If Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds was the sarcastic shrug of a studio to prove it could still do a proper Fallout-style RPG in space, The Outer Worlds 2 feels more like a confident smirk. It’s the same sort of witty, cynical, moral-twist-filled shooter RPG the studio has always been best at, with a steady hand on the controls and a much better concept of what it wants to deliver. The game doesn’t reinvent itself so much as it takes a deep breath, straightens its jacket, and says, “Alright, let’s try that again, but properly this time.”
In The Outer Worlds 2, you play as Commander, who has enough leverage in the galaxy than the random thawed colonist you were last time. The setup is classic space-pulp: You’re an Earth Directorate agent sent to the Arcadia region, where things quickly go to hell thanks to factional warfare, interplanetary corporate greed, and mysterious rifts severing communication with Earth. Naturally, your first mission collapses in on itself, and when you come to, you chase down the culprits to unspool a big mystery. It’s familiar Obsidian territory involving betrayal, satire, cosmic bureaucracy, but presented with enough propulsion to keep you hooked.
Right from the start, you can tell the developers leaned harder into role-playing this time. Character creation looks like it was built by people who best know and play tabletop RPGs: pick a background (I went with “disgraced freelancer,” because who doesn’t love an overqualified burnout?), assign skill points, and dabble in perks that range from useful to waste. I built a silver-tongued gunslinger who could sweet-talk a mob boss in one breath and vaporize a guard with a radioactive revolver in the next. The game gives you just enough flexibility to make your Commander your own creation, but not so much that you can be good at everything.
You can’t respec in The Outer Worlds 2, so if you invest all your points into Speech skill and then realize you can’t hit the broad side of a cargo freighter, well, congratulations—you’ve made your bed. It’s a risky design move in 2025, where half of RPGs treat respecs like caffeine refills, but it’s also what gives The Outer Worlds 2 its bite. The way skills interact with the world is very considerate, too. If a door says “Engineering required” and you don’t have it, you will find another way to squueze through a vent, a hackable terminal, or persuade a guard who is tired enough to look the other way. The game wants you to be ever clever, no matter your build.
Since the Obsidian team is behind this creation, it’s not long before you drown in moral grayness, and it begins just a few minutes of the start of your game journey. The factions in Outer Worlds 2 are again very absurd. On one side, there’s Auntie’s Choice, the grotesque corporate offspring of Spacer’s Choice and Auntie Cleo’s late-stage capitalism if it grew legs, slapped on a logo, and demanded you clock in for your own execution. These people worship consumerism like it’s a religion, and every soldier encounter sounds like a LinkedIn post gone feral.
Another major faction is the Order of the Ascendant, the great ideological force in Arcadia—a cult of math nerds who believe the universe can be solved like a spreadsheet. They’re cold, self-righteous, and terribly convinced that every human problem can be fixed with calculus thanks to their Universal Equation. On paper, they are the better option, though in reality, they’re as detached from humanity as the corporations they oppose. The game’s satire isn’t subtle; it has all the nuance of a sledgehammer in a dissertation, but that’s part of the show. It knows how absurd it is, and it revels in it.
Your companions bring more flavor to this philosophical buffet. Obsidian’s knack for character writing deserves a clap here: every crew member feels distinct, opinionated, and slightly broken in an endearing way. You meet Marisol, the retired black-ops agent whose cool professionalism hides an almost motherly care for the crew; Tristan, a reformed enforcer from the Protectorate who still is busy figuring out what justice means outside of a fascist handbook; and Inez, a corporate mercenary who wants to believe in change but can’t unlearn her loyalty to the system. They banter, bicker, judge your decisions, and best of all, they walk beside you as companions. Every companion has a related side quest that fleshes them out beyond their archetype, and though not everyone hits equally hard, it’s rare to have a lively party.
