1 week Ago By Nic Reuben
The Outer Worlds 2 is still set for release sometime this year, and our Ziffly chums at Ian Games have gone got their hands on 11 minutes of exclusive footage from the RPG . That video is below. Watch it in isolation for a guaranteed blissful Reuben-free experience, or keep scrolling to read my awful opinions.
Spoiler warning for one small part of one quest, and opinion warning now: I, uh, I don't love it! The clip kicks off mid-quest. We're on what looks like a mining planet, all sandstone cliffs and crystalline bunches. Indulging in a little showcasey arsenal appreciation, we admire our knife, a slimy slime pistol, and a glowing Toys R Us does Art Deco Scythe.
Art Deco's the theme, actually. We soon approach an open plaza overlooked by a mythologising mural that evokes similar art from Prey 's Talos I. "Everything must become nothing, before it can become everything," blasts a tannoy.
Distinctly meaningless middle management motivational slogan tier as far as proclamations of evil go, that, but I don't mind a "we must first punch the world to bits before making it good" villain, done well. We sneak up through the plaza, followed by our companion Aza. She's also a cultist, and she keeps calling the other cultists "traitors".
We approach an enemy, select our knife, and Aza says "It's killing time!". That is my third least favourite thing a companion can say, Aza. We stealth stab one cultist, but their body is immediately spotted by another.
No matter! We have guns, grenades, and slo-mo - a combination that makes us too pathologically impatient to wait for grenades to create an honest god-fearing explosion on their own time, and so we shoot ours mid-air. Yep, that'll do it. A bit more shooting, and we're inside.
We follow bloody footprints inside the building until we meet a science lady named Exemplar Foxworth. We can immediately tell she's a science lady because she starts breathlessly babbling calculations, as all good pop culture scientists are contractually obligated to do. Whoa! Slow down there, braniac! Can you say that again.
...
in English! She's been left bleeding out via slapdash exsanguination, but it looks like we either don't have high enough medical skills or a kit to patch her up. Conversational skill checks, check. She fills you in on the situation.
The cult has been going billy bear blood sausage nutso around the facility. "Is there any science around here we use to find and kill them?", asks your companion, quirkaciously. What a delightful whackadoodle whose shtick certainly was not worn out halfway through her very first sentence.
Science lady points you to a scanner to locate the invisible cultists. She calls them "visibility impaired". Sorry.
Sorry. Just headbutted my keyboard six times in a row then blacked out for a moment. We pass over some electrified corridors and locate the scanner in another room.
It's a mask that, indeed, reveals the cultists through infra-red bug vision. We find a few cultists and whack them with the Toys R Us scythe, which looks nicely chunky. "Homicide always cheers me up!", says Aza, evidently unsatisfied with only coming third on my shit list previously.
We return to science lady for some more advice on opening some doors, solve a lever puzzle, then it's off to locate and kill a cultist named Victor. Before that, we take a quick jaunt to show off killable NPCs by putting an end to science lady's calculations for good. Murderable everyone, check.
Murderable everyone as a crowdpleasing feature without the branching quest design that would make that feature interesting to begin with? Unconfirmed! And that's curtains, or hastily shut blinds anyway. Well! I like the art direction. The melee combat looks neat.
But can I bank on these enough to buy me a fresh pair of unground teeth each time a character opens their mouths? Starting to miss Avowed already, honestly ..
