VGC gave the game a 6/10. Has gripes about the satire coming from a studio owned by Microsoft
That being said,
my gripes with Obsidian's latest became more prominent when I wasn't pulling a trigger. For starters, the anti-capitalist sentiment of the first game gains a different meaning in our current context. When you boot up The Outer Worlds 2 for the first time, Moon Man, the no-quite-a-Vault-Boy-equivalent mascot, tells you that "any similarities to real-world dystopian corporate branded hellscapes are purely coincidental." The satire is there from the start.
However, in the modern world, it's impossible to divorce these rhetorics from the fact that Obsidian is an Xbox Game Studio under Microsoft, a company that has perpetually laid off workers and shuttered studios in recent times. Some of the quotes provided by Xbox spokespersons ring similar bells to the corporate talk you can find in The Outer Worlds 2, such as saying that redundancies were made to "enhance our efficiency".
In one of the first settlements you set foot in, holographic signs repeat the tagline that you're not a cog in the machine, you're the cog in the machine that keeps everyone productive, and there are countless other examples, from conversations between scourged NPCs about being subjected to life-threatening labor to propaganda signs about union-busting.
There are times when The Outer Worlds 2 attempts to do meaningful commentary around these issues, but when said commentary is commodified freely as part of the marketing campaign for the game, how heavy can that blow land, if at all? As much as I searched for an answer, I couldn't find one.
The closest I got is the fact that both main factions suck in their own particular ways, and the game is constantly pushing you to pick one in order to receive support during tough moments of the main story. Ignoring this insistence altogether and just sticking with my crew of companions to the very end was the one act of the rebellion I could muster.
Shallow RPG mechanics and familiar story beats hinder the studio’s long-lasting legacy…
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