OK. Let’s not beat around the bush. We really thought that Star Wars Outlaws could have been pretty bad. A mediocre affair at best. You could just remake any old Ubisoft-style open world game with Star Wars stuff and be done with it. The money is in the bank.
Although we (especially the author of this article) are sick of Ubi-style open world games, we have had a blast with this game for the past 35 hours because of one very important aspect that Massive Entertainment has perfected: the mood. The mood in this game is flawless, giving you a sense of a Star Wars universe stripped of the usual Jedi/Empire pomp and suffocating politics.
It’s about outlaw villains and renegades, the slick denizens of the Mos Eisley Cantina, crime cartels, pew-pew laser shootouts, beat-up speeder bikes, and all the things that were actually really cool about the movies (okay, there are no lightsabers, but we’re over that). Playing as Kay Vess just feels cool, it looks cool (for the most part), and even early on, before the game shows its full potential, there’s a lot to enjoy just taking surprisingly detailed and atmospheric locations from the various movies and shooting people in slow motion.
It really fits, considering that the films, let’s be honest, are also very much driven by cool vibes. It’s what we want, what we need and what we expect from Star Wars. The acting is usually rough, the dialogue is awful, but there are great spaceships, AT-AT walkers and these little sand guys that make noise, so all the nonsense kind of fades into the background. Here it’s the game mechanics that are… well… decent, they do their job, but it’s these all-encompassing star Wars Vibes who make it.
As Kay Vess, you get into a bit of a sticky situation with a crime syndicate in a story we found gripping throughout (no spoilers here), and must assemble a squad to pull off a heist and make a lot of money. Kay must rise through the ranks, make important friends, learn the life of a renegade, and prepare to run with the big fish. From this simple setup, we get to travel to various exciting planets from the films and play a Han Solo-esque role, shooting bad guys and pitting gangs against each other via a surprisingly robust faction system, as well as zooming around on a customizable speeder bike. Honestly, that probably would have been enough for us, but there’s a lot more we weren’t expecting.
When we first sat down to play Star Wars Outlaws, we were worried that it had taken on far too much, as it gave players large, detailed open world sections to explore while also introducing space travel and even space combat. You could say we had a bad feeling about it. However, these space parts aren’t just good, they actually outperform many games (hi, Starfield) when it comes to transitioning between planetary surfaces and space, resulting in a hugely atmospheric travel system that adds a lot of, you guessed it, fun. vibes, to the procedure.
Targeting a planet and zooming through its atmosphere to reveal a massive city or incredible vista is amazing at the best of times (let’s imagine), but arriving in places like Tatooine that you think you know so well is just very exciting. Plus, the space sections look fantastic, with huge colorful planets, asteroid belts, and junk everywhere, and the dogfights – while fairly simplistic – feel and look sophisticated too.
And then on the planet side, where we expected the boring aspects of these kinds of games – the collecting, the tower climbing and so on – to somehow take over and ruin everything, Massive has decided against that. Yes, they’ve reduced the collecting aspect of things and made it more in line with games like Red Dead Redemption 2 by encouraging a more natural progression and evolution of the things you find and collect. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but it just doesn’t feel like it.
We’re also losing “towers” as a means of opening up your world map, which is another boon. We should also say that this is a Star War that feels much more alive than Respawn’s recent Jedi games, which was a big surprise. It might not be as flashy, and we can’t do any great Force stuff, but it’s certainly more engaging in the downtime and more immersive in its presentation with its seamless transitions into space.
It also takes a bit of the Elden Ring approach by giving us large open areas to tinker around in and rank up. These are then located alongside dungeons of sorts; bespoke areas that you enter and stay in to complete stealth sections and various other infiltration (and gunplay) missions.
So some of our personal issues with occupational therapy in an open world are largely addressed here. Rather than resting on the laurels of combat and stealth, we’re also treated to some robust stealth that’s reminiscent of both Splinter Cell and the recent Deus Ex games.
Have we lost our minds? Yes, but that has nothing to do with what we’re saying. The level design and choices in nearly every mission are impressive in ways we just didn’t expect, creating an experience that feels like it was made by a team that simply understands what they’re doing – and embraces everything that could make an outlaw’s life great.
There’s hours of sneaking around and swearing at people here, plenty of opportunities to rush, backstab people, and climb through miles of ventilation shafts. There’s also serious fanservice in terms of lore and world-building, as well as stuff like Sabacc. Yes, Sabacc! And it’s not just some lazy, half-assed card game either. This is a complete game in itself, and there are even special cards and bonuses hidden throughout the world to improve your deck. It’s great, and adds to an overall quality and care in the loot and collectible systems you’ll be interacting with here.
The different factions you can pit against each other and the way you take on their missions are also engaging. None of your decisions have huge implications, but that’s okay because that’s not what we came for. It’s finely balanced, not enough to bog things down in big decisions, but just enough to give you what you need to play an outlaw, to feel like you have the space and power to choose who you ally with or screw over at any time, which is a perfect way to get you started on your journey in this galaxy.
As for the main combat, Kay has a pistol that can cycle through various functions such as normal fire, electric and energy modes. Of course, these then feed into environmental and combat puzzles, all of which are of a decent standard, and you can also pull off a whole load of different stealth takedowns from the shadows or use Kay’s cute sidekick Nix to do the sort of things Sam Fisher would be proud of. We fully expected Nix to be an annoying pain in the butt because we’re naturally jaded, but our little furry bundle is actually this game’s way of allowing you to do all the crap you can do in Watch Dogs with electronics and whatnot.
As it turns out, Nix is a violent little rascal, a fearless villain who doesn’t hesitate to attack his enemies, pulling out weapons and flipping switches like a boss. Hell, Nix even blows things up if you tell him to. This fluffy little bastard has more bodies on his belt than most stormtroopers. That’s actually pretty scary.
You can pick up weapons that your enemies drop during firefights, so you can play around with weapons you know from the movies. Add to that a simple cover system, rappelling and swinging around, Red Dead-style slow-motion shooting (which looks insanely cool on speeder bikes), and then there’s the stealth system and Boom! This is a very good Star War.
We haven’t even mentioned all the versions of familiar Star Wars universe-themed arcade machines in the various bars you visit while taking random jobs from scumbags, or a ton of other cool stuff about the main campaign story – which we don’t want to give away in the slightest here. We haven’t detailed how the controls and feel of your speeder improve as you level up, or that leveling up here is generally a clean, straightforward affair that doesn’t require you to spend eons in the game’s menus instead of having fun shooting down stormtroopers.
So Star Wars Outlaws really surprised us. We’re still playing it after the review, which is always a very good sign, and we already can’t wait to get our hands on the DLC they throw at us over the course of the upcoming season.
Just like Avalanche Studios’ outstanding Mad Max, this is an open-world game that screams “incredibly average” as you approach it. But forgive a few rough edges, accept a few average mechanics, let that vibe and an obvious love for the source material do the hard work, and you’ll have a lot of fun.
And finally, in terms of performance, there are the usual performance and quality options here, including a medium 40fps mode. We highly recommend playing in performance mode, as it feels the smoothest in combat and we didn’t notice much of a difference in overall visuals. 40fps mode is a good middle ground, although it does feel a little clunky after playing at 60fps. Full quality mode just isn’t worth the framerate drop, as you really feel it in the game’s combat. Aside from a few pop-ins and some rough textures here and there, we didn’t notice any particularly notable bugs either.