Combat is where The Outer Worlds 2 tries to step up and mostly succeeds. It is still a shooter-RPG hybrid, with all the usual stat-driven chaos that entails, but the guns feel good to wield this time. The variety of weapons is absurd in the best way, from triple-barreled shotguns that strike like freight trains to irradiating pistols that melt robots into metallic sludge. The standout feature is how tactile it is including the recoil, the hit feedback, and the sound design, all have good heft. There are still duds (biomass weapons, I’m looking at you), but most of the firearm encourages continuous experimentation.
Then there are the gadgets to look into. Tactical Time Dilation, the spiritual cousin to Fallout’s VATS, is here, which lets you slow time and target enemy weak spots. Though the newcomers steal the show, including the N-Ray Scanner, which reveals invisible enemies and hidden wiring, and the Acidic Dematerializer, which dissolves bodies into goo. They’re as ridiculous as they sound and add a fun experiment to fights. But the game only lets you equip one gadget at a time, so you’ll often forget which one is currently active—cue me trying to slow time mid-fight and instead scanning the wallpaper for electrical faults.
Progression systems are amazing in The Outer Worlds 2. You sure get your standard skill points and perks, but the Flaws make things interesting. The game assigns you a few personality quirks based on your habits. Reload too often, and you might get “Overprepared,” which gives you large magazines but punishes you for running out of ammo. If you lie too much, “Compulsive Liar” forces your dialogue options to default to deception, an ingenious way to make playstyle part of the story. Companions also have their own perk trees, which makes your squad an extension of the build. You can spec one to tank damage while another increases your critical hits or scavenging ability. They also level automatically, which cuts down on micromanagement enough to make you think twice before you enter a mission solo.
Where The Outer Worlds 2 stumbles is in its sense of space. The new planetary maps are massive—wide, open stretches of alien wilderness—but they mostly look emptier than they look. There’s plenty to see, but not always much to do on the way. I once sprinted through miles of nice-looking terrain but found little reason to linger. The waypointing can also be muddy, especially in indoor areas that twist and loop in on themselves. More than once, I circled a building three times before realizing the objective marker was actually on the floor below me, and even though the load times aren’t catastrophic, fast-travel between planets involves an irritating loading screen: ship → planet → location.
All clicks when you get to the good stuff, usually the dungeons or set-piece missions. These spots are classic Obsidian: multi-layered layouts, overlap objectives, and multiple ways to get to your goal. You can brute-force your way through guards, sneak around by maintenance tunnels, or hack a terminal to turn the turrets on your enemies or control area security. One mission had me infiltrate a corporate facility where Auntie’s Choice ads blared a lot. There wasn’t a single square inch of peace, and it perfectly captured the horror of a world where capitalism is inescapable.
Visually, the game won’t knock your space boots off. It’s colorful, and the art direction carries more personality than raw graphical power, but it won’t win any tech awards. What strikes me in a good sense is the environmental storytelling thanks to terminals, letters, and background details that expand on how badly Arcadia has gone off the rails. You’ll spend a lot of time reading, and the corporate memos can blur together after a while, but they create a convincing world of bureaucratic absurdity.
All that rich narrative worldbuilding would be more of a drag if the game weren’t so easy to slip into. For all its systems and satire, The Outer Worlds 2 is breezy to play. The shooting feels immediate, the humor lands often enough to keep things buoyant, and the quests—big and small—set a good tone between punchy and ponderous. You will likely spend your first few hours just enjoying the rhythm of it all: a new world, a weird faction, a dialogue tree that spirals into a philosopher’s argument about morality and mayonnaise brands.
That’s probably the game’s biggest achievement that it makes you think you’re part of an ongoing, chaotic story rather than a tourist clicking through dialogues. The writers clearly had fun to let the satire get wild and still give it some sting. There’s a recurring joke where even the most serious life-or-death missions are covered in corporate jargon: “By proceeding with this rescue, you agree to indemnify Auntie’s Choice against any loss of limb, life, or sanity.” You laugh, you roll your eyes, and then you realize—yeah, that sounds exactly like a real world terms-of-service agreement.
