If Star Trek is the optimistic dream of what humanity could become, The Outer Worlds 2 is the nihilistic nightmare of what it will probably be. Thankfully, both make for highly entertaining material to explore, and this second run through Obsidian’s corporate dystopia is a significant step up from the original. With a story that’s more grounded and interesting, significantly more competent combat, and an irresistible RPG grind, I had a blast putting my fist through the kafkaesque final frontier alongside a cast of memorable companions, even when a weak first act and some truly terrible enemy variety made the going less exciting. Across the more than 65 hours my completionist playthrough took, I fought with myself over moral dilemmas, giggled at absurd worldbuilding, and brought several would-be dictators to their knees – that’s exactly what the for-profit space doctor ordered.
The Outer Worlds 2 is a good old-fashioned single-player, open-world RPG in the same vein as Dragon Age, Fallout, and Avowed. Y’know, the ones where you’re an especially cool person given undue authority to insert yourself into the various conflicts of the world and decide the fate of all living beings while collecting a cast of snarky companions in the process? Well, as a followup to 2019’s The Outer Worlds and a sorta, kinda followup to 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian is at it again with a very similar blueprint here. It lays out a new dystopia to shoot your way through as you level up, grab every piece of loot within reach, and solve all the galaxy’s long-standing problems in no time at all. It’s not the most novel concept, to be sure, but it’s one I love that we simply don’t get enough of, and pulls it off better than the vast majority of recent attempts.
This sequel returns to a wonderfully satirical alternate reality where unfettered capitalism has conquered the stars to turn majestic celestial bodies into tacky outdoor strip malls. Though it shares the same pessimistic vision for the future, it ditches the first game’s Halcyon system for a different part of the galaxy called Arcadia, with a fresh batch of planets for you to single-handedly decide the fate of. More prominent than the new planets to explore though is a distinct shift in tone. While there’s still plenty of goofy jokes and ways to make your trek through corporate-owned space completely absurd, this sequel is much more interested in telling a grounded story – one that focuses squarely on the politics of Arcadia’s various factions and repeatedly forces you to make judgement calls on which of these deeply flawed organizations is the lesser evil.
That bet on more serious topics and the delicate balance of warring political entities is one that pays off, thankfully, and I found myself genuinely torn by who to side with and even frustrated by my inability to appeal to the better angels of these selfish, power hungry monsters, which is exactly what I look for in these kinds of make-your-mark-on-the-world games. The way you’re positioned as a central figure who will decide which of these power-hungry factions will emerge victorious is quite reminiscent of one of my favorite Obsidian RPGs, Fallout: New Vegas, and just like with that one, there aren’t any truly good answers here. Auntie’s Choice is a supposedly freedom-forward capitalistic organization that actually functions as an oppressive, monopolistic pseudo-government that would make Helldivers 2 proud, while The Protectorate is an openly fascistic society that seeks to suppress any thought diverging from their orthodoxy, and choosing which of these two vipers nests gets to control the fate of an entire planet is rarely straightforward. Even the groups that seem more reasonable like the Order of the Ascendant, which uses science and math to predict the future as it tries to guide humanity towards enlightenment, will get caught casually committing atrocities to prevent some supposed future they’ve seen through their abacus, which made me ponder if their way of life was actually any better.
When The Outer Worlds 2 is putting the political jockeying front and center, it’s sick as hell, and without question has some of the coolest worldbuilding and satisfyingly perilous moral dilemmas I’ve seen in some time – but it takes its sweet time getting there, mostly focusing on this conflict in its second half. For the first half of the story, you’ll instead prioritize a humdrum revenge quest I cared about so little that I actually forgot it was even the first act’s main focus by the time I reached credits. In fairness, they do use this early time to introduce you to the principle movers and shakers in Arcadia while you seek vengeance, which sets it up for a much stronger second act, but for the first 20 or so hours felt like the main story was quite slow and unengaging. It does rally if you can hang in there for a bit, but I wish it was more consistent throughout.
One area that is much more consistent is the absolutely gripping RPG climb, which sunk its teeth into me from moment one with a near-constant stream of interesting decisions to make about who my character was and how in the heck he was going to be able to save the galaxy. With only two skill points earned per level to spend across 12 skills that make you good at everything from Leadership to Lockpicking, you’ve got some serious decisions to make about what you want to excel in. This becomes an even more stressful decision once you take a look at the enormous list of perks, which can only be unlocked if you’ve sufficiently bought into the relevant prerequisite skills. That includes things like the ability to pickpocket others, which only becomes available to those who have leveled up Sneak, or another perk that allows you to sell increasingly unbelievable lies as you improve your Speech skill. You’re only allowed to buy 15 of these bad boys before you hit the level cap of 30, so planning out your ideal spacefaring badass and making sure you’ve got the skills you need to get the job done becomes very compelling, and I found myself hungrily looking for enemies to kill and side quests to complete to feed my XP habit.
But the best part of this power climb is how it manifests in unexpected ways in the form of flaws. The Outer Worlds 2 tracks the things your character does in search of certain trends, then provides opportunities for you to lean into those quirks by offering benefits that come at a cost. For example, if you tend to steal a lot, you might be offered the Kleptomaniac flaw, which allows you to sell all your stolen goods for more money, but also makes your character steal things automatically from time-to-time, which can get you in quite a bit of trouble with the locals. Alternatively, if you skip through a lot of dialogue, you’ll be offered the Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome flaw, which gives you bonus XP but forces you to choose all your dialogue options under a very short time limit before choosing an option for you randomly. Each of these has pretty massive implications on how you play and are irreversible, which can lead to all sorts of hilarious mistakes.
