Outriders has everything required for an es of loot, cooperative chaos, and enough flying body parts to make a janitor request hazard pay. Unfortunately, its original launch also included a less desirable featureservers that behaved as though someone had stored them inside an active volcano.
Developed by People Can Fly and published by Square Enix, Outriders arrived on April 1, 2021, as an online-only third-person RPG shooter for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms. Players could explore the hostile planet Enoch alone or in teams of up to three. The game was not marketed as a traditional live service with seasons and battle passes, yet it still required an internet connection, even for solo play. That decision became painfully important when launch traffic overwhelmed the online infrastructure. he technology cooperates, however, Outriders is a loud, fast, wonderfully messy looter shooter with unusually flexible character building. It may borrow ideas from Gears of War, Diablo, Destiny, and The Division, but it combines those ingredients into a surprisingly satisfying action-RPG casserole. It is not a revolutionary meal, but you may still return for seconds while pretending not to notice the smoke alarm.
A Looter Shooter That Wants You to Attack
At first glance, Outriders appears to be another cover-based shooter. Waist-high walls are scattered across battlefields with the frequency of decorative pillows in a furniture catalog. New players naturally assume they should crouch behind one, carefully peek around the corner, and exchange polite bursts of gunfire with the enemy.
That is usually the wrong approach.
Cover exists, but Outriders rewards aggression. Each class recovers health through combat-related actions, so hiding for too long can be more dangerous than charging forward. The game repeatedly encourages players to leave safety, use their abilities, disrupt enemy positions, and transform the battlefield into an expensive special-effects demonstration.
Four Classes, Four Ways to Ruin Someone’s Day
The four playable Outriders classes support noticeably different combat styles:
- Devastator: A close-range tank that manipulates earth, leaps into crowds, and generally treats incoming bullets as negative feedback.
- Pyromancer: A medium-range caster who marks enemies, spreads fire, and turns organized squads into barbecue samples.
- Trickster: A mobile assassin who bends time, teleports behind targets, and makes shotguns feel like supernatural office equipment.
- Technomancer: A long-range specialist with turrets, gadgets, strong healing potential, and enough tools to qualify as an extremely violent engineer.
Abilities operate on relatively short cooldowns, allowing players to use them frequently rather than saving everything for an imaginary emergency. This rhythm is one of the game’s greatest strengths. You freeze a charging creature, detonate a cluster of soldiers, teleport across the arena, fire a modified rifle, and repeat the process before the surviving enemies finish reconsidering their career choices. >
Excellent Combat Is the Real Main Character
The story introduces desperate survivors, military factions, mutated creatures, ancient mysteries, and a planet-sized electromagnetic nightmare called the Anomaly. Yet the true star is the moment-to-moment combat.
Weapons feel forceful, especially shotguns, automatic rifles, light machine guns, and sniper rifles. Enemies react dramatically to damage, while abilities send bodies flying, burning, freezing, exploding, or disappearing into clouds that would concern several international organizations. People Can Fly previously developed shooters such as Bulletstorm, and the studio’s affection for exaggerated action is obvious.
The best encounters require constant movement and rapid target prioritization. Snipers pressure you from distant platforms. Captains cast dangerous abilities. Riflemen spread across the arena. Heavy enemies march forward while smaller units attempt to surround you. A successful fight resembles controlled chaos; an unsuccessful fight resembles being mugged by an entire military parade.
Several major reviews praised this combination of guns, powers, cooperative play, and RPG mechanics. GameSpot highlighted the tactical intensity created by mixing cover shooting with superhuman abilities, while Game Informer described the game as explosively chaotic and highly replayable. Polygon and other outlets were more critical of its glitches and narrative, but even mixed reviews often recognized the appeal of its combat systems. >
Loot That Changes More Than a Number
A looter shooter lives or dies by its equipment, and Outriders understands that a new weapon should do more than increase damage from 826 to 843 while expecting applause.
Weapons and armor can contain mods that significantly alter skills or attacks. One mod might give an ability additional charges. Another may increase its radius, add status effects, summon damaging projectiles, improve armor, or trigger an explosion after a killing shot. As higher-level equipment becomes available, players can dismantle unwanted items and preserve their mods for future crafting.
This creates a rewarding cycle. You find equipment, inspect its abilities, dismantle useful pieces, and combine the recovered mods into a more focused build. A mediocre-looking helmet may contain the exact upgrade needed to transform a skill from “occasionally helpful” into “local authorities are asking questions.”
Build Freedom Encourages Experimentation
Each class also has a branching skill tree supporting different priorities, including weapon damage, survivability, status effects, and ability power. Players can reset the tree without a punishing fee, making experimentation practical.
The flexibility matters because Outriders frequently changes the difficulty through its World Tier system. Higher tiers produce tougher enemies and better rewards. A build that comfortably clears one tier may become decorative furniture on the next. When progress stalls, players can lower the tier, upgrade equipment, adjust mods, or reconsider whether charging three elite enemies with an underleveled pistol was a sound financial decision.
