Star Wars Outlaws review – a love letter to lore, Lucas and laser guns | Games

Nostalgia is a funny thing – there are times when it just comes out of nowhere like a TIE fighter and shoots you right in the gut, leaving you confused and in pain. An hour into Star Wars Outlaws, I didn’t expect to be emotionally overwhelmed during a little mission where I had to buy spare parts from a group of Jawas. But then I drove my speeder out into the Dune Sea and saw their transport there, black and monolithic under the low sun, and there were these little guys running around, repairing droids… and it took me right back to my 12th year, watching Star Wars on VHS in our living room, eating a bowl of Monster Munch my mother brought me, repeating the lines along with Luke. There are plenty of moments like this in Ubisoft’s sprawling adventure, and they save its life on more than one occasion.

Despite all the pre-release talk about this not being a typical Ubisoft open-world game, Star Wars Outlaws feels very much like a typical Ubisoft open-world game. You play as Kay Vess, a street thief who quietly makes a living from her cunning until a lucrative heist goes wrong and she steals a spaceship and crash-lands it on the remote moon Toshara. From there, she must survive by working for the galaxy’s many criminal gangs, playing them off against each other and building a reputation for herself as a skilled mercenary and thief. This is where things get familiar. You’re immediately thrown in with main story missions, dozens of optional side quests, and also the ability to take on side jobs for various smugglers and ne’er-do-wells, usually involving traveling somewhere and fetching or blowing things up – Assassin’s Creed style. Or Far Cry. Or Watch Dogs. It’s Star Wars: The Busy Work Strikes Back.

There are key differences, though. Here you’re aided by your beloved pet Nix, who you can send to distract guards, retrieve useful items, or crawl through tight spaces to unlock doors. It’s adorable, and adds emotional depth and danger to Kay’s otherwise solitary life. But more importantly, the game expertly weaves in Star Wars lore, so that the buildings you’ll be burgling are beautifully realized Imperial research stations, ruined Republic starships, and seedy Hutt strongholds, all filled with intricate visual and narrative detail from the original film trilogy. Everywhere you go, there are fan-favorite treats, whether they’re familiar droids, bits of history, or beloved spaceships. The streets of Mos Eisley are even patrolled by Stormtroopers riding those monstrous dewbacks.

The planets you visit aren’t huge expanses of land to explore, with most having a large city and a few square miles of open landscape. But that’s okay, because there’s plenty to explore, from Hutt treasure troves in the valleys of Tatooine to pirate camps in the swampy forests of Akiva. Unfortunately, the speeder bike is terrible to control, like trying to traverse alien planets on an old Honda 125. Also clunky is the space flight section, which is reminiscent of No Man’s Sky – planetary orbits are full of abandoned spaceships to plunder, as well as TIE fighters and pirate fighters. You can help ships in distress or go on cargo retrieval missions, but the flight simulation is absolutely NOT on par with the classic LucasArts space combat titles.

Most of the land-based quests involve a familiar combination of parkour (climbing yellow-painted pipes and rock walls – though you can opt to turn the paint off) and stealth, as you sneak through steel corridors, past walls with blinking buttons and beeping computer screens, then sabotage alarm panels and silently dispatch enemies. It’s basic stuff – at times leaning more towards the Mary Jane missions of Spider-Man than, say, the systemic complexity of Dishonored – and it can be frustratingly slow. As you progress, though, you’ll meet a series of experts who let you unlock new abilities, such as silent movement and cool stealth toys like smoke grenades, to make infiltration a lot more fun. You’ve also got a hugely customizable laser rifle with a range of unlockable modes, and while it’s possible to temporarily pick up other weapons, I rather like that Kay sticks with her Han Solo-style pistol – there’s no match for a good blaster at your side, boy.

Underneath it all is a pulp story that evolves from street-kid-makes-good myth into something a little more interesting. As Kay recruits her raid crew, including the heavily laser-painted battle droid ND-5, she makes friends that both enhance and contrast the heist plot. Clashes with rebel armies also raise questions about the ethics of their war and methods. There are wonderful moments when it’s clear that the designers were drawing not just from Star Wars itself, but also from the directors George Lucas held dear – John Ford and Akira Kurosawa.

Some may miss the Jedi lore of EA’s Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor titles; Outlaws is very much a game for Solo fans rather than Skywalker fanatics – just with a genuinely likable new character at the helm. It’ll deliver what most fans of the films want, providing plenty of geeky fun as they spot EG-6 power droids or maybe an X-34 Landspeeder or… is that a Chadra fan sitting at the cantina bar? I found myself wandering around for hours looking for this stuff, and rarely left disappointed.

If this were An Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry title, it would be one of the OK titles – decent fun, occasionally a little annoying, and full of the worn-out tropes of the open-world genre. But time and again, the Star Wars license grabs this game by the Corellian trousers and wrenches it into exciting territory. For much of the 40 or so hours I played, I was back as a 12-year-old, feeling slightly bewildered and dizzy, but relishing every blissfully familiar moment.