Star Wars Outlaws Review – Charted Territory

Back in 2021, Ubisoft shocked the gaming world by announcing that first-party studio Massive Entertainment (The Division) is working on an open-world game based on the Star Wars license. Needless to say, a lot of people were excited and that included the majority of staff writers here on MP1st. After three years, we finally get to see and play the fruits of their labors, and how is this non-Jedi Star Wars game? Well, let’s just say that the Force isn’t quite on Kay Vess’ side.

A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy, That Should Have Stayed Far Far Away

I wish I could tell you what kind of game Star Wars Outlaws is, but truth be told, no one, including the studio, probably has an exact answer for that. While it has a general outline of what it could be, in my full 12-hour playthrough of the campaign, I honestly can’t say that vision ever came to fruition.

On paper, Star Wars Outlaws is a game about an upcoming outlaw named Kay Vess. Like many of our Star Wars protagonists, Kay starts out life more on the unfortunate side, having been enslaved by the systems the Empire has brought forth to many star systems. Every day is a fight for Kay as she scrounges around for scraps to barely get by.

Fortunately for Kay, her luck is about to turn around as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity presents itself, the kind of opportunity that could turn a nobody into a somebody. It just so happens that Kay lives on Cantonica, a planet known for attracting the ultra-rich and powerful due to its casino city, Canto Bight. As it turns out, there’s a job up for hire that involves her breaking into the casino’s mansion, cracking a vault, and retrieving a handsome sum of credits, with promises of paying a hefty cut.

It’s the heist of the century, and though Kay is only accompanied by her pet companion, Nix, she takes on the daunting task of solo robbing the place. As one would expect, things don’t go in Kay’s favor, which leads to the realization that she needs a crew if she wants any real chance at robbing the place. Thus, her journey into the stars begins, looking for the most skilled people to hire into her crew while facing off against the galaxy’s most wanted and notorious crime families.

If the plot of Star Wars Outlaws sounds familiar, that’s because it resembles that of Disney’s 2018 Solo: A Star Wars Story, a film that explored the origin story of our favorite space smuggler and how he came to be known as Han Solo. In short, his story, too, consisted of assembling a crew to pull off some notorious heist, and Outlaws rethreads similar ideas.

Still, it’s not an idea I’m completely against, as I am always up for a good heist story, and with Outlaws, Massive Entertainment has far more playroom than working with an established character. This means they could tell a story as they see fit without worrying about living up to the expectations of a character already set by other films and media. This is especially true when looking at the grander story of Outlaws, and it involves what is being called the cartel of space. Though I’d say, it’s more akin to the mafia with all the different families and hierarchies presented.

That sounds a bit exciting, and the initial introduction leads us to believe that Outlaws will unfold into some Godfather or Good Fellas-esque plot, exploring the ins and outs of each organization firsthand. An opportunity to truly show how evil and vile the underworld in Star Wars can be, rather than always whimsical. Sadly, while Outlaws tries to do just that, it gets caught up in mashing so many different plots together, that ends up losing its on theme on itself.

Kay interacts with each organization, but that ultimately serves as a means to access repetitive and boring side missions that add little to the central plot. Otherwise, Kay is spending most of her time visiting planets, going to a bar to get information on said crew members, and then infiltrating a base to free them. In that time, you learn about each member, who is easily forgettable due to the repetitive nature of the story and gameplay. All that while, another plot unfolds in the background that, in the most comical shoehorned way, gets brought forward, all so Outlaws could have a bigger place in the Star Wars universe.

It’s not very often I’ll find myself playing a game and not having a hook of sorts, especially with Star Wars, to have something to at least look forward to. There are no “bosses” in the main story, at least in a traditional sense. You know who the big bad guy is, but they feel treated like some Far Cry level of villainy where they show up at the very start of the game only to reemerge for a few short minutes to let you know they’re still around. They’re forgettable, which is only proven further in the latter portion when they end up getting overshadowed by other characters, who are just as forgettable.

The crew members you recruit especially don’t have much chemistry with Kay, leading to the most obvious outcomes from those relationships. Not only that, but Kay, as a character, doesn’t seem to have much growth after the initial opening hours. Being a heist game and all, you should go in and expect some double-crossing to happen, and it becomes a very common trope that happens to Kay, who is seemingly shocked every time. It’s like a never-ending bit that wants you to laugh every time, but it’s not meant to be funny.

