I am always hopeful when I see a game trying to dethrone the stubborn goliaths of the PVPVE genre in videogames. I keep waiting for someone to rescue me from my weekly punishment of Warzone or recapture the early days of Escape from Tarkov. Outlawed takes aim to bring familiar mechanics of an extraction shooter but with a crime themed, simplified art style. I will cut to the chase for this review; the servers have precipitously declined in players to just barely break triple digits. At the time of writing, the game has lost about 60% of its player base in the last seven days according to Steam Charts. Now each of the 30-player servers is pretty much filled with bots. I was fortunate enough to have one game in which I had a human teammate, but I have gotten into zero gun fights with live players. If you’re still interested in what happened to Outlawed, then read on.
Remember DMZ from Call of Duty Warzone? It’s pretty much that, but crime themed. Instead of dropping in you will select a zone to spawn in. Each zone is marked with a low, medium, or high threat level depending on the loot and enemy types spawning in that particular zone. It would have been nice to have a system that spawns players in at relative distances to get into gun fights, however, self-selecting your zone allows you to knock out the optional quests easier and level up your character.
Once you are on the map, there are a few activities you can tackle. If you have an appropriate point-of-interest key, you can unlock specific doors for higher tier loot and extract to get some cash. You could also initiate unlocking a safe, raiding a stronghold (if you have a key), or turning on a radar tower to look for enemies. While these all seem lifted directly out of Warzone, they all work as intended and give some direction on what to do next. Lastly, you can try to hunt down named bosses who hide within smoke. However, this task may be the most frustrating activity in the game.
The way the boss battles are structured is based off of how far the player can see and how far the enemy AI can see you. In order to artificially make the game more challenging without building unique boss encounters or introducing new mechanics, the immediate area around each boss is filled with thick smoke. For the sake of argument, the player can see about 10 meters in front of them, while the enemy can see about 15 meters. This means as you navigate the smoke, you’ll be quickly targeted and shot at by enemies with a greater area of vision than you have. It’s a very frustrating, and ham-fisted way to add variety to the encounter, and instead of making it feel like a fair challenge, these fights are just frustrating and had me avoiding the areas altogether.
Extracting is similar to Escape from Tarkov, with the friendly green smoke designating the extraction zone, however instead of just fading out, a helicopter lowers an extraction platform that you stand on for about 3 seconds and then are lifted to safety. It feels like a missed opportunity to add some excitement to an overall tepid gameplay loop. It would have been nice to have a longer countdown with some unique enemy spawns to challenge the player before making it out. Something similar to Helldivers 2 would have given more weight to the decision to extract.
I don’t like shrinking games down to a few sentences, but “Do you remember DMZ from Call of Duty Warzone? It’s pretty much that, except only 100 people are on the servers”. It’s a real shame how the Battle Royal/Extraction shooter is dominated by so few juggernauts like Fortnight and Warzone. However, even if Outlawed were to pivot to a free-to-play model at this point, they still probably wouldn’t attract a player base to make the project thrive. It’s going to take more than replicating familiar systems to attract new players, it needs unique gameplay mechanics, a major marketing push at launch, and being distributed to enough platforms to give enough oxygen to the player base to gain real momentum.
Sadly, Outlawed has none of these. With barely more than 100 players on Steam right now, it’s not even enough to fill 4 30-player maps. Furthermore, the game’s launch window was when Verdansk was relaunched as the Call of Duty Warzone map, no doubt taking the few players who would have given this a try. As someone who loves competitive shooters, I am always cheering for newcomers to mix up the formula, however, Outlaws will not get the chicken dinner.