Early on in my playthrough, I was tempted by a Jack of All Trades flaw offered to me, which gave me a whole extra skill point every time I leveled up, but came at the cost of never being able to raise a skill more than one point above my lowest rated skill. This seemed like a pretty fair trade at the time, but I quickly realized that my character was now just bad at pretty much everything and constantly ran into roadblocks in my journey that made me thoroughly regret my decision (although it actually made for a pretty great way to play for the purposes of this review, since I got a taste of being semi-good at every skill on the roster). Even when these choices went on to haunt me for the rest of my playthrough, I couldn’t help but love them, and if anything it made me excited for subsequent playthroughs where I could learn from the error of my ways and perhaps stumble across some new flaws to saddle myself with.
Like its predecessor, you spend most of your time exploring the wild frontiers of untamed planets while staring down the barrel of a rifle and/or stabbing jugulars, and this is an area of significant improvement since the last time we were let loose in this setting. While the first Outer Worlds was mostly passable when it came to combat, this sequel manages to level up to “generally enjoyable” with snappier gunplay, improved mobility that has you sliding and double jumping around, and, most importantly, an arsenal of weapons that feels much better suited for the gloriously goofy sci-fi setting. I found so many weird and unexpected weapons with unique effects, like a shotgun that fires shots completely silently and instantly melts its target so bodies can’t be found (especially useful when trying to go undetected), and another weapon that started out weak but leveled up as I scored kills until is was an absolute beast (and which made me want to rewatch Solo Leveling).
Not only that, but there are a ton of ways to customize your weapons and armor with loads of mods you can buy and craft. Those do things like reduce your damage output overall to gain explosive rounds or better protect yourself against a certain elemental effect – and this is without me going into some of the truly bonkers and unique options that I won’t spoil here! They really do a lot more to make your rewards for exploring and completing quests more interesting and befitting of the silly world around you, which makes all the difference in the world. As you might expect, combat still has its quirks, like how the reticle on weapons often feels a bit more slippery than I’d like and how enemies would sometimes manage to hit me in melee even though I’d double-jumped a meter over their head. If you’re (unrealistically) hoping this has caught up with the best practices of a proper FPS like Battlefield 6, then you’re likely going to be disappointed, but it’s still at least a huge step up compared to the average open-world RPG, and that’s something.
The biggest letdown with combat is definitely the enemy variety, which usually features two or three types of wild animal on each world that you see way too much of for several hours at a time, alongside your standard humanoid enemies and a few robotic foes here and there. You’ll encounter a whole helluva lot of Raptidon creatures from the original, for example, and I found myself extremely sick of seeing them before I’d even left the first planet, much less by the time I entered the final stretch and was still running into them. It’s pretty disappointing that in a galaxy filled with so much promise, there’s practically no surprises in terms of the adversaries you face after only a few hours.
Even worse, The Outer Worlds 2 does the same thing as Avowed where all the enemies you encounter are finite and placed in specific spots in the world, and once you kill them they’re gone for good. This means that eventually you’ll be running through large swathes of the map utterly devoid of life, which makes areas feel very empty and also removes any possibility for random and unexpected encounters to occur. I’m not entirely sure why Obsidian keeps taking this approach, as I thought it was a detriment in Avowed as well, but they’ve stuck with it here and I still don’t dig it. That said, there’s at least a pretty decent fast travel system that let me jump around to important areas rather than backtracking through completely dead space, which I feel like I did a fair amount in Avowed. So even though it was disappointing to see this approach return, I ran into the ramifications of it far less frequently.
Speaking of running around, The Outer Worlds 2 has four main destinations, each with their own particular vibe, usually dictated by whichever faction has controlling interest, from the monk-like temples hidden in the snow on Cloister to the busy backwaters in the jungles of Eden. Exploring each is a lot of fun as you kill stuff, learn about the world, recruit new members to your party, and feverishly check off every quest on the map. I felt like I was always finding someone interesting to talk to or some loot just out of reach for me to puzzle through. All of that usually made for a good time, apart from the previously mentioned enemy repetition and the empty map that results from killing them, which does make for a very feast and famine situation.
Just like real life, a story-focused RPG is only as good as the companions who follow you around, judging your every decision, and this is one area where The Outer Worlds 2 most improves upon its predecessor. The six mostly-memorable characters you befriend and travel alongside each stand as a representative of the respective organization from which they hail. For example, Tristan, a heavily-armored brute serves as the group’s cop, eager to carry out his authoritarian government’s twisted form of justice on pretty much everyone you meet, while Inez, an entrepreneurial combat medic, is constantly reminding you of the virtues of the so-called free market enterprises she grew up with.
Like Mass Effect and Fallout before it, this tactic of making your party members serve as mouthpieces for each of the world’s factions is incredibly effective. It both immediately makes each companion’s worldview crystal clear and also helps you understand the powers at play and the philosophical disagreements that become pretty important for you to know as you start making decisions that massively alter the balance of power. Even if you’re not reading every journal entry you stumble across or following every bit of dialogue, it’s almost impossible not to become intimately familiar with Arcadia’s most important players just by absorbing it from your comrades, which makes it much easier to care about the story and the ultimate fate of the galaxy.
That said, there are still some companions who are a little less compelling, like Niles, an engineer who is mostly defined by a revenge quest that can resolve itself fairly early on in your journey, leaving little reason to bring him with you, and Valerie, a robot assistant who has some pretty amusing one-liners, but feels fairly disconnected from the story compared to the others. Unfortunately, these characters are the ones who appear earliest in the story, which makes a fairly bad first impression compared to how much better they eventually get. Although, now that I think about it… that is sorta a time-honored tradition in RPGs of this kind, isn’t it?