Around E3-Time 2019 . . or maybe 2018 . . multiple games surfaced that were basically “what if Destiny but Grimdark and from Poland???” Outriders was one of them. Witchfire was the other. They were basically indistinguishable, except that Outriders was third person. Immediately people heralded them as DESTINY KILLERS . . and then they went away for a bit. In the meantime Anthem came out, and cratered. Avengers came out, and cratered. Division 2 came out, and while it didn’t crater, it didn’t light the world on fire or anything. There were also a couple other games so generic I can’t even remember the names.

Then, finally, Outriders came out. Is it janky? Sure, it’s got some jank. Is the gunplay garbage? Yeah, pretty garbage. Third person physically removes you enough from individual guns that everything of the same archetype feels basically identical. Do most of the skills suck? Also yeah. Is the enemy diversity basically nonexistent? Yep. But is it fun? Idk it’s pretty fun but not like, day zero preorder the ultimate edition.

There’s a lot to complain about in Outriders, all the above, plus the goes-nowhere story, plus the abysmal dialogue, plus the unflinching enemy AI that focuses you down from across the map. But there’s a lot of stuff that they did manage to pull off, somehow, against all odds.

They built what is arguably one of the best loot systems in the looter genre. At its surface level it looks very Destiny, what with 4 tier loot, a grid coming off each of your item slots, two perks per gun, etc. But the Destiny comparisons all fall off immediately once you dig in.

Everything about loot is mechanically customizable. All item mods are unlockable. They’re randomly rolled on items, but deconstruct an item with something new and you unlock it permanently. All item mods can be added full mix-n-match on any blue-or-better gear, for cheap! You can only replace one rolled mod slot, which is honestly plenty.

But it keeps going, any item can be straight-upgraded 3 different ways: bump the rarity tier (green -> blue, etc), bump the level (increase primary stat), or bump secondary stats individually (!!!). And on top of that you can also swap sub-types at will for guns (most guns have 3 varieties: normal, high fire rate / low accuracy, low fire rate / high accuracy).

All this modding stuff is only nominally gated to like the third mission or so. Like, by the time you start getting blues you can start doing this. Even legendaries work this way, so you can take a legendary perk and throw it on a blue weapon, who cares! You can take one legendary perk and put it on a different legendary. Completely open. No other looter has come close to this level of free-form gear, and in Outriders it works great, but it has a critical side effect that after you get all the mods unlocked, guns drops are effectively generic power-level containers for whatever gun settings you want. And this is what passes for the “great” part of the game.

Unfortunately, what often doesn’t work great is . .uh . . . the game. Launch was pretty rough. First week was marred by near constant server stability issues. The game is ostensibly a single player game with drop-in co-op, but it’s still always-online. Servers were up and down early on, and while the game was “always” online, it only really checked at transitions. So you’d beat a boss you’ve been struggling with for the past 20 minutes, get his loot, then transition to the next zone . . . and the game would take a dump. Load the game back up? You never beat that boss, suck it. And it was like this constantly. When the servers weren’t choking the game itself was straight up crashing, I personally only experienced a 2-3 crashes, but that’s still enough to feel Real Bad. Plus they came at super un-opportune times.

Visually it’s pretty awful. It reminds me vaguely of non-setpiece areas of Gears of War, but more brown and gross. Nothing memorable. Just a homogenized slurry of brown game assets.

Skills got a bit better from the Demo, especially once mods started unlocking, and I realized how god-tier the various “rounds” skills were. Skills look a little weird at the start of the game. There are only like 7 per class, and you can only use 3 at a time. That seems crazy low for a game so heavily focused on fast cooldowns and ability spam. . . but unlike other games in the genre, Outriders’ armor mods open up incredible build variety by directly modifying skills in meaningful ways. All the Tier-1 armor mods are skill related, every skill gets 5-6 different ways to be modified. Like the underwhelming bubble can be modded to immediately give an overshield, or make enemies weak inside it, or increase the duration. Spin-2-Win can be upgraded to give you damage reduction, or increase the duration, or increase the radius. It’s like Diablo 3 levels of customization, but again fully mix-n-match, and you get – technically – 10 slots to play with across your armor.

In 20 hours or so I beat the game, completed ⅔ of the achievements, and almost hit level cap. I don’t see this as being a game I push World Tier cap on. or try to beat all the endgame crap for. But idk, I haven’t played it at all multiplayer yet because it’s horrifically broken, so we’ll see how the MP experience is now that I’ve beaten the game.