OUTRIDERS

Outriders drops a squad of augmented soldiers onto a hostile, resource-rich alien planet after Earth's collapse, wraps violent elemental powers around cover-based, third-person gunplay, and layers a full Diablo-style loot and build system on top. Developed by People Can Fly and published by Square Enix, it launched on 1 April 2021 to Mixed reviews — roughly 67% of 61,244 total, sitting right at the boundary Steam draws between Mixed and Mostly Positive. Five years on, it has one of the more dramatic launch-to-legacy stories in this section's coverage: a genuinely disastrous technical rollout, a real and dedicated playerbase who stuck around anyway, a paid expansion that reopened old wounds, and a cancelled sequel that closed the book on the franchise for good.

A disaster at launch, and a real game underneath it

Outriders' launch week reviews read like an incident report. "This has been, honestly, by far the worst release I've ever been a part of," reads one of the most-upvoted negative reviews in the entire sample, with 1,429 helpful votes and 238 hours logged. "Game breaking bugs, lack of Dev support, Dev's not listening to the community." The specific, recurring complaints are consistent: server outages that blocked play entirely, save-corrupting bugs that could wipe hours of progress, and — the design choice reviewers found hardest to forgive — a requirement to stay connected to Square Enix's servers even to play strictly solo, single-player content, meaning server problems took down solo campaigns along with co-op ones.

What makes Outriders' story more interesting than a simple launch disaster, though, is how many reviewers kept playing regardless — and how many of the game's most damning reviews are written by players with hundreds of hours logged. "I like Outriders and the time invested so far can attest to that. But unfortunately I cannot recommend such a bug ridden game," reads a 777-vote review from a player with 123 hours in. Another, 387 hours deep: "This game has amazing potential... The combat is good when you are not getting one shot." The gunplay and power system are the throughline of nearly every review, positive or negative — reviewers across the sample, even ones giving a thumbs down, consistently credit the combat as genuinely satisfying, closer in feel to Gears of War or Remnant than to Destiny or The Division. That combination — a real technical failure wrapped around a genuinely good combat loop — is what produced a Mixed score sitting almost exactly at the boundary between "broken" and "worth it," rather than a clean consensus either way.

Worldslayer reopened the wound

Square Enix and People Can Fly followed up in June 2022 with Worldslayer, a paid expansion adding a new campaign, an "Apocalypse" endgame system and a level cap increase. For a meaningful share of existing owners, the timing and pricing landed badly. "Heard about the update and was excited. Until I figured out that it is 40 bucks to get Worldslayer," reads a 293-vote review. "Why would they actually give us the update at no cost. Especially after all the hardship" the base game had put players through. Another, more pointed: "I feel completely used and abused so I spent the full amount on the Outriders first game.... and then they want us to spend an additional [amount] on the quote-on-quote UPGRADE." The underlying complaint isn't really about expansion pricing in the abstract — plenty of games sell paid expansions without controversy — it's that a meaningful part of the playerbase felt Worldslayer was being sold as the fix for problems the base game's launch had created, rather than delivered as a genuine goodwill gesture or bundled with real launch-era remediation. A 2023 review captures the resulting fatigue bluntly: "Good game buried under a host of technical errors and the devs have already announced they aren't fixing it anymore... don't even bother with Worldslayer."

No sequel, no further chapter

The clearest sign that Outriders' story is now genuinely finished, rather than merely quiet, is what happened to its planned sequel. People Can Fly had been developing a full follow-up — reported under the internal codename Project Gemini — but cancelled it after the studio's relationship with publisher Square Enix broke down entirely, reportedly over the publisher failing to provide assets the developer needed and a breakdown in ongoing communication between the two companies. Square Enix retains the Outriders intellectual property even after the cancellation, meaning People Can Fly can't simply take the concept elsewhere either. Whatever redemption arc Outriders might have earned through a stronger sequel is now permanently off the table — this is the complete story, as released, for good.

How it has aged

The picture that emerges from 2026 reviews is notably calmer than the launch-week chaos. "For a game that has 'run its course' so to speak, it is definitely an underrated game currently," reads one recent review, and several others explicitly note playing entire co-op sessions "with no connection issues whatsoever" — a meaningful contrast to 2021's server disasters. At a current price well under its original NZ$31.95, and with the worst technical problems apparently behind it, a small but genuine cluster of recent reviews describe Outriders as a quietly good, underappreciated co-op shooter rather than the disaster its launch reputation suggests. The achievement data supports a real, engaged core audience: a median completion rate around 46% across 52 achievements is unusually healthy for a loot-driven game, with even some of the harder challenge-specific achievements sitting in the 5-7% range rather than near zero.

6.5 out of 10. Outriders is, in the end, a genuinely good cover-shooter loot game that launched into one of the worst technical rollouts covered in this section, kept a real fanbase playing on the strength of its gunplay regardless, and never fully repaired the trust its launch cost — a gap the paid Worldslayer expansion widened rather than closed for a meaningful share of its audience. With the sequel cancelled and the franchise's future closed, what exists now is the whole story: a flawed, sometimes genuinely fun game, best bought cheap and best not followed up with the expansion unless it's deeply discounted too.