Daylight Robbery Fun, but A Galaxy Far, Far Away Isn’t Getting Any Closer to A Perfect Game Under its New Creators!
| Developers – Massive Entertainment |
| Publishers – Ubisoft |
| Platforms – PS5, XBOX Series X/S, Windows |
| Genres – Action Adventure, RPG |
| Modes – Single Player |
Imagine a game that lets you play as Han Solo, young and in his youth—barely even a petty criminal, let alone the dashing and daring smuggler we would come to love. Imagine jumping into your ship, booting up the hyperdrive, and jumping through the glorious blue flashing lights of hyperspace to find yourself on a planet you’ve known since you were a child. To walk with the Sand People and the Hutt Cartel, to go to Canto Bight or Kimji City. To live, breathe, and walk in the Star Wars universe—a galaxy that’s been so far, far away for so long. Travelling it like this should feel like coming home.
What you’re given is an overpriced and overhyped role-playing game with some redeeming qualities. Make no mistake, Star Wars Outlaws is a fun game. In my nearly 20+ hours, I have been thrilled to race away from the Empire on a speeder, sneak into a Crimson Dawn hideout, and blast my way through an Imperial base.
It’s got all the necessary mechanics that a good Star Wars smuggling/outlaw role-playing game should have. Unfortunately, the game has been developed by Ubisoft, and what could’ve been an amazing, award-winning, narratively fantastic new entry into Star Wars is instead somewhat bland and frankly quite repetitive—a typical Ubisoft title. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it, just don’t spend nearly £100 to do so.
I’ll be the first to say I’m usually the one who gets on these three-day early access deals and cool-looking trailers that make me think, ‘You know what, maybe this game is worth it!’ And in all honesty, I’ve really enjoyed my time playing Outlaws. In fairness, I knew what I was getting into with Ubisoft. You can give me all that baloney about how it comes from one of their better studios, but a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, and a game by Ubisoft is always going to verge on amazing but fall into the same old typical tropes.
Before I really get into what was good and what was bad, let me tell you a little about the game. The story follows Kay Vess, a young outlaw from Canto Bight who takes a contract that gets her into trouble with a brand-new cartel known as Zerek Besh. Kay is forced to go on the run and later pulled into a scheme to rob Zerek Besh of their 153 million credits.
As narratives go, it’s not that interesting, and if I’m honest, I’m mostly there for the cute creature—his name is Nix, by the way, and he is f***ing adorable! Kay isn’t the most interesting protagonist, though she’s played well by her voice actress Humberly González (Netflix’s Ginny and Georgia), who’s thankfully, mainly due to the long length of the game, given ample opportunity to showcase her acting prowess.
Now, let’s step into what’s good about the game. Alongside the fantastic actress in the lead, there are numerous talents who perform exceptionally admirably considering they must surely know how much criticism they’re probably going to receive. I mean, I’m not exactly talking about the same responses Abby’s voice actress got in The Last of Us Part II, but… well, Star Wars fans being what they are (and by that, I merely refer to the small minority who are sexist, racist, fat, and lonely little incels).
Ubisoft does one thing well: they render beautiful and cinematically astounding environments. Every single planet is magnificent. Every environment is sublime. There is such detail in the way they have painted this world with its architecture and its characters. From the citizens who crawl around the hive of scum and villainy that is Mos Eisley to the nebula in orbit around Toshara, there is not a single place you visit in this game that has me feeling any sort of visual ick. In performance mode, the game runs above 30 frames per second and demonstrates this galaxy far, far away beautifully in 4K HDR.
The cartel system is also done well. Not only do the various criminal organisations have unique designs, tactics, and units, but they also have a reputation system which feels significant. Being in good with a syndicate or a cartel is fantastic. You find yourself getting better offers on goods, new cosmetics which provide you with better abilities, and they truly influence gameplay. When you get in bad, it is BAD: forget about trading, forget about associating, forget about feeling safe on the streets. The same system applies quite well with the Empire’s wanted system, which escalates nicely. At a low level, ground troops and stormtroopers will hunt you down, but at the highest, death troopers will be sent to eviscerate you. The same applies for ground and space wanted levels, with each increase adding its own increment of Empire ships or Imperial troops to come after you.
Now onto the bad, and unfortunately, there is a decent amount of it. I’ll say from the get-go, I’ve always been a defender of this game. That’s been quite accurate for most Ubisoft games, actually. I might be one of the few people on the planet that actually enjoyed Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Would I still play it today? Probably not. The problem with Ubisoft is they think they’re a AAA game-making company. And I think that’s where most of their problems lie. Because they’re not.
