The Outer Worlds 2

I want to give this game a thumbs up, but I cant cant. The game has lots of good qualities, but it is plagued with fatal error crashes since 2025, that I know of, without a mention of a fix. It seems the more you progress in the game, the more frequent they happen. Atm it is crashing every other time the game loads. That is the most frustrating part, as time goes by and you become more invested in the game, the more you feel the frustration of constant crashes.

This is a very, very soft yes. The story, worldbuilding, factions and quests are mostly mid to boring. They never really made me feel engaged at all. However the companions this time around are soooo much better and the combat up until late midgame was kinda fun. All in all buy it on a discount, if you are bored.

There are games that upon finishing you feel "that was great!" - and ones that make you feel "oh thank the f that's over". This was the latter for me and thus the downvote. Sure there were enjoyable moments of exploration which is basically what carried the game for me. Unfortunately the downsides are too numerous. Personally I almost can't stand the 60s scifi esthetic but you can often skip that and concentrate on the more purely scifi parts. Something that is much more relevant is the story, characters and dialogue writing and unfortunately the level here is 'meh' at best and cringy at worst. None of the companions turned out to be very interesting. As for most NPCs, I get that the game is deliberately styling itself very meta on various caricatures and stereotypes but it just goes overboard with this mixing basically zero actually believable writing in there and the joke wears itself out rather quickly. The store is more holes than anything else and asks for suspension of disbelief to an absurd degree. The gameplay is sufficiently fun for me to have continued playing with many long pauses in between. Really most of the experience can just be summarized to meh / cringe and…

I was a huge fan of the first game. This one doesn't quite hit the mark. First, the tonal shift: all the tongue-in-cheek side-eye toward late-stage capitalism, the witty humor, the memorable NPCs with fantastic dialog (like Callahan, the Spacer's Choice rep on the Groundbreaker)... it's all missing here. The dialogue is dry, humorless, and played completely straight instead of the sarcastic irreverence of the first game. Gone is any feeling you could relate the game's world to that of Joss Whedon's Firefly. The combat in the game is atrocious. Enemies are way, way too overpowered, even in the medium difficulty, and your weapons are largely ineffective. They feel like they lack any real punch. Burying a triple-barrel incendiary shotgun in a bad guy's abdomen and letting loose with all three barrels doesn't so much as stagger him. He just one-shots you with a big ♥♥♥♥-off hammer. The weapons are... lame. Kitschy. Feels like they took too much inspiration from the Borderlands series. Enemy AI is ridiculously simple and broken. For example, I was in a firefight with a group of perhaps six enemies, trying to lure them through a choke-point: an open doorway. I had mined…

The companions aren't as good as the first game but I can destroy genderswapped Jeff Bezos so it kinda evens out.

Its a very good sequel.