The Outer Worlds is a fun jaunt through outer space that only lasts about 25 hours, but compacts a ton of fun into those hours.
Pros:
-Great storyline. The world is morally gray and your choices literally impact the lives of everyone in the galaxy. It's cool to see the way they portray rampant capitalism and how everyone's lives are run by corporations and what that would look like if left unchecked. You are born and die in essentially slavery and you don't get medicine or food to live unless the corporation likes you. Otherwise you are left to survive in the wilderness full of monsters until you die. There are several colonies that have been set up without corporations, but these aren't the luxuries you would think. They have their own issues and struggles that rival that of living in a colony owned by a corporation. I appreciate that everything is gray, and you can literally just kill everyone or try to have everyone get along. There are no right or wrong answers. I ended up killing a main character in the game because she was a bitch but realized later I could have done several quests for her and totally changed the outcome of the story.
-Your companions are actually interesting and have lots of missions for you to do where you can change the course of their future. These are some of the best missions in the game and totally optional.
-The combat is fun, if not very original. It's never too tough but never gets old or so difficult that it's insurmountable.
-I like that they dispensed with the completely open, giant world idea and decided to have just a few different levels to choose from where you could explore. It made the worlds each feel unique and more full of things to do instead of vast spaces of nothing.
Cons:
-Why can't I put my gun away? I'm literally pointing my gun at everyone I talk to, that takes away from the realism of the game in my opinion. Why is this person being so nice to me if I'm pointing me shotgun right at their face?
-No minimap and no ability to set your own waypoints on the map. Can only track one quest at a time.
-The load times are atrocious. Honestly, every time I had to go back to my ship to change out party members I dreaded it because the load times were so frustrating.
-There is a lot of backtracking to do certain quests, which is annoying, especially considering the amount of times it makes you sit through the dreaded load screen.
-Why does the level cap at 30? You could easily go over this, it seemed arbitrary to put a stop on any character progress at this level.
-Music - none to speak of really. It's fine as background noise but it's repetitive and not that interesting.
8.5/10