If you were looking for something cinematic and narrative-driven, I can’t say there’s much to hold on to your attention or keep you interested and invested in the story on that front. It’s disappointing, to say the least, but not all games need to have a good story to at least be fun and enjoyable. After all, it’s a videogame, so you will be playing it, which brings up our next topic, the gameplay.

Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew

What do you get when you combine Assassin’s Creed with the epic-ness of an Uncharted game that happens to be set in a Star Wars universe? Well, it’s not Star Wars Outlaws. No, far from it, in fact, but the comparison still stands as Outlaws clearly draws inspiration. The thing is, Outlaws wants to be those things, something I would actually be up for. However, it’s more of a baseline level that Outlaws pushes for rather than a fully developed and realized system of gameplay mechanics that have the kind of depth that will make you want to come back.

Outlaws offers many different gameplay components. It’s a third-person shooter, an adventure game with plenty of traversal, a stealth game, and more. It’s so many different genres mashed together to make one game, but the problem is that it’s not good at any of those things because it’s all so barebones.

The general gunplay is passable. It’s not anything special that’ll stand out from other third-person shooters, and there’s not a whole lot to it other than standing around and shooting. It’s not awful, but it’s not great either. The only weapon you have is the blaster, which comes with a stun, a regular pistol firing mode, and a charge shot. You can pick up other weapons that enemies drop, but drop them once you perform any action or run out of ammo. You can upgrade your blaster, but beyond those upgrades, there’s little to no variety in the combat outside of just blasting with the same gun, which gets old quickly. They did throw in the Red Dead Redemption Dead Eye ability where everything slows down and you can auto-target a bunch of enemies at once, which is nice if a bit unimaginative, I guess.

Strangely though, you can’t shoot freely (you can use the Dead Eye) while on the speedster, despite enemies being able to. You can’t shoot from ledges either, removing any sense of verticality combat the game could have offered. All the combat is done on the ground with your blaster, Nix being able to distract enemies, and a dodge roll. Like I said, not much to it beyond some basic functionality.

Stealth is the preferred option of play, as countless objectives force it with warnings to not raise any alarms. Alerting one usually resulted in having to restar the section, and that’s a common objective used throughout Outlaws. But much like the gunplay, stealth in Outlaws doesn’t have much going for it. The main way to go about it is to hide in tall grass or behind a small box, while sending Nix out to distract enemies, giving you opportunities to move to the next cover. Kay can also stealth takedown enemies, but only if she manages to get directly behind them.

It’s easy to see that Outlaws takes many of its stealth mechanics from Assassin’s Creed, but it’s also easy to see just how many of the franchises’ mechanics it ignores that makes them a standout to begin with. Again, Kay can only stealth takedown an enemy if she is directly behind them. This means there are no above-aerial takedowns, no grabbing a stormtrooper’s leg and pulling them down a ledge; you can’t even go into cover and yank someone who’s leaning on the other side of it. You can’t have anything between you or the enemy, no environmental takedowns or any cool animations that are special under certain conditions. There’s only one type of stealth takedown in the entire game. It’s very strange, a game that wants to be a stealth game and yet lacks so much imagination to allow the players to play that way. It feels like something ripped out of the late 2000s. Don’t be surprised if there ends up being a comparison cropping up online showing how much more stealth 2007’s Assassin’s Creed, or the original The Last of Us, games that are over a decade old.

Between the shooting and the stealthiness, there’s a good amount of platforming and puzzle work. The climbing can be janky at times, with Kay auto-snapping to spots that can result in a death or two every now and then. Puzzles are generally simple, typically blast this to open that. There’s door and terminal hacking, which is basically finding the correct symbols and putting them in the correct order. Those are very repetitive and remain essentially the same throughout the entire game. At least for those, there’s an accessibility option to just skip the puzzles, something I highly recommend turning on.

There are other things to do in the game too, such as playing Sabaac, a poker-like card game that have you betting money, or taking on one of the many, and I mean, many side quests. Just don’t go in expecting anything crazy for those side quests, as most of the ones I played through were mainly of the fetch variety. Travel across the entire map to collect an upgrade piece, and then back kind of thing. I can’t say I’m surprised by that, Ubisoft titles generally are heavy on that, but the game does set those expectations within the first few minutes of getting control of Kay, as the first thing you do is mindlessly wander a city collecting random junk to sell. I wasn’t joking about having experienced most of what the game has to offer in the first few hours because, after this and the first major stealth location, you really have experienced it all.