Like its predecessor, The Outer Worlds 2 rarely hands you clean “good” or “evil” paths. Instead, it leans into messy, complex decisions that leave you to question your own logic. One quest asked me to mediate between war refugees squatting on sacred land and a group of scientists claiming their equations predicted the land would soon collapse. The scientists, of course, were convinced they were saving lives by evicting the refugees. The refugees only wanted to sleep without freezing. You can argue, negotiate, or shoot your way through it, but no matter what you choose, someone’s going to hate you for it.
The writing doesn’t always nail its tone, though. Its criticism of rampant capitalism is sharp and timely, but its jabs at the science-obsessed Order are a little toothless or even misplaced. Something is weird about mocking scientific idealism in a time when the real world could use a little more of it. Still, it’s a signature Obsidian move to make every ideology ridiculous, and if nothing else, it brings an unpredictable world. You never know when your next employer will start quoting economic scripture or calculate your soul’s ROI.
If the social commentary occasionally overshoots, the humor usually saves it. The game’s jokes land best when they come through natural play—sarcastic dialogue choices, vague item descriptions, or companions sniping at your decisions. It’s not Borderlands-style slapstick, thank goodness; it’s more like Futurama with a hangover. Dry, cutting, self-aware. A joke about an employee dying mid-shift is funny until you realize he probably didn’t have time off in the first place.
Of course, even the smartest writing can’t completely disguise the game’s rough edges. The Outer Worlds 2 is still a mid-budget RPG at heart, and it occasionally creaks under its own ambition. Enemy AI can be very oblivious (I once crouched five feet from a guard, and he stared at a wall). The economy breaks halfway through the game once you find a few lucrative loot loops. And while combat seems punchier than before, there’s still a stiffness to certain weapon types, especially the biomass guns, that make firefights more chaotic than tactical. The Bullet Blender weapon deserves special mention here. It’s a late-game machine gun that combines every ammo type into an endless, reloading-free death hose. It’s stupid and highly overpowered, to the point that it completely trivializes most boss fights. Such a design makes you roll your eyes and grin at the same time, because of course, a game obsessed with consumer excess would give you a gun that literally eats everything.
That balance of tones—funny, bleak, philosophical, and violent—makes the game work, even when the mechanics wobble. The fact that you can bungle conversations, accidentally offend your companions, or even acquire literal flaws for your bad habits gives the game a special hook that most AAA RPGs lost years ago. When I reached the end (roughly 25 hours later), my Commander had changed from a smirking opportunist to an exhausted, slightly wise leader who’d learned to rely on their crew affected by choices, failures, and a few accidental massacres.
Verdict
If you play The Outer Worlds 2 for the gunplay, you might leave thinking it’s “fine but not great.” If you come for the writing, the choices, and the humor that cuts deeper than it first appears, you’ll be hooked. It’s not the most polished RPG of the year, but it’s definitely one of the most authored games that knows what it wants to say about capitalism, faith, leadership, and the exhausting business of being a good person in a hard world.
I can’t ignore the real-world baggage that comes with it either. Obsidian is owned by Microsoft, and the shadow of that giant looms large, especially given recent controversies and layoffs. It’s an uncomfortable irony that a game so critical of corporate exploitation is itself a product of one. You can’t play The Outer Worlds 2 without a little twinge of dissonance. Whether that affects your enjoyment depends on how much you can compartmentalize, but it does give the game’s themes an unintentional, almost tragic authenticity.
So, is The Outer Worlds 2 worth it? Mostly. It’s a smart, exciting, and more confident sequel that delivers what fans wanted and still leaves room to improve. It doesn’t dethrone the giants of the genre and doesn’t need to because it’s more interested in being a sharp, witty mirror held up to science fiction and society. If you can forgive the occasional tedium or clunky reload animation, you’ll find The Outer Worlds 2 is one of the most human RPGs of the year, hidden beneath all that corporate space propaganda. Like a good crew of misfits, The Outer Worlds 2 holds together through sheer personality, and in this era of factory stamped blockbusters, that’s something worth celebrating.