The Outer Worlds 2wants you to join the space police

It has been nearly six years now since The Outer Worlds threw players into the deep end, forcing them to acclimate to the game's far-future, ultra-corporate intergalactic dystopia amid lots of Fallout-style shooting and questing. The prologue for The Outer Worlds 2—which I got to play as part of a preview build ahead of the game's planned October 29 launch—throws players into a different kind of deep end, asking them to fill the shoes of an agent in the storied semi-militarized police force of the Earth Directorate.

The over-the-top propaganda that leads the game off suggests the Earth Directorate is here to protect colonists from out-of-control corporations and tyrannical governments. But your first mission goes in a different direction, sending you on a secret mission to the "out of jurisdiction" Arcadian system, a secretive dictatorship where all the skip drives that power interstellar travel are supposedly manufactured. You've been asked to help expropriate a rare, "unsealed" skip drive core, which can then be opened up, studied, and maybe even copied without the risk of catastrophic explosion (the "right to repair" folks in the audience might be nodding their heads sagely at this point).

Choose your choice

I won't spoil things by discussing just how the mission goes off the rails or talking about the somewhat vague twist that closes out the playable prologue. But I will gush a bit about how the first game's mix of retro-futuristic set-dressing and sardonic, cynical writing style immediately shine through, even with the change in perspective. A mix of strong voice acting and motion capture immediately drew me back into the Outer Worlds universe, even when the characters were delivering ridiculous lines like "You’re not just a cog in the machine. You’re THE cog!"