Developer People Can Fly

Publisher Square Enix

Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Release Out now

Nobody listened to global-warming advice, so humankind has to pack itself into spaceships and tear off through the cosmos in search of a new home. A ragtag group of space cowboys makes first contact on the new terra firma, and while repairing some uplinks to transmit planetary data back to the other colonists following behind, they realise the planet’s home to mysterious hostile forces, such as a strange black goo that gets into one member’s airways and incapacitates them. Before the team drag him back to the ship, though, a fierce storm breaks out. The mission descends into chaos. These overwhelmed space cowboys must send a message back to the other colonists that it’s not safe here – but they’re thwarted by a company man who’s adamant they should touch down anyway, indigenous dangers be damned. Bundled into a cryo-chamber on the ship to prevent their injuries killing them, the protagonist lies suspended for decades to come. But enough about Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels – let’s talk about Outriders.

To say it’s a familiar setup would be charitable, but in truth it doesn’t really matter that People Can Fly’s new thirdperson co-op shooter plays it safe from a narrative standpoint, because in a co-op title managing to tell a coherent story at all is something of an achievement, and in pitching Outriders as it does (somewhere between Gears and Destiny), the Polish studio capitalises on the MMOshooter’s longstanding weakness for storytelling. And, in all fairness, there are flourishes to its setup that go beyond an Unreal Engine retelling of Prometheus. By throwing your avatar into cryostasis for 31 years, for example, Outriders is able to play a brilliant bait-andswitch with the world of Enoch, at first presenting you with verdant alien landscapes and then, moments later in game time, reducing that same planet to mulch, with corpses now hanging from brutalist colony structures. In the intervening decades, humanity did touch down on its new homeworld under ECA instruction, and was subjected to anomalies that wreaked havoc with its humble genetic code. Your common-or-garden postapocalypse faction-based culture set in, and those who were exposed too much to those anomalies have become ‘altered’, a state somewhere between superpowered and cursed. And wouldn’t you know it, your own protagonist finds themselves in just such a state, suddenly able to pop off up to three special abilities in accordance with their class and skill points.