The Planet Enoch Is Beautiful, Miserable, and Full of Bullets
The campaign begins with humanity escaping a ruined Earth and attempting to colonize Enoch. Naturally, the supposedly habitable planet contains deadly storms, hostile wildlife, collapsing civilizations, endless warfare, and approximately zero functioning tourism offices.
Enoch provides varied environments, including muddy battlefields, forests, mountains, ruins, deserts, camps, and alien structures. The campaign gradually expands beyond its initial military setting, revealing stranger locations and more ambitious science-fiction ideas.
The plot mixes grim themes with pulp action and dark comedy. Characters discuss war, exploitation, ecological collapse, survival, and humanity’s habit of rebuilding its worst institutions immediately after escaping them. Then someone delivers a one-liner, explodes, or both.
This tonal mixture will not work for everyone. Some dialogue is stiff, supporting characters can be thinly developed, and the protagonist occasionally acts as though waking from cryogenic sleep automatically grants a doctorate in sarcasm. Still, the game has personality. Its willingness to combine bleak social commentary with absurd action helps distinguish it from cleaner, more cautious science-fiction shooters. >
Then the Outriders Servers Caught Fire
The original launch weekend demonstrated the biggest weakness of an always-online game: excellent mechanics are irrelevant when players cannot reach them.
Many users encountered login failures, repeated disconnections, unavailable matchmaking, crashes, and long waits at the authentication screen. Because the entire game required a connection, server trouble affected solo players as well as cooperative groups. Someone could be happily progressing through a private mission, lose the connection, and suddenly find themselves returned to the title screen with all the dignity of a customer removed from an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The Washington Post reported that the service experienced problems serious enough to require extended downtime during the opening weekend. GameSpot noted multiplayer crashes and temporarily disrupted PC-to-console cross-play, while community reports described players struggling to sign in at all. at Actually Went Wrong?
People Can Fly provided unusually detailed explanations after the launch. According to the studio’s technical account, a large volume of server calls was being handled through slower disk-based processes instead of remaining in faster memory. Data queues grew, services failed, and connectivity problems snowballed.
The development team and its partners expanded database capacity, redistributed profiles and inventories, increased storage performance, added database shards, and adjusted cache operations. One important factor involved a cache-cleaning process running too frequently and consuming excessive resources. Reconfiguring that process helped stabilize the service. transparency was commendable. Players received frequent status reports rather than a corporate message vaguely blaming “unexpected conditions,” which is technology-industry language for “the building is vibrating and Gary has stopped answering his phone.” Communication could not restore lost gaming time, but it helped explain why the problems were happening.
The Inventory Wipe Bug Made Everything Worse
Connection trouble is frustrating. Losing carefully collected equipment is considerably worse.
After launch, some players encountered an Outriders inventory wipe bug that removed weapons and armor from their characters. Reports became especially alarming after an early patch, leading many players to avoid multiplayer or stop playing while waiting for safeguards.
For a loot-driven game, this was a nightmare scenario. The entire progression loop depends on collecting equipment, improving builds, and pursuing increasingly powerful combinations. Erasing that progress is like running a restaurant loyalty program that rewards the tenth purchase by deleting the customer’s kitchen.
People Can Fly implemented preventive measures, investigated affected accounts, and developed a restoration process focused on valuable Epic and Legendary equipment. Later updates improved stability, restored cross-play, and addressed additional problems, but the incident damaged confidence during the period when enthusiasm was highest. >
Co-Op Makes the Best Parts Even Better
Although the campaign can be completed solo, cooperative play allows the combat systems to reach their full ridiculous potential. Classes complement one another without forcing players into rigid roles. A Devastator can disrupt a group at close range, a Pyromancer can ignite marked targets, a Technomancer can control distant lanes, and a Trickster can teleport around the arena removing inconvenient people.
The screen can become spectacularly busy. Elemental effects overlap, enemies fly across the battlefield, status icons multiply, and someone inevitably asks, “What just exploded?” The correct answer is usually “everything.”
However, cooperative play also exposed technical weaknesses. Launch-period cross-play problems made it difficult for PC and console users to team up reliably. Matchmaking instability and disconnections were particularly painful during longer fights because a dropped connection could erase the momentum of an otherwise successful session. >
The Endgame: Expeditions, Builds, and Stopwatch Anxiety
After completing the campaign, players can enter Expeditionscombat-focused missions designed around increasingly difficult Challenge Tiers. These activities remove much of the campaign’s slower exploration and concentrate on enemy waves, build optimization, and high-level rewards.
For players who enjoy refining damage output, testing mod combinations, and chasing Legendary gear, Expeditions provide a clear progression path. They also reveal balance problems. Certain enemy combinations can overwhelm weaker builds, while the original focus on timed completion encouraged players to prioritize raw damage over defensive or experimental strategies.
