The citizens of Arcadia are once again in peril! Deadly space rifts are appearing, vexing the greatest scientific minds of our era. The Order, Auntie’s Choice, and The Protectorate are vying for power in an epic struggle that threatens reality itself. Coming to the rescue, why it’s a Commander of the Earth Directorate! Will he save these Outer Worlds? Find out in a thrilling 25-hour adventure, with twists, turns, important choices, and daring action!
A bigger, bolder, yet similar-length sequel
The Outer Worlds was a solid game, a 7.5 out of 10 in my book. What it lacked in gameplay chops and scope, it made up for in writing. This sequel sees every part of the game made bigger and better, except for its runtime. As The Commander, I spent 25 hours in Arcadia, traveling amongst the stars through multiple planets, which is about how long the original took me.
This, of course, is as spoiler-free a review as I can make it, while doing this game’s fantastic story justice. The Outer Worlds 2 is a confidently made game. Obsidian is as good as they’ve ever been when it comes to the writing. What’s new here is how top-tier everything else is, without trying to do too much.
Your choices matter; everything you do on each of the game’s four major planets will count towards the ending you get. It’s not as dense a weave as Baldur’s Gate 3, but it is more impactful than their own release earlier this year, Avowed (another game I greatly enjoyed). The game begins with an Earth Directorate mission to a space station. Things happen, not great ones, setting you up for an adventure that takes you from verdant forests to snow-capped peaks.
You’ll gain six companions throughout your journey, all of whom have their own questlines, with one exception. Your robot support-bot V.A.L.E.R.I.E. is still just a robot, no sentience here. Their stories, those of the game’s main factions: Auntie’s Choice, The Order, and the Protectorate, are woven into small areas of each planet in a way that makes them feel bigger.
It’s a similar “this feels epic in scope” without actually being so in the way the Mass Effect games are when you go back to them. Obsidian’s world-building, questlines, and narrative arcs have always been solid. In The Outer Worlds 2, they’ve improved upon the first title’s gameplay to match the rest, if not exceed it.
Solid performance and gameplay
As we saw with the aforementioned Avowed earlier this year, Obsidian’s work with Unreal Engine is some of the best out there. While the game can be a bear to run on PC if you don’t have high-end hardware, it ran and felt great on Xbox Series X. Utilizing the Play Anywhere systems, I jumped between each version of the game, with the only issue being the need to let the game sync save files in the loading screen whenever I swapped.
Both on a mouse and keyboard and controller, The Outer Worlds 2 is a tight FPS, though it can also be played from two third-person perspectives. This is an RPG, though one streamlined to move to a light stat system, instead focusing on perks and skills to control how much health you have, damage you do, and a lot more.
Obsidian worked with multiple studios around Xbox, as noted in interviews before the game’s launch. What you get, both on console in its balanced and performance modes (Xbox Series X & PS5 Pro only), is a performant, gorgeous title. My 7900XTX GPU & 5800X CPU AMD combo ran the game anywhere between 60 fps in the most NPC-dense zones to 120 fps locked inside of buildings.
Your game starts with character creation, of course. In here, you’ll set your look, background, and starting perks. I went with a science background and a focus on the Speech skill, which proved to make even the toughest encounters a breeze. There’s even a perk that gives me more weapon damage per level of Speech.
Your background and perks matter a lot more than I initially thought. The Outer Worlds 2 is a game of skill checks. Find a malfunctioning door? If your hack skill is high enough, you can repair it, or if you have the brawny trait, you can simply force it open like The Hulk. With speech maxed out as quickly as possible (skill level 20, the overall cap is 30), I was able to avoid at least 4 major boss fights by talking the NPC onto my side. Your companions will get a new passive perk every 5 levels, which is a permanent choice, much like when you lock in skills.
When speech fails, violence avails
When talking my way out of a situation wasn’t possible, I let my guns and hammers loose. TOW2 has a wide variety of weaponry, and is not a game to try and be a jack-of-all-trades. You need to specialize in your preferred playstyle. I made the mistake early of mixing points around in hacking & lockpicking, which I used maybe 3 times each throughout my run, after realizing I had to stick to no more than 3 or 4 ‘main’ stats.
On to the combat. Shooting in TOW2 is a lot of fun, and for my orator-focused, light armor-using Commander, it let me stay in the back as my tougher crewmates took the brunt of incoming damage. Aiming feels more natural, with just enough recoil to force you into properly aiming your shots. Alongside an impressive variety of melee and ranged weaponry are armor and helmet slots. Weapons, armor, and helmets all have their own mod slots. It is a seemingly deep system that is locked behind skill and perk choices.
