Star Wars: Outlaws Review (PS5) – The first time I was made aware of Star Wars: Outlaws, I was filled with a lot of apprehension.
Firstly, it was a Ubisoft title – now Ubisoft Massive made me a tad more generous as I quite like The Division – but my history with Ubisoft games is spotty, to say the least.
There are plenty of the Assassin’s Creeds I’ve not loved, and Far Cry has done nothing for me since its third installment. I’ve never been into Rainbow Six or For Honor, (though recently XDefiant did surprise me) and I stopped caring about Watch Dogs a long time ago.
I loved the older Ubisoft days – the first few Assassin’s Creed titles, the Splinter Cell games. Back before the phrase “Ubisoft formula” was coined in games discussion at all.
So to hear that Ubisoft would be making a Star Wars game made me cautious, especially since I knew the urge to play it would be too much, since I’m too big of a Star Wars fan to just watch it go by.
I’m saying all this so you understand that I really do mean it when I say my expectations have been well surpassed. Outlaws surprised and delighted me in the best ways.
As a Star Wars fan* – that’s unfortunately an important caveat to everything. Because if you’re quite a big Star Wars fan, you’ll have a great time being in this world. If the Star Wars-of it all isn’t enough for you though, far too much of it falls apart.
Star Wars: Outlaws Review (PS5) – The Stars Almost Aligned
Shiny And New (And Old)
It’s not so much of a reflection on Ubisoft itself, more one related to the current state of triple-A games, but I kind of expected Outlaws to look worse than it does.
I did preview it twice (one hands-off, one hands-on) and have paid enough attention to the marketing to know what it would look like – but all of that isn’t the same as how it looks at home, on your console and on your TV.
Which is why I was constantly impressed with just how good it looks – there’s a layer of polish to everything – particularly when scrolling the menus as you’ll often do.
Of course the rest of the game, not just the menus, looks great. One thing I noted in both my previews was that it looked like they had paid close attention to the visual details, getting everything to feel like Star Wars. That remains true across the course of the whole game.
You’ll visit a few different planets in your criminal journey that, for the most part just serve as different biomes. Each of them look great for their own reasons. Tatooine is actually my favourite of the different planets. Just something about the open desert and the look as it grows dark works really well.
Kijimi features great neon lights that contrast nicely with its constant state of darkness and ongoing snow storm, while Toshara (the new planet being introduced by Ubisoft) is a more luscious green-filled planet with an excellent main city in Mirogana.
And when it comes to anything involving the Empire, it looks sharp and clean in the way the reign of the Empire is depicted in modern Star Wars films and TV shows. During my visit to Ubisoft Toronto, realization and cinematic director Bogdan Draghici highlighted the film Rogue One as a huge visual inspiration for Outlaws, and how that film’s cinematographer Greig Fraser approached the look of that film.
Fraser’s intention was to make Rogue One look like how we remembered the original trilogy of films looking, rather than how it actually looked. Draghici and his team took the same approach here, and my whole playthrough I was amazed at just how well they executed on that, and how cinematic the game constantly looks.
Also I feel like it’s here where I should add that I didn’t face too many technical issues, but my game did freeze once and I had a few visual glitches that were more comedic than they were game-breaking.
On a side note, perhaps my favourite layer of visual polished was the “Reputation” menu, where you could see your standing with each of the criminal syndicates, displayed with a model of their leaders. They all look great, but Jabba the Hutt just looks incredible – whoever put the final shine on that model should get a raise.
Misalignment In The Structure
So the game looked great the whole time – a huge, huge check mark there. Now onto everything else, beginning with its open-world structure. I’ll admit I was apprehensive when Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty called this the “first open-world Star Wars experience.”
But that’s pretty much what this functions as, and when you’re in the opening hours of Outlaws it works wonderfully. As you’re introduced to the different crime syndicates and working with them on various jobs (many of which involve crossing other syndicates), there’s this air of mystery with each mission as to how things will go for you.
Kay is looking out for her and Nix – full stop. So as a freelancer with no loyalty to any one syndicate, I was excited to see how my choices impacted not just the main plot but all the sub-plots centered on the underworld.
It was also exciting to see Ubisoft lean into the idea that you pick up jobs as a criminal in the Star Wars universe by keeping your ears open. Leaning against the bar and overhearing a conversation that leads you to one side quest, and then another, and another.
I had a particularly exciting thread-pulling experience like that early on, it was so intriguing I went back and took notes on the steps I took because it felt like I had stumbled on something worth remembering.
The Star Wars fan in me was having an excellent time doing jobs for the Hutt cartel, getting friendly with Jabba since my own head canon is that he is just the most powerful crime boss the galaxy has ever seen. It was also a good feeling seeing my reputation meter with the Hutts go up.
But without that, as you move through the main story and the different syndicate missions it becomes more and more clear they don’t have any substantial impact on the narrative you’re creating as you shape your version of Kay Vess’s story.
Part of it is that you can simply increase your reputation with any syndicate by collecting and selling them intel. It’s not as involved or interesting as completing side quests, but it gets the job of ‘making reputation meter go up’ done just the same.