The result is engaging but repetitive. The first successful high-tier run can feel fantastic. The twentieth attempt to obtain a specific item may cause you to suspect the random-number generator has developed a personal grievance.
Later updates improved Legendary drop rates and polished portions of the endgame, but the basic appeal remains the same: build a more efficient character so you can defeat harder enemies and obtain equipment that helps you defeat even harder enemies. It is an ancient gaming ritual, only now performed with volcanic ammunition. >
Why Outriders Still Works Despite Its Flaws
Outriders does not reinvent the looter-shooter genre. Its mission structure can feel dated, its cover system occasionally fights against its aggressive healing mechanics, and its story swings between interesting science fiction and dialogue that sounds as though it was written during a very loud lunch break.
Yet the game understands the pleasure of creating a powerful build. Skills activate quickly. Equipment mods produce visible effects. Respecs are accessible. Classes feel distinct. Combat is brutal and responsive. Most importantly, the game allows players to become dramatically stronger rather than carefully sanding down every overpowered combination in the name of perfect competitive balance.
There are moments when a carefully assembled build suddenly clicks. Enemies that once required a desperate five-minute battle disappear in seconds. Status effects spread through a group. Abilities reset at exactly the right moment. Legendary weapons trigger chain reactions across the arena. For a brief, beautiful period, the player stops feeling like a survivor and starts feeling like the emergency described in the evacuation order.
Extended Player Experience: What a Long Session on Enoch Feels Like
A typical Outriders gameplay experience begins with restraint. You choose a class, examine the early skill descriptions, and promise yourself that this will be a thoughtful tactical adventure. You will use cover responsibly. You will compare every weapon. You will carefully study the battlefield before attacking.
Twenty minutes later, you are teleporting through a wall of gunfire while holding a shotgun that causes enemies to explode into lightning.
The transition from cautious soldier to supernatural demolition crew is the game’s most enjoyable journey. Early equipment provides modest bonuses, so positioning and accuracy matter. As more mods become available, abilities begin interacting in unexpected ways. A skill that initially damages one enemy may eventually strike several targets, restore health, increase armor, and reduce its own cooldown. Your build becomes less like a collection of statistics and more like a machine whose purpose is to produce unreasonable amounts of violence.
Solo play creates an especially intense rhythm. Every enemy focuses on you, and there is no teammate available to revive mistakes. A sniper can keep you pinned while melee units rush your position. Captains launch abilities that must be interrupted. Creatures leap across the arena with the personal enthusiasm of dogs greeting someone who has been away for six months.
These encounters can initially feel unfair, but they often expose a weakness in the current build. Perhaps your weapons are underleveled. Maybe you have equipped several impressive mods that do not support one another. You may simply be playing too defensively in a game that restores health through aggression. Returning after upgrading equipment can transform an impossible fight into a manageable one, providing the satisfying sense that preparationnot merely reflexesmade the difference.
Cooperative sessions are less controlled but more entertaining. One player may carefully mark priority targets while another has already launched themselves into the largest crowd. Voice communication rapidly declines from strategy to laughter, warnings, and incomplete sentences such as, “Behind youno, the otherwhy is the floor on fire?”
The frustration arrives when the online systems interrupt that momentum. A disconnection does not feel like a minor technical inconvenience after the team has synchronized abilities and nearly defeated a difficult boss. It feels like someone entered the room, unplugged the console, and then asked whether everyone was still having fun.
That contrast defined the early reputation of Outriders. The game could produce exhilarating combat one minute and an authentication error the next. Players were not angry because the underlying experience was worthless. They were angry because something highly enjoyable was sitting behind an unreliable digital door.
Once the servers became more stable, the strengths were easier to appreciate. The campaign was substantial enough to support multiple classes, the mod system encouraged experimentation, and the lack of competitive multiplayer allowed builds to become satisfyingly excessive. The game still had rough edges, but those flaws became easier to tolerate when players could remain connected long enough to encounter them.
That is the lasting Outriders experience: moments of clumsy storytelling, technical irritation, excellent character progression, and spectacular combat packed into one unpredictable trip. Enoch may be a terrible place to live, but when the servers behave, it is a very entertaining place to destroy things.
Conclusion: A Great Shooter Trapped Behind a Login Screen
Outriders deserved criticism for its troubled launch. An online-only game must provide reliable access, and the combination of server failures, broken cross-play, crashes, and inventory wipes made its opening weeks unnecessarily painful.
Those problems should not erase what People Can Fly built underneath them. The aggressive healing mechanics encourage movement. The four classes offer distinct play styles. The mod and crafting systems make loot meaningful. Cooperative battles produce glorious chaos, while the escalating difficulty gives dedicated players a reason to keep adjusting their builds.
When Outriders fails, it can feel outdated, repetitive, or technically fragile. When everything works, it becomes one of those games that turns a planned 30-minute session into a confused glance at the clock three hours later.
In other words, Outriders is a very good game whenever its servers are not impersonating a burning trash canand that is both its greatest compliment and the most accurate summary of its legacy.