Outlaws isn’t worth nearly £100; at best, it’s worth £50—and I’m being generous there. It clearly has the potential to be a Game of the Year release but is instead some partially completed rendering of what could be a great Star Wars game. And if you’re okay settling for good, then good, because that’s what you’ll get. But I think they could’ve done a lot better.
Space combat, for example, feels very lazy. The mechanics are all there and they all work right, but it just doesn’t feel right. Playing on normal difficulty, it’s easy to see that combat isn’t supposed to feel challenging—except it should feel challenging when you’re being overwhelmed and overrun by hundreds (maybe not, but a bit of hyperbole never hurt anyone) of Imperial ships. Kay is thrown into a ship and seems to immediately become one of the greatest pilots who have ever lived. Granted, the same could be said for Solo, as we’ve seen on screens he wasn’t always the amazing pilot he was by the time of the first trilogy. But it feels strange that she manages to dominate space battles when it comes to combat.
And combat itself is not amazing. You’re essentially given two choices of weapons and one choice of ship, which you can never change. This feels incredibly limiting when you’ve got a universe filled with fictional ships with their own unique pros and cons. The Trailblazer isn’t even that cool looking—to me, it reminds me of the RV of ships. Further, space doesn’t feel like there’s much to do beyond the visual element. While you can have quite cool-looking landings, it’s not exactly seamless; there is definitely a loading screen despite what’s been said. While in space, you’re essentially completing quite mundane and uninteresting tasks for various criminal organisations, none of them paying particularly well.
This comes into another problem—what are you supposed to do with all your credits? I get it’s nice to buy upgrades and cool-looking outfits, but this is a galaxy far, far away! At least let you buy a home, new ship parts, and new ships! The same can be said for No Man’s Sky and Star Citizen. It’s not a concept that would’ve gone down poorly. Sometimes it feels like credits purely exist to advance you within very narrow and selective areas.
Again, don’t get me wrong—the abilities you earn and the way you progress through them are very original compared to the usual fighting, completing tasks until you get enough experience points to level up. However, you don’t get many opportunities to mix and match various abilities because most combat situations come down to either (a) running away or (b) shooting furiously while sliding and front-rolling between cover points.
Ubisoft does not have it down when it comes to combat, definitely not for Star Wars. When we’ve seen films where a single blaster shot takes down a stormtrooper, it feels like a break from canon when it takes me a full reload to put down an unarmed Imperial technician or officer. The modifications do add a nice little shift in combat, especially when you’re three or four hours into the game and getting a bit frustrated that you can’t have a weapon with various options, but again, the options are very limited.
Stealth is also quite limiting at times. There are generally numerous ways to approach an incursion into an enemy base, but the stealth mechanics are copied and pasted from pretty much every Assassin’s Creed game ever made. And if you’re caught, then you better be quick on the trigger because if you don’t shoot these guys quickly enough, the whole base will find out where you are without a single word being uttered.
It’s very clear to me that this game has a lot of potential, and if it was still in development, I might have some hope that Ubisoft could redeem this and make it into a great, fantastic, and amazing experience for all players. But it’s not, and even if it was, they wouldn’t. Ubisoft is reliably known for creating the mid-standard for gaming, and Disney knows exactly what they’ve gotten into with this company.
Out of desperation to keep Star Wars somewhat relevant and somewhat profitable, I’m sure there’ll be a fair few people like me who bought the game for the three-day early launch, making a bit of money for both companies’ quite large investments. It’s so frustrating because you can see that this game was going to be good. They had all the pieces to finish the puzzle, but they were lazy and threw the bits around the edge to the side and just focused on the middle picture. And that’s what you get with Ubisoft. Something that looks good and plays average.
Is it enjoyable? Yes, there is plenty about the game that I’ve enjoyed. I’ve enjoyed jumping from planet to planet, exploring new biomes. I’ve enjoyed sneaking around, breaking into places, and performing tasks for criminal organisations without seeing a single lightsabre within 100,000 light-years. I’ve enjoyed what is good about this game, and for most, this will not be possible because they have too high an expectation for what Star Wars should be.
Guess what? Star Wars is owned by a company that doesn’t know what to do with Star Wars, and that’s been the case for a very long time.
The best days of the galaxy far, far away are long behind us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the little things that get dropped every now and again. Outlaws isn’t a meal prepped at a Michelin-starred restaurant; it’s the corner shop grub that fills you up and makes you feel good for a little while before it all gets dropped down the toilet and forgotten about. Sadly, it’s probably not going to get much better from here on out—unless you enjoy Souls-like games, in which case the next Jedi game, whenever it releases, will probably be worth the wait.
A 6.75 out of 10.
