Obsidian Entertainment lit the world on fire with their game Fallout: New Vegas. Many considered it superior to Bethesda's own offering Fallout 3. The Outer Worlds was considered a spiritual successor to New Vegas. The same type of play style. A first-person RPG with shooting elements, a large story, companions, quests, and worlds to explore. Many were calling it New Vegas in space, but is it really that and does it live up to New Vegas?
The short answer is no. If falls short in nearly every way. The game really does feel like it's trying to be New Vegas with the funny humor in the propaganda posters, the overseeing mega-corporation that's trying to take over the Halcyon colony, and you're trying to get factions to agree with each other or side with them. The overarching story is pretty much forgettable and that goes for most of the game. The story, characters, and side quests are mostly boring. I hate to really say this as this game sat installed on my PC for a couple of years now and I would do a mission or two and quit because of just how dull the game is. The characters aren't memorable, there's no personality that stands out, and the overall mega-corporation humor that overshadows the game just feels like it's in the background.
The game is also incredibly short. I did several companion quests, dealt with all the factions, did multiple side quests, and still clocked in at around 12-13 hours. If you blow through the main story you can finish it in 4-5 hours easily. I feel that contributes to the problem of the story and characters being uninteresting. There's not enough time for them to develop. Your entire crew is all humans, and they all just feel like generic Bethesda faces that were run through a random generator and nothing stands out. I wound up skipping through a lot of dialogue because I just didn't care. I loved the characters and overall story of New Vegas. It was fresh and interesting, but this just feels like a generic space odyssey.
So what about the gameplay? It's tighter and more refined than New Vegas, but not by much. I hated the upgrade and skill tree system. They felt generic and half-baked. The game's poorly balanced where it's either way too easy and you mow down enemies or they swarm you and kill you on the spot. I felt like none of the items you can use helped at all, stats didn't seem to matter, and the only thing that really did matter was your level in each respective category. You really want to get your speech levels high including engineering as you can bypass a lot of battles with speech checks. Most of the weapons in the game felt pretty generic and their weapon power didn't seem to matter.
Weapons can be tinkered with and modded at workbenches. Mods can be picked up and attached to various parts of guns. They can add elemental damage, increase clip size, add scopes, and do damage to different types of enemies, but outside of this you can just tinker the weapon's level up with you and future weapons don't matter. There were no cool unique weapons found on bosses or for getting into a hard-to-hack safe. Looting like in Fallout feels pointless as there is so much given to you. By the end of the game, I had thousands of rounds of ammo for each weapon type. You can specialize in long, pistol, or heavy weapons, but I just wound up dumping points into all three. Add a few good mods and tinker the weapon up to your level and you will stick with the same weapons through most of the game rarely trading them out. You can equip up to four weapons, and I rarely ever used healing items until the final showdown where you are swarmed by enemies in every room you go into.
Another balancing issue is with the factions. You can gain and lose reputation and this will make guards attack you on-site in certain towns locking out quests and not being able to finish any in this case. I wound up pissing off a couple of factions and had to abandon the quests there and couldn't go to the shops too. This is really frustrating and there's usually no way to gain the reputation back. This can lock off companion quests and many side missions. Throughout the entire game I mostly just mowed down every enemy in my way and used my companion's abilities when I was swarmed on occasion. You get a single ability to slow down time which is useless because it slows down time too much.
The only thing I really enjoyed was the visuals. The game looks like a last-generation title, but the worlds are unique and look really good. I was interested in discovering new towns and new enemies, but that was really it. Everything else was either ignored, forgotten, or skipped because of how uninteresting most of the game is. I don't feel like this is Obsidian's best work or their love letter to New Vegas. The game is horribly optimized, looks dated, and feels dated by being too safe. The game lacks any depth and most may not even enjoy the shooting. The story and characters are boring and unoriginal, and the game's length doesn't justify this type of game in general. Who wants to play a 4-5 RPG with supposed vast worlds to explore? You might enjoy blowing through the main story but that's about it.