Take the inhaler slot, for instance. You can have up to four different inhalers equipped, theoretically. I never had more than one at a time during my initial run. Using your inhaler requires finding drugs, any of them, throughout the environment. Using the inhaler ups your toxicity rating, and I could only huff a single blast at a time without getting a full debuff. If you spec correctly, you can up your toxicity intake amount, letting you have far more powerful heals, something useful if you want to play as a tank.
There are numerous throwables, including bombs and distraction makers. You can buy or craft them, unlike the game’s six gadgets. These are a series of tools that work off of an energy system that quickly recovers when not in use. Saying what the gadgets are would be spoilers; just know they add greatly to the game’s sandbox for both combat and puzzles.
What about stamina? Well, do I have good news? It doesn’t exist. Running, jumping, double-jumping (do the guy outside the first bar’s quest, I mean it), and melee attacks are not tied to a stamina system. Much like the game’s lack of a stat system when leveling, it felt freeing to have no stamina to worry about when situations became sticky and I desperately needed to skedaddle.
Not only is there no stamina, but there are no inventory limits!?!?
Alongside this lack of a stamina system is a complete absence of any sort of inventory limit. There is no weight or item amount keeping you from looting everything that isn’t nailed down. Start looting an entire bakery’s worth of food (used to heal you outside of combat), and the game’s Flaw system may show up.
Flaws are a give and take; being a kleptomaniac may offer better prices when selling stolen items. The downside is that legitimately purloined wares now sell for less. By the end of the game, I had accepted 7 flaws and rejected a few dozen. Those vendors are everywhere, with bits always at a premium. Selling junk, duplicate items, and gear you’ll never use lets you become a walking armory.
By the end of my playthrough, I had at least a few thousand rounds of every ammunition type, crafting material, and at least one of every weapon and armor piece I had found. The UI for navigating all of it works well on both console and PC. There only seemed to be four levels of gear. Gray, Green, Blue, and Orange in an ascending order of power. There are no levels assigned to gear.
If you have something, you can use it. Finding higher-quality items takes a bit to start, and the main way to make gear better is to spec into it. This allowed me to focus on using the gear I like the most whenever I wanted to. Instead of seeing a new “level 28” version of a helmet I got back at level 12, that item had leveled with me, gaining strength as I gained skill points and perks that affected it.
R(efined)RPG
I expect an Obsidian game to have an interesting story and good writing. Over the years, they’ve proven capable at both, even when time and money were in short supply during production. Every part of The Outer Worlds 2 speaks to a game that knew exactly what it wanted to be from the start. It’s a stark contrast to Avowed, which clearly had multiplayer ambitions before being reworked into a still stellar product.
It is a cohesive product, where questlines were always seen through. Systems are less complicated yet retain levels of depth that push you towards multiple playthroughs. I know that entire areas of the game were off-limits because of who I backed, saved, killed, and other choices I made. I brought up Mass Effect before, and no, this game isn’t going for the full trilogy space-opera thing.
What they nail that feeling of the 360 classics is in fitting a ton of excellent content into surprisingly small spaces. As it is 2025, the area in between those spaces is vast in size and full of a lot more content. The actual ‘dungeons’ you’ll run through during missions are a brilliant puzzle box of content that moves you along set paths per the choices you made, pulling off the magic tricks that only gaming’s best games can.
There are no vehicles in the game. You will be running to discover each new area and then mainly fast-traveling around to turn in quests or revisit old areas for new missions. This isn’t a Fallout-style title, featuring one massive open world where you can ‘walk in a direction and find something amazing’. Much like its predecessor and Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2 is a series of smaller open-zone maps. Each map has dozens of points of interest, many with their own sub-zones that feature rich story lines. One common thread binds each of them together; they are all gorgeous.
The WOWter Worlds
Running on Unreal Engine 5, TOW2 is always a pretty and occasionally stunning-looking game. There are four main, large planets you’ll go around, each with a unique look and feel. There are multiple other areas you’ll visit for questlines, including a free trade ship run by a spy network. Visit it asap once it opens up, as there is a companion to find in the bar that is really easy to miss. I didn’t find them until 10 hours into my 25-hour playthrough.
I played half on Xbox Series X in balanced mode with VRR enabled, and half on PC at 4k max settings. Outside of areas where the Xbox version dipped towards the 40fps floor (mainly ones full of NPCs), it ran brilliantly on the system. The Series S version has the 30 and 40 FPS modes, but not the 60 FPS targeted performance mode. I found that mode gave up too much in the way of resolution and lighting for me, so I stuck with the balanced setting. One surprising thing, or should I say lack of one, in the review guide is the lack of a performance mode on base PS5 hardware. We’ll see if it’s true at launch, but only the PS5 Pro gets a 60fps mode on the PlayStation platform.
