Announced in 2019, Outriders remained secret for another good year before truly revealing its curves: it took, for that, to wait for a big event reserved for the press and influencers in the capital of Poland in March 2020. curtain in good and due form which was our last excursion before the covid-19 crisis (rest in peace, small trips). Alas, during this preview, we didn't come out really convinced of Outriders, which turned out to be too flat and too repetitive to really charm its audience, garnering a lot of mixed opinions… including ours. A clearly mixed reception which will have partly led the publisher to postpone its title for several months (and the teleworking imposed by the situation has certainly not encouraged things): today, we can say it in advance, Outriders is not as disappointing as expected, far from it. Nevertheless, it has enough annoying shells to prevent it from touching the heights of the shooter-looter.
Outriders is not a service game and therefore is not intended to evolve drastically over time by relying on a bunch of updates with labyrinthine additions.
Anyone who knows a little Gears of War will refer to it after playing Outriders for a few minutes: if the gameplay is devilishly close to it - we shoot everything that moves by taking cover and dodging, rolling in support - it also shares obvious elements with other major licenses, like Borderlands, The Division or Destiny, to name a few. So here we are in an ultra-nag, nervous TPS, relatively linear in its level design, which is all about the randomly recovered loot and the way to choose difficulties that will reward you accordingly. A particularly popular method since Gearbox and 2K Games plunged into it body and soul in 2009, which however has a small difference here with games of the genre of this generation: Outriders is not a service game and therefore does not have destined to evolve drastically over time based on a bunch of updates with labyrinthine additions. There you go, you already know a little more where you are stepping.
ENOCH KNOCK
As you might expect, Outriders takes place in a totally SF context: towards the middle of the 83th century, when the Earth is dying and the chaos of the end of the world is not helping, humanity decides to send a few thousand chosen ones frozen in the Flores, a gigantic spaceship going to conquer the distant planet Enoch, visibly habitable. The last resort of our species, in itself, before the final extinction of our original home. A critical situation that will lead, XNUMX years later, to a first excursion to Enoch by the Outriders, an elite team responsible for securing these unknown lands before the first settlers are sent to rebuild our civilization. Unfortunately, the planet is hostile and the Anomaly, a storm with supernatural and deadly properties defying the laws of physics, hits our team of brave men hard. Your character, which you will create thanks to a modest editor that we would have liked more varied, then becomes an Altered, a miracle having survived the Anomaly and who has even kept certain abilities (defined by the class of character that you will choose). In other words, in addition to being a soldier already extremely good at exploding skulls, you then become a killing machine thanks to superpowers that will make some Marvel and DC heads jealous. 
After a forced rest of thirty years in cryo-sleep, your hero/heroine then wakes up on Enoch and the conclusion is bitter: a war has broken out since men have set foot on the land, the latter finding themselves regularly ravaged by the Anomaly. With several factions of maverick warriors and a frankly unsociable mutant fauna, it will be up to you to survive and, ideally, to calm the game by crossing many unknown regions in the company of other Outriders. Unlike Bulletstorm, which already played with futuristic and galactic themes, Outriders is a game with a resolutely serious tone, whose plot and universe were written by a screenwriter, Joshua Rubin, anxious to prove the maturity of PeopleCanFly. What we can say without fear is that the story and the lore, enriched by numerous documents to read optionally, are rather convincing on paper but suffer from a summary execution. The narration and the staging fail on more than one point, both in their staging and in certain frankly cliché situations which can discredit valid remarks or reversals of situation (not to mention an audio mix and a VF questionable). The expression of the scenario therefore struggles to convince completely despite some good ideas - deepened by these hundreds of documents that most players will obviously not read - and the characters are not deep enough for us to really get attached to them. We will nevertheless underline an effort on this last point, Outriders betting on several optional dialogues for slightly philosophical talk on a background of swear words.
Outriders is a 100% action game, never doubt that.
