izigame.me

Let me start off part three of my essay on this underrated gem by saying that art direction is better in every way compared to graphical fidelity. But just like my review on the previous DLC of Outward, this one brings more superb art direction and more mechanics that are questionable-at-best additions to the world of Outward, buy rounds it out with some of the best storytelling in the entire game.
Let's start off with the biggest elephant in the room, and arguably the most controversial one: The primary aspect of the Three Brothers DLC is a town building mechanic. This punctuates the main story after every quest, and is mandatory to do in time to achieve good endings that don't cripple your town, making further failure even more likely. The punishment for failing the first time-gated town building mission is a 50% increase in building times, which are measured in a matter of in-game days. This makes succeeding after this even more difficult. The game gives you quite a lot of time to complete these objectives, provided you've at least mastered Outward's combat, since it's necessary to explore and gather resources to build your town.
Gathering materials for resources is a quite a grind too. The way they implemented the gathering is rough at best, and completely unreasonable at worst. A set of spawn locations, scattered across the vast map, is determined by RNG. The worst part is, that each set of spawns shares some nodes with at least two other sets. Figuring out the set rotations on your own is borderline impossible, and results in you running across the map to just look for certain gathering nodes. For real, just use the wiki to help you strategize on gathering resources. It's not worth the headache.
This town building mechanic easily the part of the DLC most responsible for the "Mixed" rating on Steam. To a lot of people, it felt shoehorned in, and ruined the game's experience by forcing you to run around the map fighting the toughest enemies yet, all in order to build a new building that you won't really see benefit from until halfway through the main quest of the DLC. These critiques are the most valid they've ever been, and the only defense I have for them is that gathering materials for your town makes you familiar with the map and the various locations you have to visit. Town building also gets in the way of easily the ABSOLUTE BEST QUEST WRITING OUTWARD HAS TO OFFER. This quest is so well written that I'm honestly baffled by the decision to punctuate it with town building. The town building is thematically appropriate, as you're helping the survivors of a volcano eruption rebuild, but this is an instance where thematically appropriate doesn't automatically equal fun.
But the main quest! It's actually good! The antagonist isn't some rival faction looking to survive in this world alongside you by securing power or some other convoluted grab to weaken your faction. Your enemies are the old Nobility of the town of Sirocco, which was nearly destroyed in a volcano eruption. They are demanding, with no compromises, that the people of Sirocco return to the town that's falling apart into lava and await their fate. I won't spoil it fully (I might have already said a little too much) but the reason as to why they are so committed to killing their subjects is an AMAZING twist, and the story, the final dungeon, and the final boss themselves are ABSOLUTELY worth your money. When I stepped into the final dungeon, I was blown away by the music, the art direction, and the design of the dungeon itself. The final boss was also thematically amazing and visually striking, and my only gripe is that it took Nine Dots this much effort to REALLY get their storytelling right. It's also difficult to focus on the story if you haven't already learned the quirks of Outward's combat, but hopefully, if you've made it this far, adapting your play style to new enemies shouldn't steepen the learning curve any more.
Oh, the music. I didn't even touch on it in my review of the main game since I hit a character limit for the review. The music in base game is really good, and worth a listen on its own, since each piece of music thematically matches each area so well. But the Caldera is where the music of Outward truly shines. Outward's music ranks pretty highly on my list of tracks that get me in a creative mood for writing stuff for Dungeons & Dragons. Absolutely well done, Jean- François Racine. Your music is extremely well written for communicating the emotions of Outward.
Now, all in all, is the game worth $75 ($40 base, $15 for Soroboreans, and $20 for Three Brothers)? That's up to you. I've written what basically amounts to an essay on what I think works and doesn't work for Outward across all its expansions (although my initial review of the game is more a jumbled mess, since I wrote it as I was experiencing the game for the first time). If you can handle some quirky things, and adapt to how those quirks function, you will find a lot to enjoy in Outward. That's probably the biggest hurdle: putting up with things that Nine Dots wanted as part of their game. The whole experience is not polished, but this game and its DLCs have some of the most heart I've seen from a modern dev studio. The main game is listed as a souls-like on the store page, and in some ways, they're not wrong. It's not the i-frame dodge roll or stamina based combat, but the way Nine Dots poured their heart and soul into making the best game they could. They very obviously lack the polish of a FromSoftware release. If you think you'd enjoy it, give it a play through. Keep an open mind, and you might be surprised at what you find.
*drops mic*