Billed as the first ever open-world Star Wars game, Star Wars: Outlaws is the latest title from Ubisoft-owned developer Massive Entertainment. You play as a burgeoning smuggler, thief and all-round space-rapscallion Kay Vess, who, alongside her furry companion Nix, is looking for the big job that will set her up for life.
Kay is armed with a simple blaster, grappling hook and various other gadgets. There are no lightsabers in sight, and in over 20 hours of playing, I have yet to hear the word ‘Jedi’ uttered even once. Instead, Kay is a Han Solo type, she’s far from a chosen one, has no special innate abilities and is loyal only to herself and her wallet (and Nix of course).
All of this is a pretty interesting pitch, as the vast majority of Star Wars games have you wielding the force, a lightsaber and having a consequential role in the events of the movies, but not so consequential that it contradicts said movies.
By and large, Star Wars: Outlaws delivers on the promise of offering an experience where you’re kind of a nobody. It may take quite a while to open up – the first few hours are spent in extremely linear story missions – but when it does, it begins to morph into something truly special. But first, let’s cover the basics.
Generally speaking, Star Wars: Outlaws play like Uncharted, or Assassin’s Creed. You crouch-walk to stealthily take out enemies, and then switch to running and gunning if you get spotted. As Kay, you will climb through vents and up walls, hack computers, pick locks, avoid security cameras and so on. A twist on the formula comes in the form of your cute companion Nix. With the press of a shoulder button, Kay can send Nix to fetch items, open doors, and to distract or even attack guards.
Visually, the game is gorgeous. This is confidently the new benchmark for graphical fidelity in a game as open as this. There are certainly some issues, hair clipping through clothes, some blurriness at times, but overall Star Wars: Outlaws presents an absurdly well-realised world. I’m lucky enough to have a TV that is able to make the most of the 40 FPS mode, and it proved a perfect middle ground between fidelity and performance.
Eventually, Kay ends up on the planet Toshara, where you finally get to explore the game’s first truly open map. It’s here that you acquire a speeder to zip around on and, a little later, a spaceship dubbed the Trailblazer. Far from being a traditional Ubisoft open-world, you may be surprised at how devoid of points of interest and quest markers Toshara’s map is at first. This is due to the intel system.
Instead of featuring a traditional quest system where you are explicitly directed toward an NPC, talk to them to get a quest, complete the quest, and get a reward, Star Wars Outlaws tries something a little different. It requires you to follow leads, called intel, by listening in on interesting conversations, reading datapads and making use of your local contacts.
The fundamentals are the same – by completing chains of intel you will in most cases get a map marker pointing you to a specific area – but how the game gets you to that point makes all the difference. When entering a new city or district, I found myself naturally looking around for suspicious characters and keeping an ear out for interesting conversations, rather than beelining to the next waypoint.
Instead of going from marker to marker, ticking things off in an endlessly refreshing checklist, I was actually exploring. The game was telling me “there’s something to find over here” and not “here’s the exact location of the object/person of interest”. It’s a subtle shift that has a huge impact on how exploration feels. The result is a world that feels dynamic and far more immersive than your average open world game.
Adding to this feeling of a living, breathing world is the reputation system. As a scoundrel, Kay must work with various criminal syndicates to make a name for herself. Each gang has their own reputation meter, and depending on which missions you complete, and what decisions you make, you will increase or decrease your standing with them.
Having a good rep with a gang rewards you with special items, merchants and missions, and provides unimpeded access to the districts they control in the various cities you visit. If a particular mission requires you to retrieve something from a district controlled by the Hutts, for example, it might be a good idea to fulfil some contracts for them first, so that you can simply walk in.
Unlocking abilities is tied to ‘experts’ you come across out in the world. Each expert has a number of abilities they can teach you and instead of using skill points or XP to unlock them, you have to fulfil specific requirements. These range from taking out enemies in a certain way, to finding special items, to performing an exceptionally long jump on your speeder.
In essence, you unlock abilities by engaging as much as possible with the game’s various systems. Again, it’s a subtle shift in what is essentially a fancy skill tree, but it really did influence how I played the game. Instead of combat encounters becoming a repetitive chore, I saw them as an opportunity to progress one of the expert’s requirements.
