Taking place betweenThe Empire Strikes BackandReturn of the Jedi,with the Empire too busy with the Rebel Alliance and allowing criminal empires to gain a better hold on things,Star Wars Outlawsputs players in the shoes of Kay Vess, a thief living on Canto Bight. After a botched heist, Kay finds herself with a massive death mark on her head thanks to Sliro, head of the criminal syndicate Zerek Besh. Now, having stolen a ship and finding themselves stranded on a new planet, Kay eventually gets an offer from one Jay Rincon: help them assemble a crew to rob Sliro again and grab 157 million credits, allowing Kay to buy their freedom.
City Lights
Star Wars Outlawsgets off on the right foot when it puts Kay into one of its massive cities, complete with a lot to discover. The visuals here are incredible, nicely showing off the hustle and bustle of each area, along with their more grimier aspects. You can play arcade games, get unbelievably delicious-looking street food, gamble on races or even find tables where you can gamble away credits on Kessel Sabacc, a simple-yet-ridiculously fun card game that deserves to join the ranks of other delightful tabletop games within video games. Honestly, if no one makes a physical version of this, it would a crime. But yes, the gambling parlors, cantinas, merchants and more are all rendered in great detail.
More importantly, one of the things you may gather in cities is intel. You can eavesdrop and listen in to overhear secrets or just talk to people and gather information, leading to something hopefully valuable. This is whereStar Wars Outlawstruly comes alive, perfectly nailing that feeling of its criminal underbelly as you gather information to plan possible heists, be it stumbling across someone’s stash or sneaking into a restricted area with stolen keycards. There’s just something about all of these moments that, when combined with the more urban settings, really gets you inside the mind of Kay, allowing you to play as that scrappy underdog trying to get by. Within these cities lies a feeling of truly captivating gameplay.
Unfortunately, then you eventually leave the cities to begin the gameplay proper and that feeling quickly goes away.
Been There, Done That
Now, I don’t want to sound like a dismissive mid-’90s, fifth generation video game critic who would whine about older genres such as platformers for “doing the standard video game things” or whatnot, but this is an Ubisoft action-adventure game, so pretty much all the standard, generic things you would expect from an Ubi game at this point are inStar Wars Outlaws. The open-world exploration parts where you stumble across various landmarks, the parts where you scope out enemy bases to sneak through and mark foes, the part where the game splits into three sections with their own plots, the climbing sections that have a dash ofUncharted,etc. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by re-explaining the formula, so let’s just say that it’s mostly competent, save for the occasional stiff controls, and try to focus on whatever new or notable additions to it there are.
One of the big twists inStar Wars Outlawsis the use of factions. The game has four different underworld factions to work for – the Pyke Syndicate, Crimson Dawn, Hutt Cartel and Ashiga Clan – and your possible interactions with them can be altered by the reputations you’ve created. If you’re on good or even excellent terms, a clan can reward Kay with discounts from their merchants or even send gifts to their ship. A reputation of “Poor” means you can’t even get caught in certain sections of cities under a clan’s control without getting caught and thrown out, and at worst, they’ll actively try and kill you. To boost your reputation, you can take jobs from brokers, which can potentially add to your reputation with one clan, but also lower your reputation with another.
Star Wars Outlaws Post-Launch Plans Revealed, Includes Story Expansion Featuring Lando Calrissian
Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft today dropped their plans for Star Wars Outlaws' post launch support.
It’s not the most unique concept, but one that could add a decent amount of challenge in trying to balance Kay’s reputations among all four factions…itcould,but it doesn’t, because this part ofStar Wars Outlawsis undermined by its options in how to approach it. There are certain jobs from brokers like delivering items or planting listening devices that, if done correctly, only result in a positive reputation boosts, along with other things like delivering certain datacards you can find to a clan’s merchants. So I just picked those options when needed, and as a result, I finished the game with Kay in good or excellent standings with all four factions without breaking a sweat, her reputation only dipping whenever the plot demanded it.
