Outriders (Demo)

I'm feeling a little bit of deja vu here. Just over two years ago, Anthem ran a pre-release demo of the game. There were some things I liked about it, but it had some definite problems and didn't really click for me. Fittingly (or sadly, depending on your point of view), the developers have just recently pulled back from work on the major revamp they were trying to pull with that game to make it... well... good. That leaves Anthem to languish in its current state with limited support and not much of a future.

Well, Outriders just ran a pre-release demo and while specifics differ, playing a few hours of it has left me thinking I'll probably pass on this too. It's a third-person, squad-multiplayer looter-shooter. I like the story premise of the remnants of humanity settling a foreign world where things go wrong. There's a time skip early on that takes the player(s) from the first day of exploring the world to a few decades later when the settlers have degraded into a post-apocalyptic war of scarce resources. I'm interested in the story being told and would like to explore and experience it even I find myself thinking it seems pretty weird for the colonists to have the time and resources to build up sprawling concrete structures that have fallen to ruin and units of tanks and heavy military equipment when they were fairly short of resources to begin with. It's a little hard to believe that there was some period of build-up in that time period to crumble to the "current" state. Maybe there's an explanation, but I kind of doubt it.

But while the story intrigues me, the game less so. Some thoughts as I played through:

- The player character creator has some very limited options (gender, face, skin color, eye color).

- Cutscenes are being used for story scenes, so there's a bit of break in game flow, but it looks a lot better than most in-game storytelling. I think that's probably a net positive choice.

- I generally like the characters seen during the intro.

- For some reason, the camera during conversations tends toward very shaky. I wonder if that's a glitch because it's definitely distracting in a bad way.

- She shift from the exploratory vibe in the intro to the post apocalyptic setting after is pretty jarring. I think that's fully intentional, but still.

- The couple boss-type encounters I hit in the early areas were tough. Maybe that's because I was solo. I found myself dying repeatedly until I turned the world difficulty down from level 4 to 2. Those encounters felt like a roadblock.

The biggest negatives for me, I think, are the movement and level design which interact a lot with one another.

The levels are pretty linear without a lot of branching of reason to explore. Occasional chests are a short distance out of the way, but that's it. Cover is blatantly obvious in places where firefights happen. This is a cover-based shooter. The closest comparison that comes to mind is the Division, but Outriders feels so much more artificial. In the former, you're a paramilitary person running around in a city full of scattered debris and barricades set up as things were falling apart. Ducking behind a barrier or car felt pretty natural and fine. In the later, you've got nature spaces and ruins - all of which have logs or barriers set up at right angles in places that feel artificial rather than organic. And especially in the intro section (which is even more linear), I found myself wanting to jump or mantle some ledges to the side, but that was impossible. There's a disconnect between how the appearance of the place invites you to move and how the game will let you. I found that really took away from the immersion and feel of the place.

It doesn't help that most of the gameplay encourages cover-shooting, then the bosses force you to move to avoid area effect attacks and such.

So while I'd like to see more of the story, the gameplay is overall sort of "meh" in my opinion. It doesn't come together in a way that really interests me.