Analysis of Outriders: mutate to survive in Enoch

Outriders is much more than we could have expected. We had heard about its parallelism with Destiny or its gameplay (a priori similar to Gears of War). However, when we started the game we did not think we would find a proposal as fun as the one we have on the table. Outriders makes us want to play day in and day out until we complete its amazing story. Do you dare to live an adventure with us?

Live life 83 years later

Outriders begins with a narrative that at first may seem very hackneyed and something we have already seen in other proposals but finally manages to surprise us and get us fully into the role of that explorer or space explorer.

The game is based on a story where the earth comes to an end and a few survivors manage to escape in a ship in which they would travel many years looking for a place to settle. During their journey they find Enoch, a planet that at first seems a friendly and habitable place, with properties similar to earth. However, nothing is what it seems and as soon as they land and begin to investigate they encounter obstacles and that is where the game begins and we start our adventure on a totally unknown planet.

An Outrider is neither created nor destroyed... it transforms itself

We will put ourselves in the shoes of one of the Outriders in charge of setting foot for the first time on a supposedly safe planet before the most privileged of the human species land. But nothing goes right: the surface of Enoch is constantly attacked by strange storms: the Anomaly. The consequences of this scientific meteorological phenomenon are (among others) the destruction of technology, the annihilation of some people and the granting of special powers to others

When our protagonist awakens from cryostasis 30 years after setting foot on Enoch he finds that the few thousand surviving humans are at war, that increasingly mutated monsters decimate those who dare to explore the planet and that those who have achieved mutations (powers) behave like capricious gods who look out only for themselves.

Your character will suffer a mutation in the storm called "the Anomaly" and you can choose your power among the four available classes: pyromancer, devastator, illusionist and technomancer (with eight skills, very different from each other). Each class causes the character to heal in a different way as you kill the dozens of enemies that appear in each scenario. Those same enemies will be to blame for your life bar dropping rapidly, so the game encourages you to be aggressive in order to heal yourself. Being a pyromancer or any other of the three classes will also have different powers associated with it. If we choose pyromancer we will be able to launch a fire wave at our opponents. And it will not be the only difference, since each class will have a recommended attack range: short, medium or long.

An adventure to play in company

The plot of Outriders takes the form of a road trip in which the Outrider, accompanied by a growing group, aims to find the point of emission of a strange radio signal that can mean the salvation of humanity. It is a structure that helps to offer a very typical variety of environments: the forest, the desert, the snowy mountain, the mines... And it is that same plot that puts at the service of the players the need to cooperate with each other to achieve a common goal

As there are four classes so differentiated between them, it is highly recommended to play online in groups of 4 people to have access to all the powers and skills available. It becomes a sort of Overwatch in which we have the tank character, the melee character, the one that provides us with long distance coverage... Outriders is a video game that can be completed alone but has all the foundations to be a very solid cooperative video game. And it is even likely that if you decide to play alone you may feel frustrated at certain points of the adventure because the amount of enemies that will appear on screen is unmanageable for a single player.

A journey you won't want to miss

Outriders is a third-person cover-based RPG shooter that takes many elements seen in other easily identifiable video games without executing them as brilliantly as the titles it is inspired by. However, we really enjoyed People Can Fly's proposal, a team that gives its own vision to a very risky genre: frenetism, violence and a very tight challenge level. In addition, we must applaud their good ideas in the weapon and armor modification systems, in the health recovery system that forces us to play aggressively, in the customization of the classes and in its difficulty level

Those who love the genre will find a fun title in which they will spend hours and hours. Those who just want a shooter game to enjoy the campaign and put the game back on the shelf will find Outriders a much more straightforward option than other RPG shooters (you have a demo of about three hours on all platforms that you can use to judge if it's what you're looking for). And of course, those who want to embark on a game for dozens of hours with three other friends have in Outriders a great option as there is the option (which we strongly recommend) of online cooperative mode.

Outriders is a good shooter game mixed with science fiction that could be compared to Destiny but its gameplay, difficulty and powers are different and that makes it a great game and an alternative to take into account

The best thing about it

• It introduces new elements in the genre like the powers or the healing system
• Its online cooperative mode is very fun and strategic
• Excellent learning curve

The Worst

• It presents some connectivity errors that are already being worked on to provide a solution
• Despite being a good game, it is a step below other proposals such as Destiny

We have made this analysis thanks to a download code for Playstation 4 provided by Koch Media.