If you’ve been waiting for a solid Star Wars game to sink your teeth into, then I’ve got good news for you. Star Wars Outlaws is the action-packed experience to spend your next few weeks on. You’ve got a fast ship, a cool blaster and a cute pet companion. What more could you want?
While Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t do much to re-invent the wheel, it still stands as a solid Star Wars game that gives you plenty of freedom to live out the power fantasy of a charming scoundrel.
A Thief Looking For Her Last Big Job
Star Wars Outlaws takes place between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. After the Death Star blows up, a power vacuum has opened for the seedy underbelly of crime syndicates to break out into gang wars and claim power and fortune.
You play as Kay Vess, a thief looking for the last big job so she can retire with her companion Nix, who is pretty much just Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon. After getting captured while breaking into Zerek Besh’s base, the duo barely escape with their lives, stealing a fancy ship while they’re at it. In turn, the crime lord puts a death mark on you, and you have to find a way to survive and avoid getting hunted down.
Now something that might stand out to you at the start is that your main protagonist Kay is a bit too twee to be a scoundrel. While I wasn’t expecting a Saul Goodman or Star Lord level of charisma from the character, I was hoping that they would be more confident and have better street smarts.
You spend the majority of your time on the first planet in the game, learning about the crime syndicates, how to earn favours, and how to barter within the system. Despite being a born and raised thief who needs to survive on her own in the seedy underbelly, Kay sounds nervous 90% of the time at the start of the game, opting to use “Umm they’re right behind me?” attempts at humour, which never landed with me.
Thankfully Kay improves dramatically after leaving the first planet, but I remember spending my first 15 hours of the game groaning at all the awkward quips and attempts at oddball bluffing she’d make.
“It Makes You Feel Like A Scoundrel”
You can break gameplay up into five parts: stealth, shooting, space stuff, platforming and mini-games. Each area doesn’t really do much to re-invent the wheel and borrows plenty from other games.
You can stealth around to quietly take out enemies or if you’re like me, you can go in guns blazing, clicking heads and leaving no witnesses.
In my opinion, I never found stealth worth doing unless the game made getting caught a ‘game over’. Most of the time, stealth sequences would end with you getting caught and having to shoot your way out of the building anyway. It didn’t help that if you wanted to perfectly play stealth sections, it could take around 20 to 30 minutes to clear out a single room, only to do it again later for another room. That is unless you’re cracked and immediately know how to mess with the AI in this game to breeze through these sections.
Every planet in this game has its own open-world areas which are filled with side-quests and buried treasure. If you’ve played the recent Assassins Creed games, you already know what to expect. If you want my pro tip for Star Wars Outlaws, don’t let yourself get bogged down in side quests until you’ve completed most of the story. To beat most of the side quests, you’ll need to unlock items in the main story or be taught how to beat a specific open-world puzzle to figure it out.
Platforming to me is interesting. This year, we’ve been inundated by the discourse of “yellow paint” telling gamers where to go. Normally I don’t care, but in the case of being a sneaky thief, finding yellow paint literally telling you how to escape with the goods can feel silly. Ubisoft planned ahead in Star Wars Outlaws and actually lets you toggle the paint off if you want that extra layer of immersion. I didn’t try it out myself because I’m blind as a bat and wouldn’t know where to go half the time, but I thought the paint was funny and was having fun imagining why someone would paint it, so I kept it.
The worst part of platforming though, is how the game penalises you for falling to your death. In Jedi: Survivor, if you messed up a jump and fell off a cliff to your demise, the game would reload and put you back up to where you were standing before you jumped. In Star Wars Outlaws, falling to your death is a reset to your last checkpoint.
So if you mess up a jump or a swing, which is super easy to do because jumping is so rigid in this game, you’d end up at your last checkpoint, which could make you lose five to ten minutes of progress. In my experience, this meant that if I finished a mission and was escaping after perfectly sneaking through, or even if I unlocked a trophy or upgraded an ability, I’d lose that progress because of a bad jump.
Space exploration and combat should feel familiar to any Star Wars gamer. If you’ve played Star Wars Battlefront, then you already know what to expect. What’s different here though, is you get plenty of freedom in space to explore nebulas and asteroid fields for loot or get into scrappy dogfights with pirates in the sky.
I Got Big Reputation (Mechanics)
One of the key gameplay mechanics in Star Wars Outlaws is your reputation. In the game, whenever you do a quest you improve your reputation with one crime syndicate, but also piss off another. If you’re a people pleaser, this might make you feel anxious but stick with me here.
If you have a great reputation with a crime syndicate, they’ll let you through their bases on planets with no issues and even offer you some neat outfits and loot. But, if you get on their bad side, they’ll deny you entry or in some cases, shoot you on sight. But no matter how bad your reputation gets, you’re never locked out of getting to work with one in the future. As your sexy robot companion explains later, if there’s money to be made, there are no hard feelings.
This aspect will probably have you feeling the most like Han Solo, as you can even get Jabba The Hutt to be your number one opp wishing for your downfall.
Call The Exterminator, Because We’ve Got Bugs
The game has the usual open-world jank that comes with a Ubisoft game. But maybe a controversial opinion, I love jank in video games. As long as it doesn’t break my playthrough or make me have to load a save from hours ago, I think silly little bugs are fine.
Despite playing on a pre-release build for the PS5 with no day-one patch, I can say that I didn’t experience any really egregious bugs. There’d be the usual jank with AI and riding through the open-world, but nothing truly game-breaking.
The biggest culprit for bugs in this game, however, was the speeder bike. I had moments where my bike would suddenly gain sentience and spiral in circles around me after calling it. My favourite bug was when I fast-travelled on the bike to my ship, transporting me to another location, but my bike and the player camera stuck there. Because I fast-travelled to my ship, I couldn’t call it because it was a “no speeder” zone, and I couldn’t fast-travel out, so I had to quit the game and restart it.
I don’t think the bugs were intrusive enough on my playthrough, some even made me laugh a tonne. But make sure to manually save often when you’re out and about the open-world.
Verdict
Star Wars Outlaws is a fun Star Wars game that, while feeling like a bunch of different games merged together with a Star Wars skin on it, does enough to carve out its own niche and sits neatly among some of the best Star Wars games out there.
We’ve had so many games and TV series focused on the Jedi and the Empire. Star Wars Outlaws is refreshing because you just play as a regular person doing their best to get by in the universe, with almost no connections back to the main series. You’re given free rein to explore these worlds and make a name for yourself in the criminal world, and plenty of tools to do it.
I was so keen for an open-world Star Wars game to come out someday, and Star Wars Outlaws was what I was looking for. While it could use a bit of polish and maybe a tighter narrative, I’m still keen for any DLC or sequels to come out in the future.
Release Date & Where To Buy
You can pick up your own copy of Star Wars Outlaws on August 30th on PS5, Xbox and PC from Amazon ($109.95), JB-Hi-Fi ($89), and Epic Games Store ($99.95).
Image Credit: Star Wars Outlaws / Ubisoft
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