Additionally, you have to actually find these experts first. This was never as straightforward as tracking a quest and following a marker. Locating some of them required going down a rabbit hole of intel chains and travelling to multiple planets. On the flip side, some you can stumble upon entirely by accident.
The intel, reputation and expert systems all work brilliantly together to create a world and gameplay loop that feels endlessly enticing and rewarding. It solves the problem so many open world games have where it’s fun at first, but by hour 20 you’ve done the same thing so many times that you just mainline the story to get it done. In Star Wars: Outlaws, everything feels worthwhile, and nothing feels rote.
Here’s an example of all these systems working together. Upon completing a side mission, I had to decide what to do with some sensitive data that two different gangs wanted. Either way, I’d be upsetting one faction and appeasing the other. I considered that one of the factions controlled a district where a particular broker had set up shop. Thanks to an intel chain I’d followed up earlier, I knew this broker had information that could point me to the location of an expert in splicing and therefore a brand-new suite of unlockable splicing abilities. And so my choice was made.
Making decisions like this in other open world games is usually arbitrary. Either I need more ‘good guy’ points than ‘bad guy’ points, or I’m grinding out a certain trophy, or I just go with whatever reputation is lowest. Here, I made the decision a scoundrel would make: how do I come out on top?
Believe it or not, Star Wars: Outlaws does have a story to tell beyond the one you make yourself role-playing as a smuggler. It’s nothing to write home about, and indeed is intrinsically tied to Kay Vess’ journey, which is where the problem lies. While it is definitely fun to play as Kay Vess, as a character there just isn’t a lot to her.
The core of her character seems to be the love of her admittedly charming pet, Nix. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly some heartwarming and emotional moments that stem from this relationship. However, it is not enough to carry an entire narrative. Kay’s dialogue is clearly meant to show that she’s endearingly out of her depth, is making things up as she goes along, and doesn’t really have any clue what to do or how to do it. This is fine… for a while, but she just stays that way for far too long.
Kay, as a character, needs to develop alongside the player. As the player learns more about the world, gets more confident in their abilities and forms opinions on the various characters they encounter, so too should Kay. But she doesn’t, she remains awkward, bumbling, and obviously pretending to be in control. This isn’t a dealbreaker, the real story of the game stems from how you choose to engage with the world and its systems, but it is a shame nonetheless.
There’s more to talk about: you can explore open areas of space in your ship, including engaging in dogfights, salvaging cargo and even docking on space stations in some cases. Kay’s blaster has different modes you can unlock as you progress through the story, each with their own upgrade tree. Finally, there are a surprising amount of minigames, including a selection of in-world arcade machines, speeder racing, you can bet on fathier (see: space horse) races, and best of all, play the card game Sabacc.
Star Wars: Outlaws surprised me. Going in, I was expecting a by the numbers Ubisoft open-world game set in the Star Wars universe. What I found instead was a fairly ambitious take on the tried and true open world formula, that fully commits to (and largely succeeds in) delivering an immersive and dynamic space scoundrel role-playing experience. It may falter when it comes to telling a compelling main narrative, and Kay Vess is no Arthur Morgan, but this isn’t enough to diminish the elements that shine.
More than this, beyond any one plot element or gameplay mechanic, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve played a Star Wars game that feels as lived-in and immersive as this. This really hit home as I was riding my speeder back from a mission in the harsh sands of Tatooine. In the distance, as the twin suns set, I could see the outline of Mos Eisley silhouetted against the horizon. As I approached the outskirts of the city, I dipped down a tunnel that eventually led to a hangar where I’d docked the Trailblazer.
From there I could jump in the cockpit and fly into space to explore Tatooine’s orbit, or take a short elevator ride up to the seedy main streets of Mos Eisley, perhaps visit the cantina or find a merchant who can upgrade my speeder.
It may seem simple but there are very few games that offer this level of seamless freedom, and even fewer that are set in this universe. Star Wars: Outlaws deserves high praise for offering this alone.
Rating: 8/10
Star Wars: Outlaws was reviewed on PS5 with a code provided by Ubisoft.
