The Outer Worlds Review (Vossler)
Overall I'd say the game is pretty good, a solid 7/10. Competent, but flawed.
But that's part of the problem. I was expecting a lot more from the people who made New Vegas, and yet this game feels like Diet New Vegas. A lot of the ideas and concepts from New Vegas are there, but they have either been watered down or aren't explored nearly as much as New Vegas.
For example, New Vegas did a fantastic job of adding moral ambiguity into quests and making you wonder if what you're doing is morally justifiable. The Outer Worlds acts like there is moral ambiguity, but it is often extremely clear which is the ethical choice.
One of the first major choices is deciding between the Company town, where the employees are effectively slaves and the company chooses who lives and who dies based on how productive they are, or a rogue settlement that broke away from the town. The game tries to act like it's a difficult choice because, but it's clearly not. In the power plant, right before you make the choice your companion tries to argue for why you should choose the company town. Her argument basically boils down to "the boss of the town is doing his best and the deserters are kinda mean." Meanwhile she completely ignores the fact that A) she was literally born into indentured servitude to the company (AKA slavery) and B) while going through the power plant you pass dozens of corpses of people who were literally murdered by the company just so it could increase its profits.
Yes, I know Ceasar's Legion in New Vegas is objectively evil, but the game at least attempts the argument that the Legion's evil is necessary to maintain order in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Here, everything the company does is solely for the sake of increasing profits. There is no way to morally justify murdering employees to make your business more profitable.
Aside from the writing there are some issues with the gameplay. Basically, everything is competent, but feels . . . small or scaled down. The various planets and environments you explore look nice and are decently designed, but they are all extremely small. Characters will talk like a settlement up in the hills is far away, but it's literally a short walk from one settlement to another. You can find bandit camps literally right next to a settlement's walls. It really kills the desire to explore the environments, because you feel like you can see everything there is to see in about 5 mins.
Combat is competent, but again, feels like it has been scaled down. A lot of enemies feel very "bullet spongey" and that's mainly because you're usually only fighting a handful at a time. I know this is an RPG first, and a shooter second, but like I said before, the story and environments aren't all that interesting to begin with.
There are some redeeming qualities. The voice acting is top-notch and some characters do have some genuinely funny lines. The "retro-futuristic" aesthetic is very interesting and works well. If this had come from a brand new studio and wasn't advertised as "From the people who brought you New Vegas" it wouldn't feel nearly as disappointing, it would feel like a flawed, yet promising, first game in a series. But because the advertising leans so heavily into New Vegas' legacy, it sets up the player for disappointment.