3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of The Outer Worlds 2.

The Outer Worlds 2 is one of the most middle of the road games I've played this year. I actually don't have a ton to say so I'll try and keep this brief. It doesn't do anything inherently bad, but nothing is particularly great either. It's one of those games that's trying to do a lot of things but doesn't excel at any of them. As someone that's never played the first game, I've heard from other people that mechanically this is the better game, so I'm just left asking where did it go wrong and who was this made for? It's not made for people looking for a well told story because the story is almost nothing but exposition where everyone is written with the same personality and feel like they're straight from a bad theater play. It's not made for people who want a solid FPS game because the gunplay is only passable and has nothing to stand it out. And it's definitely not made for fans of New Vegas desperately trying to relive that era of RPGs because it isn't nearly as compelling as Fallout's world, so who is this made for? I guess it's for fans of the Outer Worlds 1, but even then this just feels like a complete misstep in my book. If it wasn't clear already, I didn't connect with The Outer Worlds 2 like I was hoping I would, but that's not to say It's all doom and gloom. What's so weird about this game is that almost everything is here to make an exceptional RPG. The RPG mechanics have a lot of depth to them, the skills system is actually interesting and helps create different builds depending on what playstyle you normally play with. The weapon variety is pretty great too and there's some really wacky weapons in here that I found myself using a lot. Mechanically this game is pretty decent, but it's still nothing new to the medium. Where it really goes wrong is with everything else, this game's worst offense is that it's BORING. The world is boring, the plot is boring, the characters are boring, EVERYTHING IS BORING! Every line of dialogue feels like exposition and it's seemingly never ending. A game like this really needs a great story to justify having so much dialogue but it really just doesn't. This was one of those games that I couldn't wait for the credits to start rolling and I had to just start skipping through the side content just to progress the main story and finish the game. I know this was developed by Obsidian, but the concept of having an Xbox published game make satirical jabs on late stage capitalism is so beyond dystopian that I can't even laugh at it. They are literally what they are poking fun at and it is just incredibly tone deaf. The Outer Worlds 2 isn't a bad game, but I still wouldn't recommend playing it. Maybe wait for it to become $20 during a sale before even considering picking this game up, but even then it's just so dull that even then It might still not be worth it.