Review: The Outer Worlds |

The Outer Worlds has been out on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 since October last year. The game by developer Private Division and publisher Obsidian Entertainment was well received by many, including us (with a solid 94%). Like many games before, there’s now a Nintendo Switch version available. Not an easy task, since not all AAA games have been well received on the Switch. We can expect a loss of quality when it comes to the graphics, but just how much are we talking about? Does everything else hold up when playing The Outer Worlds on this console?

What we liked!

Story: Luckily, nothing was changed regarding the story. It’s the same for all the consoles, whether you’re playing the PC, Xbox, or Switch. The story is definitely one of the strongest key features of this game. There’s a lot of dialogue going on throughout the game and (dark, satirical) humor seems to be a recurring aspect, grasping your attention even more. The writing, dialogue, and story are simply amazing. If you’re not really into combat and just want to enjoy what the writers of The Outer Worlds have to offer, there’s a difficulty called ‘story’ which you can select. Here, you’ll be able to focus more on the story since enemies are way easier to defeat.
Engaging gameplay: The gameplay itself is so much fun, honestly. You have your main quests and various side quests (which is also great for replay value). The quests give you a great deal of freedom, and so does the dialogue by the way. You can persuade someone, lie to someone, etc. You make your own choices and in a way, create your own story. The Outer Worlds really is an amazing first-person sci-fi RPG. The game offers your basic combat system, plus a tactical time dilation (similar to Fallout’s VATS). Basically, this allows you to slow time and you will see some extra enemy information such as their armor level and classification. I quite enjoyed this feature.
Gyroscopic aiming: To help the players, and enhance accessibility, the developers added the option for support for gyro aiming. This is a slight advantage for the Switch edition of The Outer Worlds. Because of this, you are able to use the motion control of the joy-cons when aiming your weapons. You can choose between only using it when you’re aiming or just all the time. Note that the gyro option only works for the Switch, not the Switch Lite.

Somewhere between

I was hesitant to put the graphics here because I understand that there has to be a loss of quality when bringing a game to the Switch. But, just as the story is a key feature that makes this game beautiful, so are the graphics.

What we disliked

Graphics: As expected, there is quite a loss of quality when it comes to the graphics. I don’t own an Xbox or PlayStation, and I haven’t played the game on PC, but even when just looking at the screenshots in Jim’s review of The Outer Worlds on Xbox or just videos of the game on these consoles, you can see a huge difference. A lot of details are only visible when coming close to a character, which is unfortunate since the characters are designed wonderfully. The same goes for environments and the objects you encounter during your gameplay. I totally expected this, but was still a little disappointed by how big the loss of quality actually was. The game is so very beautiful, and the Switch version takes away a big part of this advantage.

If you have a Switch and you can deal with the loss of graphics, then I definitely recommend playing The Outer Worlds. If you tend to heavily focus on what a game looks like, then you’ll probably get annoyed by the vague environments and characters. For me, the game is somewhere in between. I absolutely love the gameplay, but it’s such a shame that the graphics have taken such a hit. If I score only focussing on the game itself, there’s no doubt: it’s simply an amazing game. But I have to take into account that this is specifically for the Switch, so the score suffered a little.