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More expansive isn't necessarily better. It's an old adage, but it's also the most accurate way to sum up my impressions after devoting five dozen hours with The Outer Worlds 2. Developer Obsidian included additional each element to the sequel to its prior science fiction role-playing game — more humor, adversaries, arms, attributes, and settings, everything that matters in such adventures. And it functions superbly — for a little while. But the weight of all those grand concepts makes the game wobble as the time passes.

A Powerful First Impression

The Outer Worlds 2 establishes a solid first impression. You belong to the Earth Directorate, a do-gooder organization committed to controlling dishonest administrations and corporations. After some capital-D Drama, you end up in the Arcadia region, a colony fractured by conflict between Auntie's Option (the product of a merger between the original game's two major companies), the Protectorate (collectivism pushed to its worst logical conclusion), and the Ascendant Order (reminiscent of the Church, but with mathematics in place of Jesus). There are also a number of fissures tearing holes in space and time, but right now, you really need get to a transmission center for critical messaging purposes. The problem is that it's in the center of a warzone, and you need to find a way to arrive.

Following the original, Outer Worlds 2 is a FPS adventure with an overarching story and dozens of secondary tasks scattered across different planets or regions (big areas with a lot to uncover, but not fully open).

The initial area and the task of reaching that comms station are remarkable. You've got some funny interactions, of course, like one that involves a farmer who has fed too much sweet grains to their preferred crab. Most direct you toward something beneficial, though — an surprising alternative route or some fresh information that might provide an alternate route forward.

Memorable Moments and Overlooked Opportunities

In one notable incident, you can encounter a Guardian defector near the overpass who's about to be killed. No mission is tied to it, and the exclusive means to locate it is by searching and paying attention to the ambient dialogue. If you're swift and alert enough not to let him get slain, you can save him (and then rescue his deserter lover from getting killed by beasts in their refuge later), but more pertinent to the task at hand is a power line concealed in the grass nearby. If you trace it, you'll locate a secret entry to the relay station. There's another entrance to the station's sewers tucked away in a grotto that you could or could not detect based on when you undertake a particular ally mission. You can find an easily missable character who's key to saving someone's life down the line. (And there's a stuffed animal who subtly persuades a squad of soldiers to join your cause, if you're kind enough to rescue it from a minefield.) This opening chapter is packed and exciting, and it appears as if it's brimming with substantial plot opportunities that rewards you for your inquisitiveness.

Diminishing Hopes

Outer Worlds 2 doesn't fulfill those opening anticipations again. The second main area is organized similar to a level in the initial title or Avowed — a expansive territory dotted with notable locations and optional missions. They're all thematically relevant to the struggle between Auntie's Selection and the Order of the Ascendant, but they're also vignettes separated from the main story in terms of story and location-wise. Don't look for any contextual hints leading you to fresh decisions like in the first zone.

Despite forcing you to make some hard calls, what you do in this area's optional missions is inconsequential. Like, it truly has no effect, to the extent that whether you permit atrocities or direct a collection of displaced people to their death leads to merely a throwaway line or two of speech. A game doesn't need to let each mission impact the narrative in some major, impactful way, but if you're forcing me to decide a faction and giving the impression that my choice counts, I don't believe it's unreasonable to anticipate something more when it's finished. When the game's previously demonstrated that it has greater potential, anything less feels like a concession. You get more of everything like Obsidian promised, but at the cost of complexity.

Daring Concepts and Missing Stakes

The game's second act endeavors an alike method to the primary structure from the opening location, but with noticeably less flair. The concept is a bold one: an interconnected mission that covers two planets and motivates you to solicit support from various groups if you want a more straightforward journey toward your aim. In addition to the recurring structure being a somewhat tedious, it's also absent the suspense that this sort of circumstance should have. It's a "deal with the demon" moment. There should be hard concessions. Your connection with each alliance should be important beyond gaining their favor by completing additional missions for them. All of this is missing, because you can just blitz through on your own and achieve the goal anyway. The game even goes out of its way to give you ways of doing this, highlighting alternative paths as additional aims and having companions advise you where to go.

It's a side effect of a larger problem in Outer Worlds 2: the anxiety of letting you be unhappy with your decisions. It often overcompensates in its attempts to guarantee not only that there's an alternative path in many situations, but that you realize its presence. Locked rooms practically always have various access ways signposted, or nothing worthwhile internally if they fail to. If you {can't