RoadOut Review - Getting My Rear End Tuned

Barely Magic Mike
1 hour ago
6 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byb0W3sxXnc

RoadOut is trying to do a lot. While this pixel-art action-RPG’s post-apocalyptic world is doing nothing new thematically, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a game try to merge Grand Theft Auto-style open-world shenanigans with the smaller, more puzzle and combat-oriented dungeons you’d find in a classic Zelda game. On top of that, its seemingly simplistic style is actually much more than meets the eye, since within each dungeon you can freely rotate the camera to unveil breakable walls, switches to flip, and items you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. It’s a clever bit of game design alchemy, no doubt, but as most of us have seen before, ambitious genre mixes can come forth with all the best intentions only to bungle the execution. So, what can you expect from RoadOut?

RoadOut has you playing as Claire, a walking cliché of a tough, snarky mercenary who survives, if perhaps not thrives, in a desert wasteland called The Dead Zone. The Dead Zone is populated by three rival factions that all have work to dish out for anybody willing to put themselves in harm’s way. This is the setup for Claire’s story, which involves a lot of driving around and shooting, something about rogue AIs and yada yada yada it was really hard to get invested. RoadOut’s writing is consistently weak and very matter of fact, never landing its attempts at humor or intrigue and having the sort of dialogue I’d always skip if I wasn’t, you know, reviewing the game. I don’t think a compelling plot is a prerequisite for a game like this but be aware that if you’re looking for a tale that goes deeper than typical end-of-the-world fodder, look elsewhere.

Most of your time in RoadOut will be spent embarking on a series of core missions and side missions that take Claire all around the different biomes of the Dead Zone to fight rival gangs, win races, explore dungeons, and so on. Structurally, this manages to be pretty interesting. Your vehicle is not only key to getting around the wasteland, but a resource you need to keep healthy, attach weapons to, and upgrade as you see fit. Rather than this car being just an excuse to fill time from A to B, you’ll have to navigate an occasionally obtuse map, fight enemies along the way, and even engage in chase sequences or avoid weather-related hazards. You’ll spend a lot of time in your car, which is why it’s a shame that it controls like an amateur but overconfident ice skater.

The drifty, floaty nature of the car controls is decent enough for racing missions or just traveling from point to point but suffers greatly in any situation where you need to be precise. You can aim at targets based on whichever direction your car is facing or hold an awkwardly placed button that I seemingly can’t remap in order to aim a little more precisely. It takes time to get familiar with this control scheme, but it never felt intuitive and always forced my hand into strange positions if I wanted Claire’s car to do what I said. Bafflingly, this is compounded by some physics-related design decisions that feel like the rough equivalent of putting a band-aid on to cure food poisoning. Anytime Claire’s vehicle crashes into or even clips a solid object, it aggressively bounces off of it as if The Dead Zone actually takes place in a giant pinball machine. This is just plain annoying when trying to get around, but actively infuriating when the bounce throws you right into harm’s way, and then bounces you again as if taking the pinball metaphor as a personal challenge. The feel of it is simply dreadful, and compounded yet again by occasional weather effects requiring you to avoid constant obstacles that might not even be fully visible if your path is obscured by trees or other scenery.

Claire’s car is also exceptionally fragile, taking only a handful of hits or damage from obstacles to lose all its health and spawn you at the nearest checkpoint. This wouldn’t be such a problem ordinarily, but the game often feels stingy with resources that can fix your car up, often leading me to drive carefully with a nearly destroyed car that was actively on fire for some reason. Talk about a fixer-upper! The in-world map, while appreciated, is also low-detail enough that navigating to where I needed to go was cumbersome until I got used to how to better read it to determine what’s scenery and what’s an actually drivable area.

For as much as I dunk on the feel of the driving itself, it's made no better by the open world surrounding it. Your mileage may vary depending on how devoted a fan of pixel art you are, but I found its open world visuals downright ugly at times. There are many ways to make a pixel-art desert look nice, but RoadOut’s open world feels visually anemic, presenting me with extremely basic artwork populated by many of the same few assets repeating over and over. Not a fan. At all.

While I’m talking visuals though, I have to point out how strange it is that the dungeons themselves fare much better. It’s almost like different artists worked on the vehicular versus on-foot sections, because while the look of the dungeons isn’t anything to write home about, the Enter the Gungeon-like cute, bubbly enemy sprites and environments that intriguingly skirt the line between 2D and 3D are well put-together and charming.

These dungeons are also the stronger part of the game as a whole, thankfully, but are not without their own issues. So, let’s start with the good! Dungeon layout usually feels pretty clever, with some nice puzzles that make use of your abilities and perspective shifts and often require quick timing, use of moving platforms, connecting of circuits or otherwise to properly progress. Enemies are fun to fight, at least at first, and the combat is quick to acclimate to with a mix of melee abilities, shielding, dodging, and rolling necessary for success.

Now for the bad – generally speaking, RoadOut’s dungeon and combat design is a solid experience marred over and over by dozens of tiny flaws, so many that I couldn’t possibly list them all. But let's try to list a handful. Clears throat. The shifting camera perspective is fun but can also feel too zoomed-in and surprise you with enemies or bullets coming out of nowhere, larger scale battles feel messy with too much happening on-screen to properly understand what’s going on and avoid damage, the dash cooldown can be extremely annoying when multiple enemies are pummeling you at once, most rooms in each dungeon look so similar that navigating them can become a chore, enemies feel designed to take cheap shots at you that are difficult to protect against, difficulty spikes are so common as to sometimes feel like the status quo rather than the exception, event triggers often happen painfully slowly, the controls feel imprecise and often at odds with one another when trying to switch weapons or shift the camera to get a better angle, and god am I tired. Sometimes it feels like RoadOut’s intentions are in the right place, and other times it feels like it’s actively trying to annoy me. The first couple of hours had significant potential as a flawed but fun mash-up of genres, but times after that felt openly hostile at my attempts to have fun.

One thing I have yet to mention is the extra systems in play, which give a little more credence to RoadOut’s attempts at seasoning itself with some Grand Theft Auto-flavored spice. You’ll curry favor with each of the game’s factions by doing missions for them, though helping one may piss off another and, well, you know the drill. Certain missions, locations, or markets won’t be feasible until you manage to get in a given faction’s good graces, which adds plenty of content for those eager enough, and gives more options for upgrades on the game's skill tree that come in the form of tattoos.

Thankfully, the game runs quite well on Steam Deck, albeit with one strange issue I hope will be resolved soon, which is that the text tends to display in such a way that some words fly off the screen. As I mentioned earlier, though, the story is, at best, just kind of there, so I wouldn't say anybody looking to play on Deck should avoid doing so for that reason alone. Just something to be aware of.

It might sound like I hated RoadOut and I won't lie; there were moments I did. The frequent difficulty spikes, haphazard design, and annoying controls were especially potent grievances that constantly turned me off of the experience. But there's some fun to be had for those patient enough, there's plenty of content on offer, and the perspective-switching mechanic within dungeons is genuinely unique. It's a game of solid highs and dreadful lows, for me just barely landing on the lower end of mediocrity. RoadOut is a sometimes fun but deeply flawed experience that earns itself the table lamp.

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