I’ve been pretty excited for Star Wars Outlaws ever since its announcement. I’m someone that like’s Ubisoft’s open worlds, and I also like Star Wars, so a combination two where you play as a Han Solo-type that can con, grift and blast their way to riches is just about a dream come true. So, how does a game where you are a scruffy looking nerf-herder actually work?
Star Wars Outlaws begins on the streets of Canto Bight, a rough place that’s full of, you guessed it, scum and villainy. You may recognise it from The Last Jedi – it’s the place with the alien race horses. Kay Vess is a down-on-their-luck scoundrel looking for that one big score that will allow her and Nix, her adorable little Merqaal, to retire in luxury. However, when that opportunity turns up, things inevitably go awry and one hasty escape later, you find yourself on the moon of Toshara with a damaged ship to repair, an open world to explore, and a heist crew to get together for your mysterious new employer.
You have nine crew members to gather, though most of them don’t actually join you on your ship, instead training you with certain things, like heavy weapons for example, all unlocking new abilities for Kay and/or Nix. Those that do join you have significant quest lines and you can interact with them on your ship, but the others are given more superficial characterisation. It also doesn’t really feel like a cohesive crew, as there’s very little interaction between them.
That’s not to say that tracking them down isn’t fun though, the game taking you between five different planets. Tatooine is here as it is seemingly a legal requirement for all Star Wars media, allowing you to fulfil your dreams of driving a speeder across the Dune Sea, but there’s also Akiva, a lush jungle world with plenty of water, Kijimi, which is a large city on an extremely snowy planet, Cantonica, where Canto Bight is, and the extremely windy moon of Toshara. The latter is where you’ll be learning the basics when it comes to scoundrel-ry as you navigate the fierce rivalry between two crime syndicates in the area, the Pykes and Crimson Dawn.
This is perhaps the most interesting part of the game. You maintain a reputation with each of the four syndicates (the remaining two are the Ashiga and the Hutts – yes, those Hutts), but helping one usually means upsetting another… because it usually involves stealing from and shooting them. There are five tiers of reputation, with the worst causing them to send assassins after you, attacking whenever you see any members of the faction, and, worst of all, giving out fewer contracts to take. If you get more popular with them, you’ll be able to walk around all but the restricted areas of their territories both in cities and in the open world without being bothered, you’ll get discounts and a wider selection of rare parts from merchants, and the best contracts to complete.
It’s a really cool idea that is mostly delivered effectively, but there are a few hiccups. You can just sneak into their territory if your reputation is too low, but this becomes a forced stealth section that disables your guns and is an instant fail if you’re spotted. Now, sneaking in is fun enough, but one of your tools – a silenced stun gun – is a pretty useful part of sneaking that it takes away from you for some reason. Not being able to shoot also just feels a little out of character, when you’re more than welcome to wander into, say, a Hutt workshop in the wilderness and shoot everyone full of burning holes.
There is one group we haven’t mentioned yet: the Imperials. Outlaws is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, so Stormtroopers are a pretty common sight, and have their own camps and fortifications from which to pilfer goods and information. The Empire has quite a bit of tech, so you’ll be going on contracts to break into their compounds and gather rare materials for upgrades, downloading data they’ve collected of syndicates to return to them (or to their rivals). You’ll get a wanted level that has five stages if you’re careless, the final stage of which involves Death Troopers. They will eventually abandon the search if you can stay away from them for long enough, or you could break into an Imperial outpost and wipe your wanted level with a terminal, or escape into space and find an Imperial probe that you can hack to do the same.
These systems – the factions, the Imperials, and the contracts you get against them – combine into something that is pretty damn good at giving you the experience of being a scoundrel. Stealing from Stormtroopers, getting caught and fleeing to your ship, blasting off into space, taking out a few TIE Fighters whilst you wait for your Hyperdrive and then fleeing at lightspeed to Tatooine to deliver something to Jabba the Hutt is a sequence of events I once thought I would never experience in a game. There are a lot of other touches that really sell the scoundrel archetype as well, such as picking up information on scores by eavesdropping on conversations, discovering fixed Fathier races allowing you to bet without risk, or playing Sabacc, which I’ve been surprised to find I actually enjoy and not just because you can cheat at it.
Then there’s the Trailblazer, your ship. It’s great, handling very well both in intense combat and whilst carefully edging around wrecks looking for loot, and firing off a proton torpedo to finish off an enemy amongst a cacophony of laser fire never gets old. However, space in Outlaws is fairly limited. Once you regain control from the practically seamless take off cutscene, each planet has a reasonably sized area to fly around in your ship with some stuff to loot and plenty of space battles to end up in, but you could probably knock out all the locations on your first visit and have no reason outside of contracts and missions to go there again. What’s there is enjoyable enough, there just isn’t that much of it.
This is also your one and only ship, and there’s limited options to improve it. Cannons, proton torpedos, shields and the like all have two or three variants to choose between, and these can then be upgraded once or twice each. I’d have loved to see a loot system for more depth to upgrading my ship, but it’s basically like upgrading the weapons in Kay’s pocket, and it just doesn’t really feel like it’s my ship.
I also don’t get to ride the Speeder I really want to – you know, the one from Return from the Jedi? This one looks like a real life motorbike without wheels, but everyone I’m fighting uses the one I wanted, so I’m blowing it up over and over like some kind of ironic punishment. It has other quirks, like speeder free zones kicking you off and forcing you to run away and summon it to you, which is frustrating to say the least, but it gets you from A to B quite handily.
Another slightly underwhelming aspect is that, graphically, Star Wars Outlaws is not that amazing playing on PS5. The planets look nice, and Toshara’s environment is pretty distinctive, but aside from that we’re talking about your fairly standard feeling jungle, desert, and snow planets. Perhaps other open world games have spoiled me, but outside of those first launch into space, Outlaws didn’t make me gasp with its beauty like AC Valhalla did. Facial animations are a little stilted and rough as well, even with Kay and other main characters.
Speaking of which, Kay Vess can mostly can be summed up as being a Han Solo-type with a Merqaal instead of a Wookie. She can be entertaining at times, but doesn’t leave much of an impression beyond her archetype. The villains and syndicate leaders are a touch more interesting, but they are in the background for most of the game.
There are also a handful of bugs that I’ve encountered, though nothing game breaking. I completed the last section of a mission three times before it stopped showing back up in my journal, as well as some minor graphical glitches and bugs in randomly occurring event quests that will hopefully be patched out.