The Outer Worlds 2 wants you to join the space police

Then there’s the way the game stresses a number of early dialogue choices, telling you how your fellow agents will remember when you choose to treat them with eager support or stern rebuke at key moments. Without getting too much into early game spoilers, I’ll say that the medium-term consequences of these kinds of decisions are not always obvious; concerned players might want to keep a few save files handy for gaming out the “best” outcomes from their choices.

Bang bang

The early moment-to-moment gameplay in The Outer Worlds 2 will be broadly familiar to those who played the original game, right down to the Tactical Time Dilation device that slows down enemies enough for you to line up a perfect headshot (though not enough for Max Payne-style acrobatics, unfortunately). But I did find myself missing the first game’s zippy double-jump-style dodging system, which doesn’t seem to be available in the prologue of the sequel, at least.

Shooting feels pretty clean and impactful in the early game firefights.

Credit:
Obsidian / Kyle Orland

The game’s first action setpiece lets you explicitly choose whether to go in guns blazing or focus on stealth and sneak attacks, but characters that invest in conversational skills might find they’re able to talk their way past some of the early encounters. When it comes time to engage in a firefight, thus far I’ve found the “Normal” difficulty to be laughably easy, while the “Hard” difficulty is a bit too punishing, making me wish for more fine-tuning.

The prologue stops before I was able to engage with important elements like the leveling system or the allied computer-controlled companions, making it a rather incomplete picture of the full game. Still, it was enough to whet my appetite for what seems set to be another tongue-in-cheek take on the space adventure genre.