The Outer Worlds

Obsidian Entertainment, one of the big names in the world of western RPGs and the developer of other games you liked such as Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. The lazy elevator pitch for The Outer Worlds would probably be something to the tune of 'Fallout crossbred with Borderlands' which is, let's be honest, for all its laziness pretty good as pitches go. A deep, first-person action RPG with the colour, humour and pizazz of Borderlands. Yes please.

The game begins with you arriving, rather late, at a colony of planets. Your ship unexpectedly dropped out of light speed on its way and you've spend 70 years or so in cold storage, taking the slow lane there. By the time you arrive ultra-mega corporations are basically running the entire show, owning entire towns and giving people jobs like 'Junior Inhumer' rather than gravedigger. There are those, however, who resist, and you can choose to join them if you so desire. The decisions you make will have a profound impact on how the story of these worlds unfolds, so make them well!

Said decisions will also impact how you can and do play the game, too, in particular on the skills tree. The skills are split into general categories such as dialogue, stealth, melee etc with each having three sub-skills. To start with you can only upgrade the whole category, but beyond a certain point you can start working on specific skills. Out there in the world, that could mean you can use engineering skills to solve a problem that might otherwise involve a long hike to retrieve something, for example.

Meanwhile, characters can pop out at you from all angles, throwing new quests in your path or just generally getting into it with you and giving it humorous bants.

The Outer Worlds, in other words, is a fun tangle of a game that throws tons of decisions at you and responds to the choices you make. There are a lot of ways for you to change these worlds for the better, or for the worse...