The Outer Worlds 2 review – next generation role-playing

Obsidian Entertainment, makers of Fallout: New Vegas, return with what may be their greatest RPG yet, and certainly one of the best of the generation.

Video game role-players have come a long way since the days of Ultima and Wizardry, and focusing solely on trying to emulate tabletop games. Today’s titles have evolved almost out of all recognition, over the last five decades, but higher tech visuals and systems are no guarantee of an enjoyable game. Despite Starfield’s size and complexity it still has a detached, artificial formality to its conversations, whereas Cyberpunk 2077 is far more atavistically human in its interactions and outcomes.

Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, from 2019, was one of the more traditional breed, its 1950s retro-futuristic style and conversational options not too distant in style from the studio’s work on the classic Fallout: New Vegas. But it also came with lashings of wry satire, its setting shot through with ultra-late stage capitalism’s worst mores. Naturally, for the sequel things have been pushed quite a bit further.

That means where there used to be Spacer’s Choice – the unreliable but ubiquitous brand that infiltrated practically all walks of life – there’s now Auntie’s Choice. It’s the result of a hostile takeover by Auntie Cleo, a figure whose hairstyle, caustic kindness, and abject cynicism are clearly inspired by the underling-slapping tyrant in charge of Futurama’s Mom’s Old Fashioned Robot Oil.

Auntie’s Choice and its band of cutthroat, commerce-obsessed corporate mercenaries are just one of the three factions you’ll be dealing with in Arcadia, a solar system with a problem. Everything had been going just fine until rifts in space-time started appearing, which not only multiplied, but instantly vaporised anything they came into contact with, making them a problem for Auntie and her ideological rivals.

Chief amongst those is The Order of the Ascendant. They’re also helmed by an icy matriarch, the society underneath her aligning itself around Seers, who use advanced mathematics to calculate the near future (a nod to the Foundation series) but not always very accurately. The third faction is the Protectorate, whose rigorous adherence to bureaucratic regulations makes them all too fond of executing their own people for minor infractions.

It’s into this three-way conflict that you amble, and how you arrive is once again completely up to you. Your character’s background can be an ex-convict, a former professor, gambler, renegade and more, but your choice of backstory colours many of your interactions and conversational choices. Add to that traits like brawny, brilliant, or innovative, and you’ve already got a broad range of potential ways to act on your environment and its inhabitants.

But that’s only the start. You’ve also got skills, with the potential to unlock new ones every time you level up, as well as character flaws. Those were also present in the original game and get offered to you based on your play style. Generally, they have both ups and downsides, and some can have serious ramifications for other systems in the game, to the extent that there’s at least one that advises you not to select it on your first play through.

Like most role-playing games, you have to decide on a number of those before you’ve so much as set foot in Arcadia, but that actually turns out to be no bad thing, because the way they’re incorporated into the story is highly unpredictable. As before, there are many ways to resolve situations, with violence only one of them, and in conversation you’ll find all your traits, perks and background details come into play. A high speech skill is just one of many factors.

You’ll regularly find picking your way to a peaceful resolution can involve anything from charm, lying, and scientific knowledge, to in some cases skill with guns. It’s inspiring how well woven into the fabric of the game all its traits are, and how thoroughly central conversation is. It’s fortunate, then, that it’s so well written, with the intense and frequent chatter also funny and capable of leading to all sorts of outcomes.

As well as your own character’s traits and peculiarities, you’ll also recruit a crew of misfits, two of whom you can bring with you on each mission. Where the first game let you apply their skills, making up for your hero’s inability to lockpick or their inexperience with explosives, this time all they can lend is their wit and firepower – although the latter now comes with all sorts of additional abilities, that get more specialised as they level up.

Despite the strong emphasis on conversation, with most chats involving five or six optional responses that go way further than the typical agree/disagree/sassy paradigm, you’ll find yourself in frequent firefights. The range of weaponry and mods, and the way they combine with your other stats, supplies an incredibly impressive range of pugilistic options, from melee to ultra-long range engagements, complemented by the companions you choose.

