Introduction

It's hard to believe The Outer Worlds came out six years ago, but here we are. The Outer Worlds 2 continues in the steps of its predecessor, offering dozens of hours of action-RPG adventuring that includes tons of shooting, but also a lot of dialogue and plenty of corporate capitalism satire; a tad ironic the second time around, since Microsoft—of all companies—is the publisher and the owner of Obsidian, the studio behind the game.

The Outer Worlds 2's promise is more of The Outer Worlds, but with shinier visuals and expanded gameplay mechanics. The sequel caters to both players who prefer to stick to the shadows and those who always shoot first and ask questions later.



The game is built on Unreal Engine 5 and includes the full suite of UE5 features, such as Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, even hardware ray tracing. Upscalers-wise, you can pick between DLSS, FSR, XeSS, and Epic's own TSR. When it comes to frame generation, players can opt between DLSS and XeSS frame gen, but for some reason, FSR frame gen is omitted.

This handheld performance review tests how The Outer Worlds 2 runs on the Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X, ASUS ROG Ally X, and an ASUS ROG Ally running SteamOS. Aside from a bunch of performance graphs, you can also find optimized settings for most devices.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken on a Steam Deck LCD and an ASUS Xbox ROG Ally X, at 800p (Steam Deck) and 900p (ROG Xbox Ally X), with our optimized settings applied and upscaling set to "Balanced" (Steam Deck) and 85% of the native resolution (ROG Xbox Ally X). You can navigate the gallery with cursor keys. If you want to see the game in all its graphical glory, check out our PC performance benchmark.

ROG Ally X Screenshots