Outriders review – fountains of gore and hilarious carnage

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC; People Can Fly
Capturing exactly what makes the genre tick, this is perhaps the best looter-shooter game since Borderlands

The first proper gun you pick up in Outriders, the latest looter-shooter where you run around sci-fi warzones blasting everything that moves, detonates enemies' bones. While perhaps not the sort of thing you would bring up at the school gates, this bodes extremely well. You pick up that gun, read the description, you are excited to try it out, and the results do not disappoint. This game understands what makes the genre tick: the loot needs to be tantalising, adding new creativity to the ubiquitous shooting, which needs to be fun enough to repeat for hours.

Outriders' underwhelming narrative stakes are laid out across an extensive introduction: humans have fled a dying Earth for a planet called Enoch, but - and this is a bit of a shame - it turns out that Enoch is plagued by storms that cripple electronics, disrupt the laws of physics and turn people inside out.