GameCentral reviews Ubisoft’s new open world game, with a journey into the dark underbelly of the Star Wars universe.
The Star Wars movies have been around almost as long as commerical video games themselves, with the influence of the franchise on gaming being second only to The Lord Of The Rings/Dungeons & Dragons. In the early days that meant that many of the games were more than simple cash grabs, with titles like the original Atari coin-op, Rebel Assault, and Knights Of The Old Republic being important milestones in their own right.
Licensed slop, like the recent Star Wars: Hunters, has always existed but while the franchise’s batting average did slip during the prequel era, many Star Wars games throughout the years have been genuine classics. EA’s two Star Wars Jedi titles have fallen just short of that accolade, but they were very good and so, in large part, is Star Wars Outlaws.
Like all licensed games, how you react to Outlaws will depend on your feelings on the original property, which immediately causes an existential crisis for most Star Wars fans, given the poor state of the shows and films at the moment. We’ve said many times that a Han Solo simulator is our dream Star Wars game and this is easily the closest there’s been to such a thing. But it’s also a Ubisoft open world game, and whatever your feelings on Star Wars, that also comes with its own baggage.
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Han Solo does make a brief cameo in the game, still stuck in carbonite, on the wall of Jabba the Hutt’s palace. You play as down-on-her-luck thief Kay Vess, who the game’s marketing constantly describes as a ‘scoundrel’. She, together with her pet Nix – who looks like an oversized axolotl and takes the Chewbacca role in the relationship – will steal anything that’s not nailed down, and while she generally only steals from other criminals, at the beginning of the game she has little opportunity to be altruistic.
After ending up with a death mark from a new crime boss, during the game’s opening, Kay goes on the run with a high-powered stolen spaceship. Her eventual goal is to organise a heist so big she can retire on the proceeds but much of the first half of the game is spent just drifting from one minor job to the next, working for each of the four criminal cartels in the galaxy – with who your reputation ebbs and flows as double-crosses are treated as occupational hazards.
Before release, developer Massive Entertainment, who are best known for The Division, insisted that the game was not a bloated 100+ hour epic, but that’s only true from a certain point of view. The game has no true role-playing elements, so while you can unlock new skills as you progress, you could try and do only the story missions and it would only last around 30 hours.
You’d have to be really disinterested in the game to play it like that though, as once you get your bearings you’re bombarded with a dizzying array of options for who to work for and how to make money. Before you start worrying about icons on maps, and giant waypoint markers everywhere, the game is very restrained in that regard, for a Ubisoft title, and the way options are presented feels very organic.
There’re different levels to everything, with bespoke story missions at the top and randomised ‘events’ at the bottom, that range from simple bandit ambushes to the Empire wiping out a pirate camp and then you sneaking in to steal the spoils. Almost everything else feels handcrafted though, even though some of it probably isn’t, and while a lot of it is essentially fetch quests, you can get involved in everything from breaking and entering to interstellar smuggling.
Missions are given out by brokers, working for one or multiple cartels, or you can simply hang around in bars, listening in on conversations that can either lead to missions or information you can pass on. A lot of quests devolve into just ‘go here and shoot people’, and there’s probably a few too many sneaking missions inside Imperial ships or compounds, but it all hangs together very well.
Well, except for the lockpick and hacking mini-games. The latter is just Wordle with Star Wars icons and the former is, inexplicably, a rhythm action game. You can turn it off via the options menu though, which we did almost immediately.
A dozen or so hours into the game your list of possible quests becomes extremely long and you realise how much time is needed to try and complete them all, but the natural thing to do at that point is focus more on the story missions and that works very well as a change of pace. There are multiple planets in the game and after the first one you can visit any of the next three whenever you want, with each having an open world environment of their own.
Some are bigger and more densely designed than others, with the initial world of Toshara being the most intricate and a very interesting addition to the Star Wars canon, with its extreme winds that carve weird shapes out of the landscape and have people farming fish in giant nets they hang in the sky.
The story missions revolve around recruiting a number of different people for your heist: a safecracker, a heavy, a droid expert, and so on. At this point, Tatooine is grossly overused as a setting in Star Wars but the mission there is one of the best, with lots of unexpected plot twists and a great boss battle – of which there are otherwise few – with a rancor.
Part of the reason it works is that there are more personal stakes for Kay, and she gets to interact with more people. All your recruits are damaged to some degree (literally, when it comes to the droid ND-5), with each suffering from a lack of self-worth, regret, or an inability to trust. While the script is rarely more than adequate the storytelling still gets its points across without resorting to overlong cut scenes and it all zips along nicely.
It’s a shame more of your crew weren’t more likeable though, especially ND-5, although there are some interesting characters elsewhere, such as the bounty hunter Vail, whose character arc takes some unexpected twists. Kay herself is helped by some good voice acting but hindered by some very poor facial animation and an absolutely hideous haircut.
She needed a few more rough edges though and while it would’ve been lazy to make her a gender flipped Han Solo she would’ve benefited from some vices equivalent to his womanising, arrogance, or occasional incompetence. Instead, she’s just unlucky and doesn’t trust anyone. Although that still makes her more interesting than the majority of other video game action leads.
Star Wars Outlaws nerdy nitpicks
We haven’t let any of this affect the game’s final score or verdict but as Star Wars fans there were a number of things that rankled us.
