The Outer Worlds 2 Review – Refined, Reliable, and Reluctant to Risk

The Outer Worlds 2 on PC

Settling Back Into the Corporate Cosmos

It begins, as all Obsidian adventures do, with quiet catastrophe. You wake in a broken system ruled by money, faith, and malfunctioning bureaucracy: a familiar tune, yet one that still rings true.

Six years after its first outing, The Outer Worlds 2 doesn’t reinvent the star chart. Instead, it doubles down on what worked: sharp wit, rich systems, and the joy of making decisions that might just ruin you. It is not revolutionary, but it is reassuringly, defiantly Obsidian.

A Galaxy Still Ruled by Greed

This time, the journey unfolds in the Arcadia region, a new corner of space where ambition and ideology keep colliding. You play as the Commander, a once-disgraced operative tasked with repairing the fractures of a corporate empire that’s losing control of its own myths.

Each faction you meet believes itself righteous — a company peddling salvation through branding, a cult of scientists promising enlightenment through equations, a protectorate preaching order through oppression. The genius lies in how the game never tells you who’s right. It simply asks you to pick a side and live with the consequences.

The satire remains biting but never smug. For every absurd slogan and hollow pep-talk poster, there’s a line of dialogue that cuts through the humour to reveal something bleakly human. The Outer Worlds 2 isn’t content to make you laugh at capitalism; it makes you complicit in keeping it alive.

Role-Playing in the Truest Sense

If the first game flirted with old-school role-playing, this one fully commits. There is no respec button and no safety net. Every skill point you assign is a statement of intent and a potential regret as you shape your Commander through thirty levels of irreversible growth, each choice carving a personality as flawed as it is functional.

That permanence creates genuine tension: you stop treating builds as maths and start treating them as morality, which I am sure was the intended goal all along. The return of the Flaws system deepens this further. Your habits become your handicaps, like when a compulsive reloader finds their weapons jamming, or a silver-tongued liar may start believing their own fabrications.

Flaws are inevitably annoying, but they humanise and help turn this version of the Commander into someone truly reflective of you. By the time you’re halfway through the campaign in The Outer Worlds 2, your character feels less like an avatar and more like a record of every bad habit you’ve ever indulged.

Sharper Systems, Familiar Foundations

Combat is noticeably snappier this time around. Weapons carry weight, animations feel responsive, and mobility has been given a welcome boost with sliding and double-jumping. Gadgets expand on the tactical playbook: time-slow dilation for precision shots, scanners for stealth routes, and chemical toys that melt, zap, or disorient foes in a way that finally makes tinkering worthwhile.

That said, the variety of enemies still lags behind the quality of the combat. After a dozen hours, the menagerie of corporate grunts and space fauna starts to repeat itself, and the thrill of discovery dips.
It’s a blemish on an otherwise improved loop, especially when exploration itself encourages experimentation at every turn.

What The Outer Worlds 2 does masterfully is keep its RPG systems interlocking. Perks feed into skills, skills empower companions, and said companions alter combat flow. It’s a web of cause and effect that rewards planning without suffocating spontaneity.

Companions With Corporate Luggage

Your ship, the Incognito, serves as more than a hub — it’s a crucible for ideology. Your crew come from rival factions and wears their biases openly. One is a zealot for order, another a believer in free markets, another a weary idealist who still thinks empathy can be profitable. They argue, they banter, and occasionally they walk out on you. Through them, the political chessboard of Arcadia comes alive.

Each companion has their own ability tree and loyalty arc, but the real draw is in the conversations between missions. Their small talks turn into philosophical duels, and you start to see the contradictions that define this galaxy reflected back at you. For all its shootouts and space travel, The Outer Worlds 2 remains a game about people trying — and failing — to do the right thing in a system designed to punish them for it.

A Question of Pace

Where the sequel falters is in its pacing. The opening act takes its time finding purpose, bogged down by a revenge thread that never quite lands. Only in the second half — when faction wars collide and the stakes crystallise — does the story find its pulse.

Once it does, it soars, layering political intrigue with personal fallout in a way few studios manage.
But it’s a slow burn, and some will feel the embers take too long to catch. Load times remain on the long side, and fast travel can feel like a series of polite interruptions.

These are minor irritations rather than deal-breakers, but they keep the game from reaching the seamless rhythm its systems deserve.

A Journey of Sights and Sounds

Visually, The Outer Worlds 2 is an evolution, not a revolution. The retro-pulp aesthetic endures, where fluorescent skies, chrome corridors, posters that whisper propaganda with a grin are ever-present. Textures and faces occasionally betray the game’s mid-budget roots, yet the art direction still charms. Lighting and scale do more heavy lifting than fidelity ever could.

As for audio, the soundtrack trades brass bombast for elegiac strings, evoking melancholy over mischief. It fits this older, more self-aware sequel, with a story of disillusionment wrapped in bright colours. Performance is steady across the board, a rarity for Obsidian, whose past brilliance often came with a side of technical chaos.

The Outer Worlds 2 is a Confident Sequel That Plays It Safe

The Outer Worlds 2 is refinement distilled. It’s more thoughtful, slicker, and more cohesive than its predecessor, yet still cautious in its ambitions. It perfects the mechanics of moral choice and consequence, but hesitates to truly disrupt them.

Where others chase scope, Obsidian chases sincerity, and that decision gives this sequel its quiet power. It is comfort food for those who savour complexity, a space opera about responsibility rather than revolution.

And while it may never reach the mythic heights of its inspirations, it proves there’s still room in modern gaming for worlds that challenge how we think, not just how we shoot.

The Outer Worlds 2 will be available on October 30 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.