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Bigger isn't necessarily superior. It's an old adage, yet it's also the best way to sum up my feelings after spending five dozen hours with The Outer Worlds 2. The creators expanded on each element to the follow-up to its 2019's futuristic adventure — additional wit, adversaries, weapons, attributes, and places, every important component in titles of this genre. And it operates excellently — initially. But the weight of all those daring plans causes the experience to falter as the hours wear on.

An Impressive Opening Act

The Outer Worlds 2 makes a strong initial impact. You belong to the Planetary Directorate, a well-intentioned institution focused on curbing dishonest administrations and companies. After some serious turmoil, you wind up in the Arcadia sector, a settlement fractured by conflict between Auntie's Choice (the outcome of a combination between the previous title's two big corporations), the Guardians (groupthink pushed to its most dire end), and the Ascendant Order (similar to the Catholic faith, but with calculations instead of Jesus). There are also a bunch of rifts tearing holes in space and time, but currently, you urgently require reach a relay station for critical messaging purposes. The challenge is that it's in the middle of a warzone, and you need to determine how to get there.

Following the original, Outer Worlds 2 is a FPS adventure with an main narrative and many side quests scattered across various worlds or regions (expansive maps with a plenty to explore, but not open-world).

The first zone and the task of reaching that comms station are remarkable. You've got some funny interactions, of course, like one that features a agriculturalist who has given excessive sweet grains to their beloved crustacean. Most guide you to something beneficial, though — an surprising alternative route or some new bit of intel that might provide an alternate route forward.

Unforgettable Moments and Overlooked Possibilities

In one memorable sequence, you can come across a Guardian defector near the viaduct who's about to be executed. No quest is linked to it, and the exclusive means to discover it is by exploring and listening to the background conversation. If you're quick and alert enough not to let him get killed, you can preserve him (and then save his runaway sweetheart from getting eliminated by creatures in their hideout later), but more pertinent to the current objective is a electrical conduit hidden in the foliage nearby. If you follow it, you'll locate a hidden entrance to the communication hub. There's a different access point to the station's drainage system stashed in a cave that you could or could not detect based on when you pursue a certain partner task. You can locate an easily missable character who's key to preserving a life 20 hours later. (And there's a plush toy who subtly persuades a team of fighters to support you, if you're nice enough to rescue it from a explosive area.) This initial segment is dense and exciting, and it feels like it's full of rich storytelling potential that rewards you for your exploration.

Diminishing Anticipations

Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those early hopes again. The following key zone is structured similar to a level in the initial title or Avowed — a large region scattered with points of interest and secondary tasks. They're all narratively connected to the struggle between Auntie's Selection and the Order of the Ascendant, but they're also vignettes isolated from the main story plot-wise and spatially. Don't expect any world-based indicators guiding you toward alternative options like in the opening region.

In spite of compelling you to choose some hard calls, what you do in this zone's side quests is inconsequential. Like, it genuinely is irrelevant, to the extent that whether you permit atrocities or direct a collection of displaced people to their demise results in merely a passing comment or two of conversation. A game isn't required to let each mission impact the narrative in some big, dramatic fashion, but if you're forcing me to decide a group and pretending like my selection counts, I don't feel it's irrational to expect something further when it's finished. When the game's previously demonstrated that it can be better, any diminishment seems like a compromise. You get additional content like the team vowed, but at the price of complexity.

Ambitious Concepts and Absent Stakes

The game's intermediate phase tries something similar to the primary structure from the initial world, but with noticeably less style. The idea is a courageous one: an related objective that spans multiple worlds and motivates you to solicit support from different factions if you want a more straightforward journey toward your goal. In addition to the recurring structure being a little tiresome, it's also lacking the tension that this sort of circumstance should have. It's a "deal with the demon" moment. There should be tough compromise. Your association with either faction should count beyond earning their approval by performing extra duties for them. All of this is absent, because you can just blitz through on your own and achieve the goal anyway. The game even takes pains to give you ways of doing this, indicating alternate routes as secondary goals and having allies advise you where to go.

It's a side effect of a broader issue in Outer Worlds 2: the fear of letting you be unhappy with your selections. It frequently goes too far out of its way to guarantee not only that there's an alternate route in many situations, but that you are aware of it. Secured areas practically always have various access ways indicated, or nothing worthwhile inside if they don't. If you {can't