I don’t want to downright say that all the gameplay mechanics in Star Wars Outlaws are “bad” per se. It’s more that it’s just, forgettable? There’s nothing that stands out, nothing that makes you want to come back and keep on going through it. It’s like a bunch of mechanics from a bunch of different games were all thrown together, without understanding the work that was put into all those mechanics to make them standout in the first place. Half-bake, or more like a proof of concept to show to someone that this could work, only to never moved on passed that stage and just built everything else around it.

I’ve yet to even mention any sort of bugs I’ve experienced in the game, which is quite a lot. Nix can, at times, become unresponsive and even broken to the point where I need to reboot the game just to fix them. I’ve spoken with a few other reviewers, and one common issue is that elevators are not responding at all. They require you to stand on them for a few seconds, but sometimes they won’t move, leading you to think you’re going the wrong way. My speeder was constantly breaking on me, getting locked into the brake position, even after toggling the brakes off. That prompted me to hop off it, walk away a bit, and then spawn it back in. There was a mission that I had to restart multiple times because I had to keep up with a character, and my speeder just wouldn’t move at all. Eventually, when it did manage to get unstuck, it would accelerate faster than I could react, slamming me into a wall and starting the whole process of trying to get it unstuck again. Things especially get frustrating during the stealth, when Kay suddenly gets flung across the room just for doing a stealth take down, alerting everyone in the area.

If you thought the game looked rough based on previous gameplay videos, then the final product probably won’t convince you that much has improved. There’s definitely a lot lacking in the polishing department, something I feel the studio could have used some extra time for.

At Least It’s Pretty

I will say, bugs aside, Star Wars Outlaws’ visuals are pretty impressive. Mind you, they’re not as good as Massive Entertainment’s previous game, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but they are pretty good nonetheless, with a few inconsistencies here and there in the environment. I love what the studio has done in some of the larger towns, as they’re filled with all kinds of NPCs from all reaches of the galaxy. There are some gorgeous backdrops, too, especially in space.

It definitely looks like something right out of Star Wars, and I’m glad to see the studio managed to nail down that look.

Now, I wasn’t really planning on addressing the whole outcry about Kay’s face looking manlier than her real-life model because I honestly didn’t care too much about it. I thought it looked fine, and it does in most of the pre-rendered CGI cutscenes in the game. But then you get in-game, and there’s actually a lot of inconsistency with how her face looks throughout, especially under certain lighting conditions.

I mean, look at her here; this doesn’t even look like the same character.

No disrespect to the model, but someone really did butcher her in-game face. It’s not great, and it’s hard to believe it’s the same character you’ve been playing this entire time.

Now, onto performance. As long as you don’t play with everything cranked to 11, including the raytracing lighting and reflection, you should be able to get Outlaws running at a pretty smooth and consistent frame on PC. I’m not one to go over 60 FPS unless it’s a competitive shooter, and for the most part, I did feel that Outlaws maintained a steady frame around there. With everything maxed out, though, I did notice some severe dips. No surprise, considering it can become a very demanding title, depending on your settings. This is running with a RTX 4090, with our other builds needing to be scaled much lower to keep frames up.

Lower Me Into The Carbon-Freezing Chamber

If I could sum up what Star Wars Outlaws is, it would basically be a massive fetch quest, that while looks pretty and manages to capture feeling and look of a Star Wars, is ultimately hindered by its repetitiveness, barebones gameplay, and lack of polishing.

Sure, there’s still fun to be had, and some story moments that do standout, but overall it’s a hard recommendation, even to the diehard Star Wars fans. While Star Wars Outlaws ticks off many boxes on what a good Star Wars games should be, it also doesn’t try and innovate beyond those check boxes. To add to it, what you’ll play in Outlaws is probably something you’ve played in another game, though a tad bit better, and executed earlier.

Ultimately, Star Wars Outlaws’ biggest strength is that it has the Star Wars license, but in terms of gameplay? It feels by-the-numbers for the most part. This is one outlaw that might want to spend some time in the pokey to reflect on their missteps.