![]() These disadvantages remain in effect as you advance, but naturally, earning better armor, weapons, skills, traps, and magic mitigate them considerably. ![]() Adding insult to injury, Outward’s stingy stamina meter depletes to empty with any sustained offense longer than a few seconds and takes half a minute – if not an in-game night’s sleep – to fully recover, forcing you to ration swings of your weapons in long fights. Countless times I’d get disposed of by some scourge beast or bandit because it did inordinate amounts of damage, its hitboxes made absolutely no sense (causing me to take attacks that seemed like they shouldn’t hit), and because it sniffed out any attempts to sneak past it. My experience was essentially a long montage of deaths and cheesy wins. While you’d expect to start out underpowered in a game about a random peasant who strikes out into the world to pick between one of three factions and do things for them (Outward’s story is pretty thin), the early hours feel poorly balanced relative to most RPGs, creating an inverted difficulty curve where the beginning is significantly more difficult than the end. The combat started out poor and barely improved once I’d learned the ropes and become respectable at it. Feeling like an explorer carving my own path into the unknown in search of adventure just over the horizon is arguably the magic of any open-world experience if the rest of the mechanics surrounding that core were better, Outward could have been a diamond in the rough. It's expansive, and while walking the length of its four regions over and over and over again just to get to the next step of a given quest was tedious, time-consuming, and boring (especially due to the lack of mounts or fast-travel of any kind), the times where I actually got to delve into the wilderness and find something off the beaten path were by far Outward's best. There are secrets to discover, sights to see, and interesting enemies to meet. That said, the sprawling landscapes of forests, snowy mountain passes, parched deserts, and demon-infested marshes are by far Outward’s strongest feature. This fantasy world isn't particularly pretty or well designed, with graphics that compare to older games like Gothic 3 or Mount and Blade: Warband and invisible walls that render its “open” world more restrictive than it may appear at first glance. Sprawling landscapes of forests, parched deserts, and demon-infested marshes are by far Outward’s strongest feature.Outward is an RPG built around combat, exploration, travel, and the grind to stay alive within the rules of its survival mechanics. It still wasn’t much fun, but after I’d gotten my hands on the kind of material wealth that turned the tide for me, I got a clearer idea of what Outward is supposed to be. Determined to not let Outward beat me, I used the debug menu to break the obnoxious autosave feature to retrieve my stolen gear and money (a last resort when reviewing a game) and set out on the second act, eventually upgrading enough to grind through the aggravating combat and complete the story. ![]() I was also contending with bugs and design failures that first caused my co-op partners to abandon me and, at their apex, left me broke, nude, and alone in a snowbank, dying of exposure. ![]() In the first, I spent the majority of my time in this open-world fantasy RPG getting killed by nearly every enemy I encountered, running between the only two cities I knew the way to (after getting locked out of a third) to find gear and salvage crafting materials and baubles so I could sell them. My experience with Outward essentially unfolded in two distinct acts. ![]()
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