Not a great CO-OP experience. Quest rewards are NOT shared among player 1 and player 2 - what an oversight. So that means we would have to do the same trek twice in both our games. I really wanted to like this game and look past the jank/bugs, but that poor co-op experience is a dealbreaker.

I considered this game a "hateplay" like i would consider watching a movie i bought but hated within the first hour. I definitely got hooked not because I enjoyed it but because I wanted to justify the money i paid for it after i hit the 2 hour mark on steams return policy. I did not to want to feel like my money was wasted so I went all in to get as much done in this game. As you can tell from my achievements in game, I have done one playthrough and finished the main campaign of the dlc (beating the crimson avatar) while also completing alot of the unknown dungeons ranging from the trog queen to calixa. This is to cover for the fact that alot of fanboys of this game will react with clown emojis saying that i just need to "git gud". I am good. Thats why I have the maelstrom sword and full squire.

This preamble is all to say that this game really doesnt value your time and not worth playing unless you really delve into understanding the mechanics of it. It is a walking simulator where you spend most of your time walking from place to place where its such a chore that you would rather put on the auto run button and do something else on another screen. There is evidently true when it comes to building new sirocco. You have people on reddit saying to just use the debug menu to spawn in the materials to build everything instead of wasting hours of your time running around to find materials. Thats how horrible this game is with padding out game time with just endless walking between the actual fun sections like bosses and dungeons. There is zero fast travel anywhere until the very end of the three brothers dlc which makes going from region to region take forever unless you get movement gear. This is also a wiki game. I felt like i was playing some mmo where i needed to look up optimal grinding routes online like in runescape because this game will literally not tell you much of anything. It is because of this that is better for you and your sanity that you look up guides on builds before you even bother playing. You do not want to waste breakthrough points like I did because you will feel gimped the rest of the playthrough with no specific play style. The combat is also super janky. I understood how it works but it does not mean i actually liked it. It is animation based which means if you are already in an animation for an attack then you cant dodge out of it or do something else until it is done. I absolutely hate systems like this. I hate it in basketball games like 2k where you get stuck in animations and i hate it here for combat yet people will call this "realistic". For example, why cant i dodge when im reloading my pistol? just cancel the loading animation but it forces you to stay there and finish it. How is this realistic? The game itself is also janky with enemies you already killed being in T poses before they fall to the ground when you load into an area. The pistol reload animation also cancels when you are on staircases for some reason. I saw a beetle in the desert just fly across the screen. This game is just full of jank that is to be expected from unity titles.

In conclusion, I wouldn't recommend this game. If i had bought this physically, I would have returned it by the end of the week or traded it in.

Edit: the reason i set the game down to make this review is because the gladiator arena in new sirocco glitched where i spawned in with literally no one to fight so I just quit after that.

This game is agony. Enemies don't have stamina like you, everything can and will kick your ass, your needs pop up at the most inconvenient times possible, things can gang up on you so fast that as soon as you take one hit that knocks you down, you can pack it up because it's all over. You can easily get stuck in the geometry and wait for a couple of hours to hope to die of cold or starvation and be respawned in a better spot. There are no actual cut scenes aside from a character standing there with a sentence from its blocks of dialogue spoken inaccurately to what words are actually there half the time and the npcs take for granted how much you do for every single one of them as if you didn't just schlep yourself through rain and snow and lava and desert to perform every little task that they gave you like a good dog (you're not even the one who gets to become a god in the end after all you've done! I want to see Elatt's manager.)

But I'll be darned if it isn't still worth the play. I bought this game initially on ps4 as just SOMETHING to play with my sister after scouring the shop for something interesting for hours. We landed on this as just something to do and right off the bat, were punished for our cockiness by getting the beat-down of our lives by a bandit or two minutes into the game. She gave up quickly, but I continued to play so she could watch my many failures for amusement. Eventually, it became nostalgic and I bought it for PC to continue playing after I left home. This game is extremely easy to get angry at. You find yourself sitting there screaming "GET UP!!!" at your character as they take so long to complete their "standing up" animation or take so long to drink a health potion that you're murdered mid-animation and you wail with all of the agony in the world "NO!!!" You enter each battle hands shaking, knowing how easy it is to fail and how much time and supplies are at stake (especially the poor souls on the "0 defeats achievement" run). But the stupidity of it all is what makes it an utter triumph when victory is yours and you lean back with a sharp exhale as your enemy finally ragdolls into oblivion. It's not quite as open or in depth as other games like it. It's a pure jank "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I'm stuck in a rock and I can't get out. Whelp, time to make a sandwich and hope I die within the next 4 hours", it's an abysmal "OH MY GOD, I HIT THE WRONG BUTTON AND I STOPPED TO TAKE 10 YEARS TO DRINK A POTION WHILE GETTING KILLED", it's the desperate "I got too cocky looting and now I'm limping for my life with a heavily encumbered backpack as 3 enemies are on my backside, but the stuff I snagged is worth so much that I will risk it all to inchworm my way to the door and then take the next hour and a half crawling to find a merchant to sell it to".

Somehow, the unpolished nature of it makes the suffering more amusing (at least you can tell yourself "that wasn't my fault" to convince yourself that you're not just terrible at it) and I find myself almost reflexively asking anybody who says they play any game ever "have you played Outward? Would you wanna play it with me?" just to listen to their cries of woe, too. It became something sacred to me, something that needs to be shared, and I almost wish they didn't make a sequel just to keep the sanctity of the first game and all of its strangeness like some mystical once-in-a-lifetime experience. I dedicated almost 300 hours to this thing and, after finally accomplishing all there is to accomplish, I can ceremoniously reclaim the 50 gigs of storage space it held hostage all this time. I'll be sad to see it go, but for all the torment it gave me (worth it), I'm so glad I never have to play it again.

For the people playing it for the first time:

Honey, you got a big storm coming.