The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds arrived in October 2019 carrying the two Obsidian veterans most likely to make a Fallout fan pay attention — Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who worked on the original Fallout before helping build New Vegas — and a premise that let them do openly what Bethesda's Fallout only implies: a handful of megacorporations bought a colony ship, colonised a solar system, and never stopped acting like landlords. Seven years and one console generation later, it's a good RPG whose own reputation has settled into something more specific than "good": a well-liked, well- finished game that a large share of its own reviewers describe as smaller than expected, and that new buyers on Steam currently can't even purchase in the form this review covers.

A colony run entirely for shareholders

Halcyon is a corporate-administered star system where nothing is subtle about who's in charge. Currency doubles as company scrip in some settlements. Job titles come with slogans. A cannery town's entire economy runs on a fish that everyone secretly knows is poisonous, because admitting that would cost a quarter's earnings. None of this is delivered as background lore you have to dig for — it's the first thing every settlement shows you, and the game trusts the joke to land without winking at the camera. Where Fallout usually lets you infer that its factions are corrupt from the wreckage they've left behind, The Outer Worlds puts the corruption in the present tense and lets you decide how much of it to dismantle, exploit or simply walk past.

That framing pays off best in the quest design. The overwhelming majority of missions in Halcyon have more than one route through them — a skill check, a companion's specific expertise, straight violence, or persuading two sides to solve your problem for you — and the game keeps track of which path you took rather than funnelling every approach back to the same cutscene. It's the part of New Vegas's design Obsidian clearly cared most about preserving, and it's also the part the review corpus argues about least: almost nobody, positive or negative, disputes that the writing and branching quest logic are the strongest thing here.

Companions who push back

Your crew — up to six recruitable companions, two along at a time — each carry a personal quest, a set of opinions about the corporations running Halcyon, and a willingness to say so out loud mid-mission rather than waiting for a dialogue prompt. The roster spans a shy engineer who's never left her home station, a hard-drinking big-game hunter, a disillusioned priest questioning his own faith, a company doctor hiding a past mistake, an anarchist deckhand who wants the whole system burned down, and a small mechanical companion built to translate between species. That spread matters because it gives the corporate-satire premise more than one register to argue through — the priest and the anarchist can both be right about Halcyon's corporations while disagreeing completely about what to do about it, and the game lets you side with either without punishing you mechanically for the choice.

Positive reviews consistently single this cast out: companions argue with bad calls, occasionally refuse to help with something that crosses their line, and read as people with their own stakes in the story rather than a stat-boosting entourage. It's a smaller cast than Fallout's, and none of them get New Vegas's factional complexity, but the writing invested in each one is dense enough that the top-voted positive reviews on Steam call the companions some of the best in an Obsidian game outright.

Combat with a New Vegas accent, in a smaller space

Tactical Time Dilation — a VATS-adjacent slow-motion ability tied to a resource meter rather than a hard pause — is the mechanical spine of combat, and it does what it's meant to: it turns firefights into something with a rhythm of aim, slow, target and follow-through, rather than a straight shooter. What it can't disguise is a genuinely thin weapon roster next to Fallout's, and a Flaws system — permanently accept a character weakness in exchange for an extra perk point — that reviewers and players alike describe as a clever idea most builds end up skipping, because the perk tree underneath it rarely rewards a specific build enough to justify the trade-off. Global achievement data shows the familiar completionist taper for a game like this: the earliest story-progress achievements sit above 60-70% of the playerbase, and by the last handful of achievements — largely the DLC-specific and full-completion ones — that falls into single digits, which is a normal shape for an RPG's tail rather than evidence of anything broken.

The bigger, more repeated complaint isn't about combat depth at all — it's about scale. Halcyon is built from a series of contained, hand-crafted hub areas connected by loading screens and a ship you fly between them, not one continuous open world, and several of Obsidian's own 2019 previews leaned into "Fallout in space" language that didn't prepare players for that structure. It's the single most consistent theme across the negative review corpus years later: not bugs, not balance, but a sense of "solid but smaller than I expected," repeated by players with wildly different playtimes, from five hours to over fifty.

What the Steam reviews actually say

The Outer Worlds sits at Very Positive on Steam — 20,047 of 24,281 reviews are recommendations, an 83% positive rate — but the shape of that number is worth reading past the badge. The single highest-voted review on the entire page isn't about the game at all: it's a player explicitly buying the game a year after launch specifically to spite Private Division and Epic Games over the now-notorious 2019 Epic Games Store exclusivity deal, which Obsidian later said was the publisher's call rather than the studio's. Former Obsidian writer Chris Avellone publicly called that exclusivity arrangement "a cash grab" at the time, and the Steam review corpus still carries its residue six years on — a meaningful share of the earliest, most-upvoted reviews are as much about platform politics as about Halcyon.

Strip that away and the more common critical review is calmer and more specific than a launch-week backlash: several of the most-upvoted negative reviews open by directly quoting the game's own reputation back at it — "overwhelmingly average" turns up more than once, verbatim, across independent reviewers who clearly went in expecting to be told that and came out agreeing. The recurring specifics underneath that verdict are consistent: a story that resolves faster than its opening act promises, skill trees that reward one obvious build rather than several viable ones, and a game that several reviewers compare directly and unfavourably to New Vegas while still recommending it as worth the price on sale.

Reception then and now

The Outer Worlds landed well with critics at launch — 82 on Metacritic's PC aggregate, GOTY nominations at the 2019 Game Awards it didn't ultimately win — which is roughly where the Steam audience has settled too, six years and thousands of additional reviews later. That stability is itself worth noting: unlike games whose review scores are propped up by launch-week hype and quietly erode, The Outer Worlds' Very Positive Steam rating has held up across a much longer and more varied sample than most 2019 releases get, which suggests the "solid, well-made, smaller than expected" verdict is a genuinely durable read on the game rather than a first-impressions snapshot. Technical polish helped that hold: one of the most-upvoted Steam reviews on the page isn't about story or combat at all — it's a Linux player reporting the game running cleanly through Proton with no tweaking required, a detail that matters less for what it says about this specific title and more as one more data point that the launch was a stable one, in an era when high-profile RPG releases increasingly weren't.

The version you're actually buying

One piece of context belongs in any review of this game written in 2026: the original 2019 release — appid 578650, the one every review above is describing — was pulled from sale on Steam in 2023. The store page now displays a plain notice that "The Outer Worlds is no longer available on the Steam store," and directs buyers to The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition, a 2023 remaster bundling the base game with both story DLC packs, Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos, for NZ$69.95. That's a reasonable value proposition — full game plus both expansions in one purchase — but it's also worth knowing before buying that the specific build this review and the vast majority of its 24,000-plus Steam reviews are describing isn't the one you'll actually download.

Verdict

The Outer Worlds earns the comparisons to Fallout: New Vegas it invites, without matching that game's factional depth or its length — it's a tighter, funnier, more openly satirical RPG that knows exactly what it's doing with dialogue and quest branching, and doesn't pretend to be the sprawling open world its early marketing gestured at. That gap between the pitch and the delivery is the honest reason its own community keeps landing on "solid but not remarkable" rather than anything harsher. Played today — as the Spacer's Choice Edition, DLC included — it's a good, economical RPG for a weekend or two, not the genre landmark some 2019 hype cycles promised.