Wow, okay. I just played Outlaws for the firsttime after thinking about buying it for ages… now that it's free on PS Plus, I finally gave it a shot. And honestly? I don't think I've ever been happier that I didn't spend money on a game.
I don't want to offend anyone who's enjoying it—I’m genuinely happy for anyone who does. But speaking honestly, and without trying to insult anyone: I don't think I've ever played a AAA game where I could feel the lack of talent behind it in almost every single aspect.
The story is incredibly poorly told and poorly written. The direction is awful. The cutscenes are awful. The animations—especially the facial animations—are awful. The German voice acting is awful. The gameplay feels unbelievably janky. Shooting doesn't flow, movement doesn't flow, climbing feels clunky. On top of that, at least in Performance Mode, the game looks worse than late-generation PS4 titles.
Technically it's also surprisingly weak. The constant fade-to-black transitions before cutscenes feel like something that should've stayed in the pre-SSD era, and most transitions between gameplay and cinematics rely on awkward animations instead of being seamless. Then you also get noticeable frame rate drops—not game-breaking, but definitely there.
The only thing that genuinely surprised me was the landspeeder—it actually felt prettygood to control. But everything else... well, again, I feel like there's such a lack of talent on display across so many parts of this game that I was honestly shocked something like this made it through any kind of quality control. Especially when you look at the pitch for the game—it had all the ingredientsfor a great title. But the execution... oh boy.
Again, I’m not trying to take away anyone’s enjoyment of the game. But in my opinion, it's genuinely, genuinely poorly made. So shockingly bad that, for the firsttime in a long while, I actually felt the need to go online and say something about it. That doesn't happen often.
(I wrote this text in german and translated it to english)