A story that can be followed, therefore, and above all a nice context to interfere in dangerous environments with crazy inhabitants. Composed of about fifteen zones with different biomes - a slum, World War I-style trenches, jungle, snow, desert, a forest village and so on - these consist of zones of fights placed one after the other, with some adjacent portions for side quests. A structure that will be repeated ad vitam æternam, with the exception of a few small peaceful towns in which it will be possible to buy or sell items (something doable anyway with your team members anywhere) or obtain side missions. From a level design point of view, these combat zones are not really deep either since apart from several levels of height, it is completely a question of using the walls to take cover and play with them. enemy fire to overcome his opponents. Recurringly, we will also face formidable alien animals for much closer combat and deadly proximity. It should be noted that there are no gameplay elements other than combat: no vehicle driving, no rail-shooting phase, no puzzles, no particular mini-games or anything to diversify the experience. Outriders is a 1% action game, never doubt that. 
STORM OF BALLS
Fortunately, this brutal dynamism works rather well. We owe this to the expertise of PeopleCanFly in the matter (Bulletstorm is also a small pearl in the matter), with Gears of War vibes that are felt immediately. The cover system, the sensations of relentless shooting, the constant dismemberment and so on: everything is perfectly fluid and can be approached very easily for a most frenetic and rather pleasant action. In Outriders, life points are recovered only by killing enemies, which forces you to approach an aggressive strategy to survive, especially since the HP goes away very quickly. The difficulty is also progressive, with however somewhat uneven peaks at the very end of the adventure which could well discourage some. To manage this, the game then establishes “world levels”, which quite simply correspond to the hardness of the game: fifteen in number, the higher they are, the more the level of the enemies will be higher than yours. In return, the rarity rate of the loot obtained (weapons and clothes, therefore) will be considerably increased for an ever more qualitative loot. Namely that to move to the next “world level”, it will be necessary to fill the dedicated gauge by killing the most enemies without dying, under penalty of seeing a substantial loss of the accumulated points. In other words, once you have crossed a certain number of world levels (which is very well done during half of the single-player campaign), it will become extremely difficult to cross the threshold to reach the next world level, unless to be a hell of a PGM or to play in co-op with very solid people. Fortunately, it is quite possible to choose a lower world level if you find yourself facing too much difficulty, but you must not forget that this, firstly, can hurt your ego and, secondly, two, will lead to recovering a less good loot, necessarily below your current equipment... which will inevitably lead to a certain stagnation thereafter. An effective system that changes compared to what is done elsewhere, therefore, but which also has questionable facets. 
Finally, note that the lifespan obviously depends on the level of the world chosen and the choice to do the adventure solo or not, and that "expeditions" are to be covered after the end credits: these are levels to be finish as quickly as possible, with difficulty levels to unlock and then choose, in which you will have to… kill all the enemies. Nothing abnormal at this level - that's what we do in Outriders throughout - but the rewards will, on the other hand, be particularly beneficial. In addition, dozens of side quests (not varied for a penny, but sometimes leading to unique bosses) are also offered for maximized longevity. If you like Outriders, you should have it for pretty dozens of hours before seeing the end of it.
An effective difficulty system that is a bit of a game-changer but also has questionable facets.
On the pure loot side, Outriders does not take many risks but does things rather well: the items are divided into several categories of rarity, which will notably allow the inclusion of several “assets” with different passive or active properties. Thus, we find ourselves dismantling many objects to recover resources that will be reused to upgrade weapons or clothing, which will clearly make the difference in the difficulties a bit high. The feel of the weapons is good even if we can't help but think that the diversity is a little lacking: we would have liked more types of weapons to lighten up the experience more, like grenades or rocket launchers, but the developers have nevertheless integrated many variations through the “assets” to offer concepts, sometimes original. 
