I passed over Outriders when it initially launched – looter shooters haven’t been my bag for a while, so it wasn’t anything exciting to me when the game was first revealed or ramping up for release. With Outriders Worldslayer out in a couple weeks, though, I can think back and remember reading impressions and being impressed by how respectfully designed the People Can Fly co-op shooter was compared to other online looter games.
No strong-armed microtransactions, no exhaustive battle passes, no missable seasonal content. Outriders was just a solid shooter that you boot up and play until you felt like putting it down. For some people, the time to put the game down came sooner than they were hoping. Outriders Worldslayer aims to bring those players back – this isn’t a 2.0 shift or a massive overhaul, but a souped up injection of fresh content for that same Outriders experience.
You can hop straight into the Worldslayer campaign, if you want – an instant level-30 booster is going to be provided to all players on launch so you can hop straight into the endgame content and Worldslayer. As someone with zero Outriders experience who jumped straight into Worldslayer for my hands-on preview, though, I don’t recommend it – at least not for a solo experience. The Worldslayer campaign takes place after the events of the base game and offers zero context or explanation for anything happening on screen. Then again, if you just want to ignore dialogue and shoot baddies with friends, the booster is a great help.
For one thing, having instant access to a level 30 character lets you immediately start exploring the full capabilities of each character class. The four classes in Outriders each have a handful of different skills at their disposal, but you can only equip three at once. What’s fun as hell, though, is when a battle or boss is giving you trouble and you decide to swap out your skills on the fly and take a new approach to the fight. I got a huge hit of dopamine from struggling with a set of ranged DPS abilities, then swapping to a kit of melee and ability-interruption skills and immediately clearing out those foes on the first try.
Another reason Outriders Worldslayer works so well as a fun and mindless shootathon is that, to be honest, the aesthetic and world-building still isn’t all that exciting. Worldslayer introduces a set of snowy tundras and iced-over caves that are fun to explore, but the game still has that generic sci-fi shooter style, complete with hooded-cape & helmet combos and plain space-age assault rifles. It’s hard not to feel like I’ve seen the things I see in Outriders in a bunch of other games, and the uninspired aesthetic makes it hard to feel like the game is anything special.
Still, while Worldslayer doesn’t give the game a fresh coat of paint, it gives it a breadth of new things to do and foes to fight. Two new skill-trees and points systems give you added reason to grind away as you unlock new abilities, major buffs, and a constantly rising difficulty modifier that leads to rarer and rarer loot.
The base Worldslayer campaign is set to be short and sweet, but the endgame content and skill-tree unlockables added by the expansion promise to give dedicated outriders as much to do in the game as they could possibly wish for.
Outriders Worldslayer is out on 30th June 2022 across PlayStation, Xbox and PC. The expansion will be available as a standalone upgrade or in a bundle with the base game.
