Outriders re-review: Square Enix’s loot-shooter was years ahead of its time

Arc Raiders and Marathon owe a lot to Square Enix’s loot-shooter

The biggest multiplayer shooters of the moment share a lot in common. In Arc Raiders and Marathon, you and up to two other players venture from a safe hub into hostile areas, shoot a bunch of enemies, grab a bunch of loot, and return back to safety. These games are built around a loop meant to draw players back repeatedly, and have become bona fide hits as a result. But these shooters owe a great debt to one maligned 2021 loot-shooter: Outriders.

People Can Fly’s Outriders, published by Square Enix and released on April 1, 2021 (not a joke!), wasn’t an extraction shooter, but it hit many of the same beats. You and up to two other players decamped from a hub city, venturing into hostile areas where you’d shoot a bunch of enemies and grab a bunch of loot before returning back to safety to sift through that loot, at which point you’d fine-tune your builds to do it all again. Again, Outriders was not an extraction shooter — the stakes were lower, for one, and it didn’t feature PvP — but the feedback loop scratched a similar itch as the shooters du jour.

Ostensibly, Outriders was a story-driven game. Set in the 22nd century, it focused on a contingent of humans who flee Earth for a star system some 12 light years away (at least according to number-crunching fans). They attempt to establish a post-Earth colony, only to discover an exoplanet whose native lifeforms very much do not want humans around. They also get space magic superpowers. Some sci-fi plot beats — cryosleep, planetary anomalies, civil war, all that stuff — tee up a compelling story you’d expect to propel a single-player game. But take it from someone who voraciously played at the time: Outriders kinda sucked as a single-player game.

It absolutely ruled with friends, though.

Classes were the main draw of Outriders. When making a new character, you could select from four classes: the Trickster, who could create localized bubbles of Matrix-style bullet time; the Technomancer, who deployed fancy gadgets like turrets and land mines; the Devastator that tanked damage with stone shields; and the flame-wielding Pyromancer.

In early areas, you could brute-force your way through mobs of enemies by yourself as pretty much any class. Later in the game, you’d face uphill battles unless teaming up with friends. And combining classes in your party was key to that success. Players rocking the Devastator could tank hits while as a Trickster dodged bullets and carved through enemies. Pryomancers would incinerate crowds, drawing attention from foes who’d then walk into a Technomaner’s traps. (The shooting was also gold-standard, but that goes without saying, considering developer People Can Fly’s established pedigree on 2010s shooters like Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgement.)

Outriders also differentiated itself with an innovative difficulty setting, in which you’d level up “World Tiers” alongside your character. Every time you’d set out on a mission, you could then set the World Tier level from any you’d previously unlocked; the higher the level, the tougher the enemies — and the better the loot. But rather than your typical easy-medium-hard framework, there were 15 tiers of challenge levels. To this day, I can’t say I’ve played a shooter with that level of customization over its difficulty. (Beyond that, Outriders included a number of settings that minimized the slog present in many loot-grind games. For one thing, you could tweak the settings in order to automatically source all of the loot of specific rarity levels or higher, meaning you wouldn’t have to bother sifting through common-tier items.)

At launch, Outriders was marred by a rocky release, including a litany of hiccups like server woes, balance issues, and all the other problems that afflict basically any online game released in the past decade. But People Can Fly eventually stabilized the game (and acknowledged the issues with a tongue-in-cheek emote for players). More than 3 million people eventually played Outriders in its first month, thanks in part to a day-one Xbox Game Pass release, and Square Enix said in an announcement that it was “on track to become the company’s next major franchise.”

That did not pan out. A 2022 expansion, Worldslayer, didn’t attract new players or even encourage most lapsed players to return, according to SteamDB data. Across 2024 and 2025, People Can Fly conducted three rounds of layoffs and suspended two internal projects, one of which was reportedly a sequel to Outriders.

We may not get a sequel any time soon, if ever, but Outriders thankfully hasn’t gone anywhere. Unlike the ignominious fate that befalls many forgotten multiplayer games, its servers are still online.