Outriders Worldslayer Review

ign.com:

Ever since Outriders released early last year, I’ve held a theory that it's the ultimate fast food game: a bland story filled with cheesy one-liners and mindless encounters that you know aren’t good for you, but undeniably awesome combat that’s easy for you and your friends to lose hours in just makes it so dang tasty. In that context, if the base game was a Big Mac, then the latest expansion, Worldslayer, is that one sandwich from KFC where the bread is replaced by fried chicken. With a fine-tuned combat sandbox, expanded build-crafting options, and a drastically upgraded endgame, Worldslayer improves upon a lot of what was already great about the original, but it also doubles down on many of its shortcomings. That includes another weak story, annoying boss fights, and an overall lack of stuff to do. The result is a fleeting evolution of its space–magic mayhem, but one that’s still entertaining enough to leave me feeling good about making a return trip to Enoch.

Like the vanilla campaign, Worldslayer’s borderline incoherent story takes place on an alien world where you play as a magical soldier called an Outrider, complete with a stupid sci-fi haircut and some of the cringiest dialogue in all the cosmos. The same mysterious anomaly that gave your character powers now threatens to destroy the entire planet, plus there’s a new scary lady that wants to kill everyone, and yadda yadda yadda – now you’ve gotta murder thousands of people and animals in the name of all that’s good.

"Outriders offers some genuinely great sci-fi action, alongside some really interesting world and creature design that I'd love to see more of. Its mostly satisfying take on RPG loot progression is well worth putting up with a lackluster story, a few