Your rewards for being in ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ standing with any of the syndicates is gear that has an impact on gameplay, but your mileage may vary on how much you feel that impact.
Likewise, your reward for being in ‘Poor,’ ‘Bad,’ or ‘Terrible’ standing with a syndicate results in nothing more than annoyance. The thing it impacts the most is how you’re treated in regions of the map controlled by different syndicates. In good standing with Crimson Dawn? You can walk right into their turf, a handy thing when completing a job involves getting on their territory.
Anything less, and you’ll have to approach them all as stealth encounters, lest you want to be thrown out of the area or shot at.
The most you’ll lose are some credits and a bit of reputation score, both of which can be gained back so quickly and easily it trivializes and breaks the whole thing down far too quickly.
Which is particularly disappointing because the Star Wars-of it all means that for me, I’m still having a good time crossing and double-crossing different syndicates and getting involved in the turf wars of the criminal underworld. I like the structure of the reputation meter, I like how it’s all laid out – but I never saw it go far enough to introduce meaningful stakes that would’ve impacted the game’s main narrative.
The lack of real stakes just makes every moment where the game definitively asks you to choose one side or another feel all the more illusory.
Misalignment In The Gameplay
With no lightsabers in sight, and no midichlorians to speak of, Kay relies on her trusty and highly-customizable blaster pistol to get her through every situation. Failing that, a pair of knuckle-sandwiches also do the trick.
It’s a great starting point for the combat at the beginning of the game, and modding your blaster to get it doing more for you in battle is a fun progression to experience.
The shooting itself is great. Tight in the way you’d expect it to be from the people behind The Division. But at the same time, if you’re doing a lot of shooting then you’re probably also getting through sections with a fair bit more challenge.
Stealth is king in Outlaws, which isn’t too much of a problem for me because I like being stealthy in games anyways, but even I have a threshold when the stealth becomes mundane.
For all the stealth gameplay in Outlaws, there’s not a lot the game does or introduces to make stealth more interesting. You can find stealth-related gear upgrades, but you quickly learn each encounter will have a few of a determined list of things you can do, and that list doesn’t grow at all by the time you’ve reached the credits.
It also doesn’t help that the enemy AI is forever dumbfounded by Nix walking in front of them and playing dead as a distraction, rather than questioning why he’s there at all.
Nix is an excellent third-arm throughout all of the gameplay, stealth included. But perhaps more tactical stealth gameplay could’ve been born out of something like having areas where Nix distracting guards won’t work, with their reactions being more aggressive in how they try and track you down.
Gunplay suffers similar issues. You’ll use your blaster the majority of the time, but you can also pick up the weapons your enemies drop – but only for a limited time.
I would’ve liked the option to at least keep one extra gun on my person – even if I could just carry it around, and would have to pick up ammo packs for it to keep using it, that would’ve felt better than dropping it because I did literally any other action that wasn’t ‘shoot’ or throwing it to the ground because it’s seemingly overheated/ran out of ammo.
Just having that second option be a tactical choice you make for a mission rather than having to just pick up whatever you can could’ve helped make every combat encounter feel more varied and unique.
The other issue to all this though is that you never really feel like you need anything but your blaster. It feels great to use particularly after a few upgrades, and it’s cool having such an all-purpose weapon on you at all times.
But when your one blaster pistol is the answer for every situation, those encounters lose a bit of what made them different, and it sets a more monotonous tone to the whole experience.
Which feels like an odd thing to note, when there are of course so many shooters where all you have is one main firearm. It stands out negatively here though, to me, because Kay’s blaster has been lightsaber-ified as her one-weapon-fits-all.
If Outlaws is meant to be a story and experience starring “a normal person” in the world of Star Wars – then you’d think that any normal person in her shoes would see the benefit in keeping a blaster rifle on her back with her pistol at her side.
Experts Are Better Than Trees
Though your progression through the criminal underworld fell flatter than I would’ve liked, the progression system that fared a touch better was the Expert system.
Rather than unlocking abilities through a skill tree where you unlock different points through earning XP, you unlock your abilities through various ‘experts’ you find across the galaxy.
You’ll start off with each expert by doing a mission for them, and then be tasked with competing specific side-objectives to unlock new abilities. For example, to unlock the “Fast Talk” ability, you need to perform a certain number of stealth and melee take-downs.
Then to get the next level of Fast Talk, you need to use the ability six times. I enjoyed this kind of progression system for your skills and abilities far more than the traditional skill tree.
With this system, I felt like I was being encourage to try and approach each encounter in more creative ways to fulfill these side objectives. I think it’s just good game design to encourage players to play in more interesting and unique ways.
The problem is that once you acquire a few upgrades you’ll almost never face an encounter where you felt like you needed it. Upgrading your blaster is arguably far more important than anything – you don’t even need to upgrade your maximum health at all, if you don’t want to.
Being over-powered is the most fun in the post-campaign part of a game like this – where you’ve earned every skill and can still feel challenged, but have a whole range of options to approach any situation.