It doesn’t help that the broker jobs tend to quickly become repetitive. I remember doing two separate deliveries for the Pykes and Crimson Dawn that ended up being the same job. The same map, the same pick-up point (marked by an empty container I had previously looted), the same path, the same drop-off point, all despite coming from bitter enemies. And once I was good with all them, there was no incentive to risk Kay’s reputation. The gametriesto tempt you with the ability to double-cross a faction after completing their broker job by offering more credits and/or a reputation boost with another faction at the cost of a reputation drop, but it never came across as being worth it. Honestly, you have to activelytryto get your reputation with a clan to anything below “Poor,” let alone the lowest rank that sends out the death squads.
I know I’m harping on this feature quite a bit, but considering thatStar Wars Outlawshas a story and settings that revolve around these underworld syndicates and that this gameplay feature was one of the more notably advertised ones, it just seems baffling that it ultimately amounts to nothing as long as you play your cards right. It even seems like some later missions were even banking on players having negative reputations, having you travel into various faction territories and expecting players to have to sneak around even the non-restricted sections. But nope, do everything right, and you can just waltz through on your way to an objective marker. It’s quite the letdown, needless to say.
Moving on, there’s the space travel and space combat, which…well, let’s just say theBlack Flagship battles, these aren’t. You can traverse the orbit of each planet to gather cargo and fight enemies, and maybe it’s just my own relative inexperience with 3D spaceship combat, but it was not fun at all, largely due to awkward controls, combat where you can barely see enemies and disorienting gameplay. Luckily, after some initial tutorial with this gameplay in the first act and outside using hyperspace to head between planets/maps, space travel never became essential again in order to progress the game…
…at least untilliterallythe final part of the game,which suddenly turns into a dogfight with multiple ships. Yes, after never being required for at least a good seventy percent of the game, suddenlyStar Wars Outlawsrequires you to have mastered it at the very end. At this point, it felt like the game was basically insisting that I quit this hours-long final quest so that I could grind more in order to get materials needed to upgrade the ship and handle more spacefaring missions.
There’s also the use of Nix, Kay’s little pet, who can be used to distract enemies or attack them, or steal items from them. They can also trigger switches and do things like sabotage alarms for a distance, leading to them being used in a few minor puzzles. While Nix is cute as a button and their relationship with Kay is a highlight, their use in gameplay is fun, but nothing revolutionary. The game also has lockpicking taking the form of a brief rhythm game-esque bit, and slicing (RE: hacking) computers involves a bit ofMastermind,but they feel like desperately trying to put any spin on these now-standard parts of huge action-adventure games.
Finally, there are the Experts feature. Instead of the traditional system of gaining experience points,Star Wars Outlawsinstead has a series of experts that you may discover throughout its world, and after competing individual quests for them, you unlock a series of abilities from each one (such as learning how to handle heavy weapons, move faster whole crouched, draw extra cards in Kessel Sabacc and more) that Kay can learn by completing certain tasks, such as jumping their speeder bike across sixty meters without being ejected, uncovering treasure, getting headshots and other gameplay tasks. At the very least, it does feel like a genuine attempt to innovate the traditional skill tree setup, especially since you have greater control over what order you unlock them in.
Definitely No Trying Here
Again, though, the problem is undermining, in this case being the Experts system undermining the gameplay. In something like theFar Cryseries, experience and other rewards are typically your incentive when it comes to taking care of enemies as stealthily and efficiently as possible, gaining bonuses for not having enemies trigger alarms and such. But without any real rewards for a stealth approach and the actual rewards only requiring a handful of actions like distractions, you begin to wonder whynotjust head into every mission with guns a-blazing? The only wayStar Wars Outlawsdeals with this question is to either have broker missions only offer one chance at them (unless, of course, you quit and load a previous save), or have missions explicitly say that you can’t trigger any alarms, lest you instantly fail. And even then, you can still take the guns a-blazing approach as long as you prevent any enemies from using alarms.