CTRL + ALT(ÉRÉ)
As discussed earlier in this test, cooperation is one of the key elements of Outriders: it is possible to play alone, of course, but also up to three for clashes which will then take on another flavor. Needless to say, it's always better with several people: although PeopleCanFly said that the difficulty automatically rebalances according to the number of players, this is a parameter that we do not feel so much and, more than ever, playing as a team is an obvious and decisive advantage for progress. Also, the very gameplay of Outriders takes on another dimension thanks to the supernatural faculties of our character: during his creation, we must then choose a class that will allow him to have several very important powers. Thus, the Pyromancer will opt for formidable fiery attacks, even capable of exploding his enemies at medium distance; the Illusionist, on the other hand, will be able to distort time and space to slow down his enemies, teleport next to them or disassemble them wildly (literally). The Ravager will act as a tank, with the ability to block attacks and explode the earth in a close circle - finally, the Trickster will use its mobility to strike fast and well before fleeing in the blink of an eye. 
Styles of play different from each other that we can combine with our weapons and which, above all, will intertwine well with those of other players. Combining these different attacks may prove to be formidable against certain enemy troops and will release, let's face it, a certain enjoyment. Moreover, note that the more you level up thanks to experience points, the more “magical” attacks you will unlock, of which a maximum of three can be assigned to the triggers. A few surprises therefore await the player who can also spend skill points on passive improvements, via a basic but relevant skill tree. There is therefore an evolution of the character in his skills and in the loot, be reassured, and this one is pleasant to experience in the company of one or two friends. By the way, this cooperation also makes it possible to ignore a bestiary which tends to repeat itself a bit, or this lack of truly Hollywood sequence which could have diluted these countless fights in a row. Last point to be clarified: the host of the game will impose the level of the enemies (then set on his own and his "world level") on the other players, then causing too large differences between the guests who are very advanced in their game or, on the contrary, not enough. We would have infinitely preferred a Borderlands 3-style system, allowing the difficulty to be rescaled for everyone and allowing coherent team play...
LOOT DE BUGS
But you see, even if Outriders is pleasant to browse alone or with others (especially with others), it also relies on an extremely annoying online policy: the mandatory connection is effectively required to play, making it impossible to pause in full game, even solo. A very annoying little detail which is added above all to other unforgivable problems: calamitous servers which completely mess up the gaming experience. It's very simple, since its launch, Outriders has only been difficult to play because of constant crashes of the servers of the Polish studio. We really couldn't try the title on two consecutive evenings because of a general network failure, which prevented solo games altogether. In the same register, the console versions end up two times out of three (without exaggerating) on a connection notification which grinds indefinitely, leaving no other choice but to close the application and relaunch it in the uncertain hope of being able to access the menu. of reception. And we're not talking about the COUNTLESS crashes simply closing the game for often obscure reasons, or senseless disconnections ranking Outriders among the most unstable titles of the generation. So of course, it's a safe bet that this chaotic launch, generating bad buzz on social networks, is causing some gray hairs in the corridors of PeopleCanFly who must work hard to deploy a very big update. These technical blunders will therefore probably be corrected in the future, but as it stands, it is impossible not to put a red highlighter on these pitfalls that are difficult to forgive, especially after five years of development and for a price of 69,99 euros.
Fortunately, Outriders remains a pleasant title to play if you are ready to close your eyes to its many technical problems on which you are entirely dependent.
A truly multiplatform title, Outriders is a real challenge for its developers who must then agree on a game suitable for all media. Tested for the occasion on PlayStation 5, the TPS achieves its objectives with a framerate of sixty frames per second and a frankly clean dynamic 4K resolution (it is the same on Xbox Series X with even better resolution but a framerate apparently slightly less stable). Still on next-gen, the minimal loading times are more than appreciable and the graphic rendering, without stunning, fulfills its part of the contract with a sparkling and rather varied colorimetry, also allowing some nice panoramas. On the other hand, yellow card for PeopleCanFly which absolutely does not use the DualSense, both in terms of haptic vibrations and feedback on the adaptive triggers. There is no denying it, an optimization, even minimal, for the famous controller of the PS5 would have greatly deepened the sensations of the game. It is still frankly a shame. Fortunately, Outriders remains a pleasant title to play if you are ready to close your eyes to its many problems on which you entirely depend. Hoping that a patch fixes the situation as soon as possible...
