GB Feature: The Outer Worlds Review

Our latest critique is focused on Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds, with the added bonus of such a belated review being that we could also play through Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos at the same time and tack on our summarization of the game’s DLC contributions, as well. A few paragraphs regarding Val’s impressions of character creation:

When creating a character, you also pick an aptitude, only instead of Arcanum’s playthrough-defining backgrounds, these don’t really do anything worth mentioning. They’re just there to give you another thing to click during character creation.

Later on, every two levels you’ll get a perk point. There are three tiers of perks in the game, with sixteen perks in each tier. You need to invest five points to unlock the second tier, and ten for the third.

Perks make you better at certain things, like wrangling your companions or carrying more stuff. But seeing how some of them are pretty useless and others are mutually exclusive (you won’t get the benefits of the lone wolf perks if you have any companions with you), by the end of the game you’ll have more points than there are useful perks.

This is especially true if you utilize the Flaw system. During the game’s development, it was paraded around as a unique approach to character building, but in reality, it just allows you to make yourself worse at fighting in certain scenarios (which will still be very easy) in exchange for an extra perk point.