TOW2 maintains the vibrant color palette of the first game, especially in the starter zone. There is a full day/night cycle that can lead to some incredible vistas as well as more boring and flat-looking images. It’s a trade-off for not having always baked in lighting like Destiny 2. I think it’s worth it, though, as Destiny is infamous for how long it takes to re-render anything if you move so much as a pebble in a level.
The maps in TOW2 feel a lot bigger and more varied than the first game, as well. Your guns can have various elemental effects, which are represented in how the attacks and damage on enemies look. Seeing big bolts of purple-blue energy arcing between 15-foot-tall Dragoon robots while their human compatriots melted into a puddle of biomass was always satisfying, much like the game’s audio.
Splendiferous Splendor
The Outer Worlds 2’s excellent writing is matched with just-as-good voice acting. While your character never says a word, every other line is fully voiced. Each companion grew on me, even the first one I recruited (you start with two by default). They were a bit boring, to begin with. As I went through their companion quests, which are how you unlock two sets of permanent upgrades, they opened up into someone capable of being funny and incredibly helpful in combat.
The companions, factions, and random folks you meet all have the same high-quality direction. Ridiculous lines work for comedy because they are never delivered in a way that’s meant to sound funny. Crazy lines from your most bloodthirsty companions are met with a mix of dry wit and horror from those around. It elevates what could be corny into something genuine-sounding.
That is true of the game’s music as well. It never delves into the comedic, with high-pitched sounds. It’s full on serious but never stiff. Epic sweeping tracks match when sh!t gets real. The soundtrack isn’t the most memorable, outside of the excellent main menu theme and the epic fight music at the end of my run. It elevates, never obfuscates, and knows when to fade into the background to let the game’s sound effects and voice acting carry a scene.
I didn’t run into any major bugs while playing. The only issue I had was making sure to open the load menu when swapping between Xbox and PC so that it could resync. If I had one complaint, and it is a minor one, it would be that a selfish part of me wished it were just a bit longer. I did everything I could find in about 30 hours total, going back to a “point of no return” save to see how long the remaining side content I had would take. It’s not really a problem, though, as I think the game’s pacing and scope fit perfectly with who Obsidian is as a developer.
Xbox Ally X Performance
I purchased an Xbox Ally X and got it in time for this review. I played through a few hours of the game on the handheld and came away mightily impressed. Unreal Engine 5 typically runs terribly on most devices I’ve used whether it’s a Steam Deck OLED, Legion Go, or the original ROG Ally.
The Xbox Ally X ran the game at a steady 55 to 80 FPS while in the plugged in 35 watt turbo mode. Lowering the TDP to 17 watts and even 13 watts gave a still playable 30-40 fps experience. This was using the game’s recommended mix of medium and low settings. The resolution was set at 1080p and I used FRS 3 at performance level. On the device’s built-in VRR capable display it felt smooth, with little to no input lag.
My gameplay in the video review did have some serious lag going through my capture device, unfortunately. I did have to wait for roughly 5 minutes for the shader compilation to complete on my first boot-up of the game.
Wrapping Things Up
The Outer Worlds 2 is a confidently made game. It is perfectly-scoped, with excellent gameplay, writing, and voice acting. The combat and movement are the biggest step up over the original. Whether you have played that title or not, if you want a choice-heavy, narrative-rich adventure in a far-off solar system, then this game is worth a download or Game Pass, or buying outright.
The Outer Worlds 2
Played on
Xbox Series X (Main) and PC
PROS
- Feels Great
- Looks Even Better
- Best-In-Class Writing
- Well-Scoped
CONS
- UE5 performance on PC is what it is
- Some dips on console in NPC heavy areas
Is it worth $80?
It’s not $80, it was changed back to $70.
Extremely glad to hear it isn’t bloated after Avowed (which I still like a lot but was way too long!)
Sounds great! Can’t wait to play it.
Avowed had weird issues due to drastically changing during dev. This is by a different team and had a very straightforward development as a sequel.
Yep, not mad at Avowed or the team. Still a very good game, just I desperately wanted a short RPG.
That’s not what I meant. The question is , is this a $70 game that is worth $80, or a $80 game that was discounted to $70?
Weird question. I think we know the answer. It was always a 70$ game. They’ve just tried to up the price but it got some backlash, even from Obsidian.
Anyway, you can play it tomorrow if you pay extra for the Deluxe or wait for next week or buy it on sale later on, that’s your choice.
Great review as always, Jesse. Read and bonus-watched it
Really looking forward to jump into this tomorrow!