OUTLAWED Review (PC)

I’ll be honest, when I first glossed over the description for OUTLAWED, I wasn’t expecting it to be anything even remotely special. It was sometime in that moment, just as I came across the line ‘this once proud city has succumbed to crime, and now gangs and private military organizations rule the streets’, that I immediately shrugged my shoulders and thought, alright, so it’s another extraction shooter with a lot of generic loot, weaponry, and gang-based badassery. I figured, if it had the above prosthetics and the same setup as the likes of Payday, Crime Boss, or Call of Duty’s TMZ, then it would automatically cement its status as just another shameless clone of another established IP. But then I decided to delve a little deeper, eager to prove myself wrong and find something that would set it apart from its competitors. And you know what? I found it.

It was sometime during the opening portions of the game that I heard another critic mention a convincing argument: OUTLAWED is like the brainchild, or the culmination of both Grand Theft Auto V and TMZ birthing the foundation for a new extraction shooter. And I can’t help but agree; truly, OUTLAWED brings a similar tone of untethered violence and an open world of self-explanatory pandemonium. It’s the sort of game you don’t need an introduction to; in fact, it’s more or less the case of throwing yourself to the wolves, and learning how to run with the pack without the added benefit of an hour-long tutorial to guide you. And, you know, it works. The point is, it doesn’t take a genius to crack this particular vault. There are weapons, riches, and more PvPvE action than you could shake a stick at. It’s primordial, but it gets the job done.

…Then Out Came the Wolves

As the brief description states, OUTLAWED is a solo and multiplayer first-person extraction shooter that combines traditional PvPvE gameplay with a densely packed loot system and a 3km*3km stretch of land to both wage war on and effectively monopolize. The game itself sees you, one of the spoil-deprived players, taking to the dynamic and highly destructible sandbox of a crime-riddled world, where you can use a number of tools—parachutes, zip lines, and makeshift portals, for example—to traverse the map, unearth special abilities, riches, and enemy militia. It’s a bit like Just Cause in some ways; it doesn’t restrict itself to the single cardboard cutout of some generic flat ground terrain, but instead takes full advantage of the space it provides. There are towers to climb, mountains to scale, rivers to wade through, and, surprise surprise, a generous amount of buildings to utilize for cover and other special purposes.

OUTLAWED itself isn’t a massively complex game. As if butter wouldn’t melt, it is just as simple to hack through as the average extraction shooter that you might find on the middle tier of a local catalog. Well, I say that, when in reality, there are several things that one might consider to be thorns in your backside. As it turns out, it isn’t the process of traversing the map that’s the problem, though, but more the struggle of earning just enough loot to boost your arsenal and the overall pre-match load out. And with so many options to consider—magazine clips, weapon skins, tactical gear, medical supplies, and custom scopes, for instance—there’s certainly a great deal to plug away at and scratch off the checklist as you hop from one heist to the next. But there’s a plus to all of this: the journey itself is ridiculously fun.

Calculated Carnage

The breadth of the experience is comprised of tactical combat, which means that there is a degree of skill and coordination to be developed over the course of the game. But that’s where OUTLAWED removes the shackles and allows you to devise your own strategy; it doesn’t force you to foster a well-traveled vantage point, but rather, it encourages you to experiment with a variety of play styles and techniques on a plethora of different terrain types, from simple and calculated stealthy maneuvers to Rambo-like marches. And it’s because of that flexibility that the game offers that you don’t necessarily need to subject yourself to the same routine to make headway on your objectives. Suffice it to say, the most fun I had was learning the ropes and trialing alternate vessels for extracting the loot. Mindlessly slaughtering NPCs with a custom scope might’ve had something to do with it.

I can’t bring myself to say that OUTLAWED is the most structurally sound extraction shooter I’ve ever played, because it’s still dragging along a few notable issues. In the dozen or so rounds that I ran, I often witnessed enemies clip through walls, certain pieces of audio dip in and out, and armored vehicles adopt that tediously spongey durability meter. And yet, for whenever I would encounter one of these minor flaws, I would always find a silver lining to balance out the scales—the competent AI that would often prove a good challenge; the amount of depth in the weapon loadout system; or the smooth and satisfying combat that would make each and every kill feel different from the last and effortlessly rewarding.

Verdict

While it’s relatively difficult to ignore the barrage of technical issues that rifle through the inner workings of an otherwise captivating extraction shooter, it’s also easy to sideline a lot of these faults to gander at the silver linings of OUTLAWED, of which there are many to pluck from the list. True, it’s still with a few minor flaws—the fact that the audiovisual elements aren’t quite up to scratch, or that enemies occasionally clip through walls, for instance—but with an incredibly solid and addictive progression hook to keep you enticed and a tremendous amount of loot to obtain, it’s hard not to fall in love with this bullet-brazen hybrid.

In addition to OUTLAWED having some compelling and, in some cases, binge-worthy progression trees to climb, the game also congregates on a variety of great locations, with settings that include well-rounded suburban settlements, mountainous terrains, luscious riverbeds, and an enormous 3km*3km playground to conquer and strategically monopolize. I’m convinced, then, that with such a large amount of material to stow away under your belt, the average extraction shooter fanatic could quite easily lose a significant amount of hours to the grind. And with a roadmap of content drops already scheduled for release later this year, it seems at this point that there’s still a lot more to look forward to. Sign us up for the next wave, folks.