn't be so bad if I could jump on a hoverbike or anything that would make correcting a wrong turn go faster, but having to hoof it everywhere makes every navigational mistake hurt that much more. The Outer Worlds 2 is by no means a perfect game. I have my gripes with it, and it grinds my gears in several ways, but the sum of everything that's good about The Outer Worlds 2 is what makes it a great game. It's what makes it something I don't want to put down, which I won't, since I started a new playthrough right after hitting credits the first time. Obsidian Entertainment has once again knocked it out of the park after Avowed and the successful early access debut of Grounded 2, making 2025 a year to remember for the studio. They created a world I want to keep playing in and a cast of characters I want to keep hanging out with. Rolling credits did nothing to release me from the hook The Outer Worlds 2 has on me. Yes, in so many ways, this is just more of The Outer Worlds, but a sequel doesn't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel, and The Outer Worlds 2 adds enough polish and shine to the wheel Obsidian built six years ago that it's more than worth experiencing again, whether you loved the first game or not. Tested on Xbox Series X and ROG Xbox Ally X. Review code generously provided by the publisher. You can find additional information about our standard review process and ethics policy here. 8.5 WCCFTECH RATING The Outer Worlds 2 The Outer Worlds 2 is an improved, more refined version of The Outer Worlds and is an all-around better game than its predecessor, with a well-executed Flaw system to keep gameplay interesting, improved gunplay, stunning visuals, and excellent character writing, voice acting and animations. It's held back by a lacking plot that fizzles well before the end, progression pacing that's all over the place, and an abysmal menu system, but those elements don't make it a game you should skip, whether you were a fan of the first game or not. Pros Strong cast of characters and excellent character writing Stunning visuals and world design Improved gunplay and weapons compared to the first game Wonderfully implemented Flaw system that can drastically change your gameplay experience in fun and interesting ways Cons Poor progression pacing with odd difficulty spikes and little to no challenge even before you're halfway through the game An abysmal menu and map system The plot fizzles out before the end Buy for $69.99 from Amazon The links above are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Wccftech.com may earn from qualifying purchases.
