On June 30, Outriders Worldslayer, the first major expansion for the brutal loot shooter, will be released. MeinMMO author Marko Jevtic had the chance to play it and had a lot of fun. However, there is a major catch.
Outriders is my favorite among all the loot shooters on the market. It feels as if it was tailor-made for my shooter taste: whether story or gameplay, this game is brutal, aggressive, and uncompromising through and through.
Not only are the abilities of each class a firework, but you truly feel as powerful as the story describes.
I have already played Outriders Worldslayer, and I was not disappointed. Everything I liked about the original game is here too. Just more of it, and better. However, there is a slight bitter aftertaste: the price of €40.
In this detailed spotlight video, you can see what the Outriders expansion has to offer:
Outriders Worldslayer gives you more reasons to play as usual
The Worldslayer expansion aims to convince you with the following innovations:
- The story campaign continues, with a new villain: the fearsome Commander Ereshkigal.
- The story content is said to provide between 4 and 10 hours of gameplay, plus the new endgame.
- The new “Apocalypse Items” give legendary and epic loot an additional mod slot, making these weapons and armor even stronger.
- There are 2 new upgrade paths for your class:
- In the Pax skill tree, you can invest a total of 5 points in insanely powerful class improvements.
- The Ascension skill tree works like the Badass Ranks in Borderlands – for each level after max level 30, you can slightly improve individual stats.
- Apocalypse Ranks are the new difficulty system that replaces the world tiers. They go up to rank 40 and can be increased with any type of content.
- In a new endgame activity, you can work through various challenges and grind for your desired loot. The structure with branching paths leading to bosses is reminiscent of roguelites like Hades. This endgame is hardly manageable solo; it is clearly designed for 3-man teams.
- There are many new enemy types and plenty of new loot.
If you were hoping for new classes or abilities, you will unfortunately be disappointed in this expansion. Because the fundamental principle of Worldslayer is clearly for the familiar, but better.
Basically, not much is changing with the expansion in Outriders, but everything plays even smoother.
Outriders has always been a game where the incredible “power fantasy” is at the center. As a cold-blooded quasi-god in a broken world, it only matters to deal more damage than any other creature in the game.
Who plays the most aggressively lives the longest thanks to self-healing from damage. This was a successful formula a year ago, and it still is. And exactly this will be pushed to the limit with the expansion, thanks to the new upgrade options in the game.
The Apocalypse Gear and the new upgrade paths sum up perfectly what you can expect from the Worldslayer expansion. You don’t really get fundamentally new toys of destruction, but can absolutely tear apart your favorites even more spectacularly.
Here, the new enemy types also deserve praise. In the first hours of play, you will face several enemies who want to make your life hell in close combat with hefty axes or knives. These villains not only visually resemble enemies from Diablo or Elden Ring, but you also have to dodge their attacks skillfully, much like in those games, to crack them.
My personal highlight in the first hours of play was therefore the mission in a dilapidated fishing village, which atmospherically reminded me of the last level from the Bloodborne DLC with its horror atmosphere and ghost stories revolving around the vengeful spirit of a fisherman.
There was nothing comparable in the base game, but it fits perfectly into the already brutal and nihilistic world of Outriders.
Worldslayer offers good content at a steep price
The innovations in Outriders Worldslayer are very good, even if they don’t even try to reinvent the wheel. Together with the “New Horizons” update, the loot grind is now more fun and effective than ever.
When I found two apocalyptic armor pieces with my Technomancer that together granted four powerful mods for my minigun, the power trip after an hour in the expansion was already bigger than in the endgame of the base game.
The developers at People Can Fly clearly understand what makes their loot shooter fun: big magazines, bigger explosions, gigantic damage numbers. If you enjoy that, you will be well satisfied with Worldslayer.
Especially in comparison to the loot shooter king Destiny 2, Outriders plays significantly faster, more aggressively, and more brutally. There is still no PvP in Worldslayer, but anyone wanting to destroy even better in PvE should still have a lot of fun with Outriders in 2022.
The contents of Worldslayer seamlessly continue the story from the base game. You must have reached the endgame of Outriders to start Worldslayer. You have two options:
- You can take your old max-level character into the new campaign and start the new campaign from your stash.
- You can create as many new characters as you like, starting directly at level 30, and thereby immediately dive into the expansion.
This allows both newcomers and veterans to jump right in if you want. Trying out new classes will be easier than ever.
However, the price is disappointing. Worldslayer costs €39.99 as an upgrade to the base game, and both together without discounts cost about €80. For big fans or very interested newcomers, this price point might still be justifiable. But if you are not firmly convinced in advance that you want to play Worldslayer, then this expansion offers too little that is truly new to be convincing.
Outriders Worldslayer is exactly what I wished for from the expansion: the intense, aggressive gameplay of the loot shooter is further rounded and polished with new challenges, better loot, and higher stats.
As a fan, that is completely sufficient for me. Because in hardly any PvE game have I had so much fun playing the same things repeatedly, as in Outriders. Just the fact that each class heals itself through hyper-aggressive gameplay is still genius to me. Therefore, Worldslayer is exactly what it officially is: a good expansion of what I already love.
However, it is not a reinvention of the game. Outriders is still Outriders, now there is just more of it. If, like me, you loved the previous content and don’t necessarily need a new class or anything like that, you can buy it without hesitation. However, if you never fully warmed up to Outriders, you will probably find few new reasons to learn to love the game.
Especially for the comparatively steep €40 that the expansion costs, I can currently recommend Worldslayer primarily to Outriders veterans or very interested newcomers.
Marko Jevtic
Freelance writer for MeinMMO
The release of Outriders Worldslayer is on June 30. If you pre-order the expansion, you can start collecting loot on June 28.
If you haven’t played Outriders in a while, you should also know that the loot system has been drastically changed. Here’s what happened:
Outriders radically changes loot to save the game – Did it help?