They each have their own backstory, and in most cases fabulously complex and multi-layered quest lines. Your robot buddy, Valerie, is pretty neutral, but Inez, a ‘grafted’ soldier, has had a monstrous arm surgically attached to her back, and getting her back to health leads to a plot-altering side story about the inhumane genetic engineering programme behind it. Then you meet Aza, who’s hilariously psychotic, talking incessantly about disembowelling her many foes.

Each of them leads you down new paths if you decide to help them, and even more impressive is how much they have to say about situations you find yourselves in. Hearing them comment, chat, refer back to past missions they were on, and engage with the people you meet, you realise there’s a vast web of dialogue that underpins absolutely everything in the game, giving the sense that you’re only getting to hear a fraction of it.

While gunplay initially feels a touch clinical, the robotically perfect aim making things feel a little too squeaky clean if you’ve just been playing Battlefield 6, it’s amazing how swiftly you get used to it. The full panoply of its arsenal gives you so many ways to shoot, freeze, incinerate, disintegrate, and blow to pieces those making the mistake of standing in your way, such that those initial impressions are soon forgotten.

Perhaps The Outer Worlds 2’s strongest suit, though, is its sense of consequence. There are plenty of games that get you to make decisions, from the clearly flagged codification of Fable to Dishonored’s high and low chaos outcomes. The Outer Worlds 2 is both massively more detailed and a great deal more far-reaching, in your effects on the worlds and people you encounter. You’ll even find your exploits making headlines on the three in-game radio stations.

One criticism levelled at the original game was that most of your influence was only really obvious at the end of the game. In the sequel you’ll start feeling the difference you make throughout, and not just for small things. You can do more or less anything you want, from taking a shotgun to major characters to skipping major plot points. Despite engaging with practically every side quest we could find, and completing the entire story, we finished the game without even having met two potential crew members.

Missions have also been enhanced, with many playing out completely differently depending on how you approach them. Sure, you could pick a lock and break into a building, but now you might also be able to shimmy through a vent, talk your way past a guard, or use your hacking skill to open up a new path to the same objective, all dependent on your character’s skills. You’ll also learn that situations partly shape themselves around the party you bring with you, the antipathy towards insane cultist Aza proving especially amusing.

Even the placement of loot is more thoughtful. You’ll find a ring or a packet of cigarettes on the side of a sink, which is exactly the sort of thing someone washing their hands would accidentally put down and leave behind, as opposed to the box of shotgun shells you’d find in most first person games. It makes Arcadia feel more human, as does your companions’ requests to be included on particular missions, based on their personal goals and grudges.

Impressively for a game of this scale and complexity, it’s remarkably free of bugs. In a few dozen hours, we had a single crash to the dashboard, and a side quest where one of its completed objectives failed to register. Fortunately, there were three other ways of finishing the mission, all of which worked fine, and a far bigger issue was the fact that the Xbox Series X ‘quick resume’ function only works two out of five times you use it, a problem that can hardly be laid at Obsidian’s door.

The only real complaint we have is that your character is unvoiced, so when you pick a response, your interlocutor behaves as though they’d heard you, without anybody actually saying anything. While initially disconcerting, robbing some scenes of some of their humour, it only takes an hour or two before it feels completely normal.

Listening to your companions looking back, dissecting decisions you made, or re-casting some of the arch-baddy’s choices in light of them, creates an almost unrivalled sense of a living universe. Despite only having four planets and a clutch of orbiting structures to explore, it feels bigger than the first game, and takes considerably longer to explore.

You’ll also find some genuinely epic missions, with multiple stages, and points where your experience of them will diverge considerably depending on the decisions you make. It’s inspiring, strongly encouraging subsequent playthroughs to see what else you could have done, and how a fresh approach might reshape some of the many unintended outcomes.

In spite of its huge arsenal of weaponry, The Outer Worlds 2 is perfectly happy for you to talk your way out of even the toughest boss fight, which along with its exhilarating sense of consequence makes it feel more like an actual role-playing game than any other title since Baldur’s Gate 3.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £59.99
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Release Date: 29th October 2025
Age Rating: 18

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