The Star Wars franchise may be taking a beating lately between The Acolyte‘s cancellation and poor reception on recent series like Ahsoka and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but at least we have the video games. The Lego Skywalker Saga game was fantastic, both Jedi Survivor games were great, and Squadrons was a love letter to the old X-Wing games. Thankfully, Star Wars Outlaws continues the tradition.
Featuring Kay Vess and her animal companion Nix as our protagonists, Star Wars Outlaws provides a surprisingly immersive Star Wars experience. Kay lives in an apartment above a bar and runs odd jobs for credits. She wants to make it big with a giant score, but needs to escape the slums of Canto Bight first. It is clear from the beginning that she is in over her head, but a combination of luck and grit gets her going on her adventure.
Kay is honestly an interesting character and easy to root for, despite her desire to be part of a team on a big score. She grows throughout the adventure, learning from her mistakes and becoming wise to the ways of the underworld. She will meet several new companions as she travels, and some who will act as mentors, but none are as important as Nix. He is an axolotl-like creature that travels with her everywhere, and is used to distract enemies, toggle switches and fetch items from places. In short, he stands in for your bird companion from the Assassin’s Creed games, but cuter.
The comparisons don’t end there, and if you were wondering if Star Wars Outlaws was going to borrow heavily from the established Ubisoft pillars, you would be mostly right. Most of the differences are refinements on the formula, and changes that reflect the attitudes of modern gamers. That said, the atmosphere does a lot to differentiate it from its contemporaries, and it is not merely a Star Wars skin on top of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Assassin’s Creed Mirage. One interesting choice I found was that you do not build up an arsenal of weapons like you do in other games. You have a blaster, and an array of tools like single-use grenades and bacta vials, but you never get any permanent better weapons. You can pick up rifles and launchers from fallen bad guys, but once you use up the ammo you drop them and move on.
Right from the beginning this is a galaxy that fills lived in and fully realized. The planets you land on have that dirty and used feeling that the original movie captured so well — Book of Boba Fett production team, please take notes. The city areas are packed with detritus, scavenging animals and dozens of species of sentient beings. The sound design also reflects this, and the towns are abuzz with noise and chatter. Quest givers aren’t always obvious, so listening for people in need of assistance is critical. There are occasional familiar faces here and there, but thankfully most of the cast are new characters. I will say there was one particularly obscure character from the Star Wars books that I was surprised to see, but I prefer them pulling in characters we haven’t seen in a while to, say, another R2-D2 cameo. It’s a nice reminder of some of the secondary canon material.
Of course, the atmosphere is wasted if the game isn’t fun, and Star Wars Outlaws has that in spades. Gunplay feels good, interacting with the environment is mostly intuitive, and you’ll have to make lots of decisions, which keeps you engaged. Once you get going, you’ll start working for the cartels, but you have to balance things carefully. Most missions will boost your reputation with one cartel at the expense of another.
Some items are locked behind your standing with a particular cartel, and certain story missions play out differently. For instance, in an early story machine you need to acquire a part to upgrade your blaster, and the part can be obtained from the Pykes or the Crimson Dawn. At this point, if you have a negative reputation with the Pykes, you must sneak in and steal it without being caught. You are probably friendly with the Crimson Dawn, so you can just walk in and take it since they trust you (though maybe they’ll trust you less after you take it…).
My two main gripes with the game are minor in the scheme of things. First, especially in the early game I feel it emphasizes stealth-only missions a bit too much. This is Star Wars, and I want to use my blaster. Second, the lockpicking mini-game just did not click with me. I honestly hate it and groan whenever I encounter it. I did also encounter occasional glitches and bugs, which lessened the experience enough, but given this is an open-world game the number of glitches was surprisingly low. The one I encountered most was Kay’s pickiness when it came to interacting with grappling hook points and having to stand in just the right spot to get the button prompt to show.
Graphically, Star Wars Outlaws looks amazing. They have taken the Snowdrop tech and enhanced it on almost every level. I did turn off motion blur and ambient occlusion right away, though. Unfortunately, the pretty graphics come with a cost on console. Frame drops were common in crowded areas, but nothing particularly distracting. During gunfights the game was smooth. I did switch over to the “quality” settings on my Xbox for a bit and found that there was an increase in frame-rate dips, and the overall experience is worse. In either mode I didn’t find them to be distracting, but I have a fairly high tolerance for frame-rate issues. If you are sensitive to frame-rate drops I would stick with “performance” mode.
This is an Ubisoft game, and as such there are going to be some conversations about the company and its policies. Of note here is their love of monetization and micro-transactions. At the time of writing the DLC store is not yet available, so I cannot comment on how that will go. This game doesn’t have a gear score system like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and nor does it use a traditional experience points system, so it will be tough to capitalize on that. There are benefits tied to gear like in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, so they could certainly add gear sets that are overpowered through the shop. It’s still just a single player game and including pay-to-win gear would just be an expensive cheat code.
I have never spent a cent in an Ubisoft in-game cash shop, and I don’t think even Star Wars cosmetics will change that. But I realize that it is not so easy for everyone, and only you can decide for yourself what is tolerable in a real-money shop. I do consider the fact that they have disabled the shop in the review build of the game to be a potential warning sign, but until we see the shop we can only speculate.
Star Wars Outlaw Review Final Thoughts:
All told, Star Wars Outlaws is an amazing game for both Star Wars fans and people who don’t care about the franchise. It was clearly made by people who enjoy the lore and wanted to have fun in the galactic sandbox. The gameplay is engaging, the graphics are superb, the sound design evokes Star Wars while still holding its own identity and the voice acting is overall well done. I have very few negative things to say about Star Wars Outlaws, and honestly, I’m just happy that there is something positive to focus on in Star Wars at the moment. Now, don’t mind me, I’m off to go exploring the galaxy in the Trailblazer and see what other things I can find in this game.