But when you feel over-powered with just a couple upgrades unlocked, the rest of the upgrades stop feeling worth your time.Still, it’s all far more interesting than a standard skill-tree, and what I see as an example of Ubisoft doing its best to streamline parts of its Ubisoft formula.
Misalignment In The Story
I won’t be getting very in-detail with the story for spoiler-reasons but if you didn’t know, the main premise of Outlaws is that Kay Vess and her best friend/pet Nix are looking to get rich enough so they can disappear from criminal life and live freely.
A job doesn’t exactly go their way, and Kay finds herself with a giant price on her head, and lucky for her she gets offered a job with a giant payout to buy her freedom and then some. She’s then charged to put together a crew meant to pull off this galactic heist.
That’s an interesting enough foundation, and with a few intriguing side characters along for the ride that makes for a perfectly fun Star Wars adventure.
If Outlaws stayed in that lane consistently, then it might’ve felt like a less consequential tale, but it wouldn’t have felt as disappointing as this one does.
There’s plenty of really, really good writing all throughout this game, with lines that caught me off guard in the best of ways. But once again, it just doesn’t ever go far enough.
Kay and Nix are the heart of the story in many ways, but I still felt myself wanting more from Kay – from all of them. ND-5 arguably has the best full arc for his character, and while I don’t dislike how it ends for Kay, it all still felt like things just get rushed towards the end so things can be wrapped up with the kind of bow on top that lets you keep playing after the credits.
We get glimpses of what it might sound like if Outlaws began to go deeper in interesting ways, but it never picked those moments back up for me.
It all came back to the heist, and I suddenly felt like I was the problem – thinking about how I’d wished I was in a cutscene getting gripping dialogue about what more mature themes the writing had touched on – while watching the cutscene where Kay and the crew go over the schematics of their target building.
Maybe I am the problem, and my expectations not being met isn’t a poor reflection of the game. Even so when Outlaws failed to pick up on the different threads it only brushed on, it couldn’t help but feel like a missed chance at best.
You’ll Never Get Better If You Don’t Try
For someone who genuinely had a great time with Outlaws, I’ve harped on it more than I’ve praised it in this review, but for good reason. So much of Outlaws is scratching the wall blocking the line to “Great” territory, and a lot of that comes from Ubisoft really trying to go back to the drawing board on its tried-and-true formula.
There are no towers in this game to climb, but you still have a big map for each planet with a bunch of icons on it. Skill trees are out in favour of Experts, where progression is tied to gameplay challenges that can encourage more interesting ways of playing.
The main story is actually quite short when you get down to just the golden path. You can finish the main campaign in about half the time Gerighty said it would take.
In various ways it feels like Ubisoft has taken the criticisms it’s received over the years to heart and is trying new things with the sort of formula it has for making open-world games. I appreciate and applaud that – but ironically in some ways it perhaps would’ve been better, if Outlaws was more like previous Ubisoft titles.
If the game was not bigger but maybe just longer, in the sense that the syndicate dealings impacted the story in deeper ways, and we got more time with each side character, it could’ve done a lot to flesh out the things I feel Outlaws just isn’t doing enough of.
If combat leaned heavier into stealth by providing tenser, more tactical scenarios, and when you had to go loud, if there were more options than what you’re given, firefights might’ve felt more intense all the way through.
But even with all that said, and all my gripes – the experience of playing Outlaws remains a net positive. It’s a fine game at the very least, in fact there’s only one thing I’d call out that’s downright bad, which disappointingly is the speeder.
Though it grew on me by the time I hit credits, controlling it was just never as smooth as I wanted it to be and it’s ludicrous that you can only use your blaster while piloting it if you enter the Red Dead Redemption style ‘dead-eye’ mode to hit multiple enemies quickly. Why this is the case is beyond me.
The caveat to all of this though, like I said at the top, is how much you like Star Wars. My love for Star Wars is what makes Outlaws punch through that wall and cross over into “Great” territory.
So much of Outlaws is a first for Star Wars games, and it gets so many things about the experience right, that what it gets wrong feels less significant because I’m doing things in a Star Wars game I haven’t gotten to do before, and it’s incredibly refreshing to not see a lightsaber appear anywhere.
Star Wars: Outlaws is the Star Wars game I’ve wanted for years, and while that makes me all the more disappointed in the ways it falls short, they simply don’t do enough to take the fun entirely out of it.
Oh and a final PSA on something that I’d wager falls under Ubisoft as a publisher more than a developer, but the mission that is pay-walled behind the Gold and Ultimate editions of the game, Jabba’s Gambit is such a nothing-burger of a mission for one to put behind a paywall. It felt like someone on an executive level just asked for one of the larger side-quests to be cornered off, and some extra pizzazz was used when presenting its contents.
It’s a fine mission, but it doesn’t do anything more or less than the non-paywalled side quests. So don’t feel like you’re missing anything if you just pick up the standard version.
Star Wars: Outlaws will be available on PS5 on August 30, 2024.
Review code generously provided by the publisher.