And after beating the game, I came to the realization that the constant use of sections where you’re able to’t trigger alarms was theonlything that madeStar Wars Outlawseven remotely challenging. The main campaign is basically a cakewalk, with the third-person shooting never evolving and enemy difficulty never going beyond a few tougher enemies later on. Never once did I need to use any of the advanced skills offered by the experts. Or for that matter, use Kay’s Adrenaline skill (basically a reskinned Deadeye mode fromRed Dead Redemption). I didn’t even use the grenades I had picked up even once, no matter how many were lying by to pick up.
A Jedi Shall Not Know Usefulness
And ultimately, that sums up the biggest, most critical flaw withStar Wars Outlaws:there’s an astonishing amount of stuff in this game that is immensely, utterly,useless.The game has countless side quests, broker missions, treasures to find, but all of them stopped being appealing because they just kept offering up the same rewards: credits and materials that can be used for upgrades (because, ofcourse,there’s a crafting mechanic of some kind). And you can use your upgraded blaster so that you can earn more materials for other upgrades to earn more materials for other upgrades to earn-you get the idea. It might be fine if all these extra missions had any variety in their objectives or level designs, or at least some flavor or well-written stories to them, but there isn’t. And yet, all of it is constantly thrown at you.
Basically, everything surrounding the story missions inStar Wars Outlawsis a distraction – even more than usual when it comes to open-world games. It’s all filler, side content that’s nothing more than mere content, just there to give the illusion of a massive, gigantic game. And yet honestly, if this was just a leaner game that lasted ten to twelve hours, it would have been substantially better, because it wouldn’t be bogged down with unnecessary open-world junk. There’s actually a wholeGTA-style “Wanted” system in play if you tick off the Empire too much by snooping around Imperial bases, and I triggered it maybeonce,and even then the Death Troopers summoned never caught up to me because I was miles away from the area by then, and it just faded away. It’s yet another pointless addition.
I don’t have a dislike for open-world games, but the gameplay in their worlds has to be executed properly.Far Cry 5is an example of the best Ubisoft open-world gameplay (in spite of it having the worst story), because it encourages players to naturally explore the world and discover all of the various secrets within it.Star Wars Outlaws,meanwhile, is the type of game that wants toforceplayers to engage with its open worlds, which also aren’t particularly creative. Outside of good landscape shots, there’s barely anything to see in them, nothing outside the token objectives scattered throughout, in contrast to the constant activity in the cities, anyway.
Something Something Dark Side
It’s all just generic stuff with nothing interesting to find, as if Ubisoft is holding back anything that would make all of these features meaningfulfor the post-launch content.But does the story at least salvage things? Not especially. Depending on how long you spend with side activities on the initial planet, it can take about four to six hours for the main plot to actually get going. There, things get promising as we get to interact with more characters, another of the game’s few strengths, be it the previously-mentioned and adorable Nix or repurposed battle droid ND-5. And the premise of anOcean’s Eleven-style heist is great, something rather unique in theStar Warsuniverse.
Unfortunately, without going into spoilers, that premise gradually goes out the window once the third act kicks in, and a story that was supposed to be all about the seedy underworld of this universe degrades into a standard batch ofStar Warsclichés that feels like it’s trying to play it safe and cater too hard to fans.
Meet the Criminal Syndicates of Star Wars Outlaws
Meet the criminal syndicates you’ll come across during your journey across the galaxy in Star Wars Outlaws.
Closing Comments:
The idea of aStar Warsgame focusing entirely on the world of outlaws in its seedier parts of the universe is a great one, but it deserved a different kind of game thanStar Wars Outlaws,instead of being suited for something more likeShadows of Doubt,Disco Elysiumor evenL.A. Noire.Even a straight, linear action game would be better. Instead, we get a boring, open-world monstrosity with uninspired gameplay, way too many useless features and a constant deluge of uninteresting side content. Kay and company deserve way better and so do the players. Save your credits and wait for something like a solo Kessel Sabacc game instead.
Star Wars Outlaws
Version Reviewed: PlayStation 5
Set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Outlaws sees you playing as Kay Vess, an outlaw who finds themselves working for the galaxy’s top crime syndicates as they navigate the underworld of the Star Wars universe.