The first is the poor use of official sound effects. The AT-ST walker, for example, animates horribly and uses only a cheap stomping sound effect when it moves, rather than the one from the films. Speeder bikes never sound like they should either and Kay’s punches don’t have the distinctive Lucasfilm snap. Only the E-11 stormtrooper weapons sound the way they should, while Kay’s is more like something out of Battlestar Galactica.
The way aliens are portrayed also feels badly off, even if you could say the same for most of the Disney era live action stuff. Not only are there not enough aliens in general, as a percentage of the populations, but almost all of them just speak English (Basic, according to in-canon terminology) even though many, such as Sullustans and Rodians, were never shown doing so in the original trilogy, when this is set.
More importantly, almost none of them have their voices modulated, such as for the distinctive rasp of Mon Calamari, and instead everyone is given either generic American accents or random British regional ones, as if Ubisoft had accidentally hired voice actors for a medieval fantasy game instead.
The end result is that very few seem alien enough. Everyone acts and talks like ordinary humans and it’s notable that the game features very few species that would be anything more than a simple mask in live action.
That’s weird, because that’s not a limitation for video games and some wilder ones, like Ithorians and Chadra-Fan, are in the game and look much more visually interesting, but just don’t turn up much. The lack of variety is especially evident when visiting landmarks like the Mos Eisley cantina or Jabba’s palace because almost everyone is either human or just human with a creature mask.
However, we will give the game points for being stricter about hyperspace rules than any of the Disney stuff, as well as for including a lot of more obscure ship designs from various parts of the canon.
In gameplay terms, Outlaws is a lot better than we expected, even after playing three hours of hands-on preview. Maybe it was just because the game makes better use of the DualSense’s haptic feedback than most games, but the gunplay was a lot tighter and more satisfying than we remember and our favourite in a modern Star Wars game.
There’s also a lot of Uncharted style platforming and a surprising amount of stealth. Since the latter is often in Imperial owned locations it’s surprisingly reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid at times, although much more simplistic. It’s a real shame you can’t move bodies, as enemies will react to them, but Nix does add some additional flavour in that you can use him to distract or attack (but never kill) enemies, or to activate nearby machinery – which works similarly to setting things off in Watch Dogs.
Kay starts off with an odd ability similar to Dead Eye from Red Dead Redemption, where she can target up to three people and shoot them all instantly after building up a meter. Despite having that superpower everything else must be learnt from one of half a dozen experts, who have to be recruited something like Mass Effect. Unlike the heist members they don’t hang around on your ship but once you’ve completed the equivalent of a loyalty mission with them, they give you access to a unique skill tree.
Since there are no skill points these are unlocked by a mixture of completing in-game achievements, such as using each of the different kinds of guns in the game, and collecting specific resources. We liked this very much, as it makes you think hard about which to prioritise and most are genuinely useful abilities, from simple stuff like expanding how many health vials you can carry to learning to do a 180° flip in your spaceship.
Spaceship combat is fine, but it’s too simplistic for our tastes, with no energy or shield balancing to be done, and a button that not only does the spaceship equivalent of aiming down sights but automatically leads a target for you, which removes almost all the skill. It’s still an entertaining enough palette cleanser though and there are also hidden secrets and quests to be found in the immediate vicinity of a planet.
You can customise your ship, speeder bike, and blaster with meaningful upgrades and cosmetics, with the former being essentially a crafting element, although the most important upgrades often involve purposefully seeking out a component that is the reward for a specific side quest.
Finally, there’s the issue of the graphics and while the gunplay was better than we expected from the preview, the visuals are worse. We were planning on the PC then, but the PlayStation 5 version represents a significant downgrade from there, with lots of low resolution textures and more pop-in than we can remember in any major game for a long time. Although, as mentioned, it’s the ugly and unemotive character visuals that are the most off-putting.
The game is ambitious, with a lot of content, but there’s also a fair amount of bugs pre-launch, the worst of which are audio. If you’re anywhere within a mile of a landing pad there’s a constant deafening noise that makes dialogue almost impossible to hear. We’d joke that Ubisoft is just trying to be realistic but there’s lots of other audio glitches and minor graphical problems too.
Overall though, we thoroughly enjoyed our time with the game. Our dream Han Solo simulator would be something like Elite crossed with a more family friendly GTA and while this is absolutely not that, it does encroach onto the same ballpark. Nevertheless, we’re aware that our (mercurial) love of Star Wars may be affecting our opinion somewhat, as even as fans this is still right on the razor’s edge when it comes to the score.
If the Star Wars elements hold no appeal to you then we’d definitely drop the score by one point but otherwise we enjoyed this slightly more than Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and slightly less than Survivor. It’s certainly not a classic in its own right but it is in the upper echelons of Star Wars games and one of the most enjoyable open world games we’ve played this generation.
Star Wars Outlaws review summary
In Short: A beguiling mix of open world exploration, mild criminality, and Star Wars flavour that, while it has its flaws, is one of the most enjoyable space adventures of recent years.
Pros: Multiple, interesting open worlds to explore and an impressive amount of freedom. Relatively non-linear storytelling and enjoyable action. Upgrade and cartel reputation systems work well.
Cons: No individual element is exceptional, with spaceship combat in particularly being overly simplified. The script could’ve done with punching up and the visuals are very disappointing after initial previews.
Score: 8/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Massive Entertainment
Release Date: 30th August 2024
Age Rating: 12
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