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Game of the month – Outriders

Outriders is an action-packed and gory gaming experience for the adult audience

Text:
Daniel Haaf

Published:
26 April 2021

This article is written by PriceSpy's editorial staff. No one else has influenced the content of it. There are no paid links or other types of advertising collaborations.

Outriders is an action RPG set on the fictional planet Enoch. You wake up from cryo-sleep 30 years after humanity first reached the planet, and are thrown straight into a conflict of planetary proportions.

You're an outrider. The goal is to survive and to do that you have to use real force against everyone who stands in your way.

There are four different classes to choose from and you can have six different characters to experience Outriders with.

Outriders can be played all by yourself if you want, but for the best experience play in groups of up to three players. Then you can tackle many of the game's more difficult areas for greater challenges and better equipment.

If you want to try Outriders before you buy the game, you can get a demo version here. The demo takes about three hours to play, and you can test both single and multiplayer modes as well as all player classes.

Worth noting:

  • Game type: Action-RPG
  • Playing time: 25-30 hours (for the story)
  • Download size: approx. 70GB
  • System: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 4/5, Stadia
  • Game world: Semi-open
  • Release date: 1 April 2021

All games from People Can Fly

Requirements to play at 720p / 60fps

  • Requires a 64-bit processor
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Processor: Intel I5-3470 / AMD FX-8350
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 750ti / AMD Radeon R9 270x
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 70 GB free space

Requirements to play in 1080p / 60fps

  • Requires a 64-bit processor
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Processor: Intel i7-7700 / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Storage: 70 GB free space

We tested Outrider's demo version

There is a demo version of Outriders that we have tried. It took about three hours per class to complete the limited version of the game, enough to give us a good sense of what the full game will be like.

Graphically, Outriders is clearly up to par, but don’t expect to be dazzled by any visual extravagances in this game. The performance felt, at least on our gaming rig (PC), totally fine, with just a few fps dips. 

The control characters in the game felt responsive and without any major issues. Running between the shelters on the tracks in classic Gears of War style took some time to get used to, but with a little practice wasn’t that difficult either. 

Something in the weapons that the game offered lacked feeling. Neither the handling nor the sounds felt really good, but it is, of course, completely subjective and perhaps the later weapons after the demo give a better impression.

It’s important to be mobile if you want to stay alive

Another thing that didn’t give a good impression is the prologue, which is the first half hour before you get to choose a class. The dialogues are decent, but there was something lacking in the introduction to really drive us further. Thankfully, you can skip the whole introduction when creating new characters.

Finally, we reacted to the very aggressive style of play that constantly requires us to be on our toes. The enemies like to flank and they often attack several at the same time. It’s important to be mobile and vary your attack patterns to avoid your health bar shrinking in no time.

Three quick tips for playing Outriders

1. You can change the difficulty level at any time

There are 15 different levels of difficulty called World Tiers. You always start with the first difficulty levels and when you have accumulated enough experience points, the next one will be unlocked.

You can switch between levels at any time if you get stuck in an extra difficult mission - even in the middle of a track.

Just bear in mind that if you switch to a lower level before you finish a mission, your reward will be worse, so don’t change unnecessarily!

2. Pick up all equipment automatically

When you find different items, you can choose to either pick them up yourself or let the game do it for you.

In the settings, you choose how rare the objects must be for your character to pick them up. You can choose from common items up to just legendary.

The advantage in the latter part of the game is that you don’t have to think about whether you forgot an important object on the track. And you don’t have to collect a lot of ordinary objects unnecessarily if you don’t want to.

3. Abilities can be changed at any time

All classes in Outriders have a special class tree. When your characters get better during the game, you will be rewarded with points that can be used in the class tree.

Here you choose, amongst other things, whether your characters should do more damage to the enemies, have more health or if you want to change how your magical abilities work.

The great thing about Outriders is that you can always change how the points are distributed in the class tree. It costs nothing and you can change exactly how much you like.

How to pause Outriders with an Nvidia RTX graphics card

Since Outriders needs an internet connection to work at all, the game cannot be paused. At least not with a pause button.

However, there is a small trick for some users. If you have a newer graphics card from the Nvidia RTX series, you can use Geforce Experience to trick the game into pausing.

For the trick to work, you must play yourself and not have someone with you in cooperative mode. It also doesn’t work with graphics cards from AMD, older Nvidia graphics cards or on game consoles.

Big problems with the game's servers on the launch day

When Outriders was released on 1 April, many players were faced with troublesome servers.

It was sometimes not possible to log in to play. For some who actually joined Outriders, the joy of playing was also short. Too many were kicked out of the servers as quickly as they came in.

The problems persisted for several days after the launch. When we played the demo version on 4 April, the servers were stable during the hours we played.

Game developer People Can Fly previously announced on Twitter that they were aware of the problem. They also wrote that work was underway to find a solution to stabilise the servers. A temporary solution was to turn off the support for cross games between PCs and game consoles, something that was not resolved a week after the launch.

You can check the status of Outriders yourself on this official support page.

Bug warning!

Right now, there is a serious bug in Outriders that causes all or part of the stuff you have collected with your characters to disappear in certain situations, often after the game crashes or the connection to the servers stops working.

People Can Fly has announced that they are working on a solution and that everyone affected should get back at least most of what they lost. If you have not bought the game, it may be wise to wait until the game studio finds a solution to the problem.

The game studio has also promised that they will give all players an apology package with various items for the game, including a guaranteed legendary weapon. When the apology package will be sent out to the players is not completely clear.

We are keeping an eye on the situation and will update the article when more information is available.

Other games that were released in April 2021

  • Oddworld: Soulstorm (PC, PS4, PS5)
  • Lost Words: Beyond the Page (PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch)
  • MotoGP 21 (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, Stadia)
  • Nier (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
  • New Pokemon Snap (Switch)
  • Returnal (PS5)

Upcoming games in May 2021

  • Resident Evil Village (PC, PS4, Xbox, PS5)
  • Mass Effect Trilogy (PC, PS4, Xbox)
  • Subnautica: Below Zero (PC, PS4, Xbox, PS5, Switch)
  • Deathloop (PC, PS5)
  • Biomutant (PC, PS4, Xbox One)
  • Hood: Outlaws & Legends (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox)

This article is written by PriceSpy's editorial staff. No one else has influenced the content of it. There are no paid links or other types of advertising collaborations. Daniel Haaf can be reached at [email protected].