When we talk about a game conveying a sense of place, it’s often about how cleverly it covers up the necessary falsehoods of a world invented to suit the player character. It’s the good kind of lie. One on purpose, like Lucas smearing Vaseline across the camera lens to cover up the landspeeder’s wheels. Star Wars Outlaws is a strange case, then. Because while its planets and cities feel like ersatz as inhabited places, they’re kind of incredible as movie sets. That’s your job here. Here’s the game. You’re not playing it so much as you’re playing your part in a series of loving, enthusiastic callbacks. This is a Star War. This is a Star War. Oh, hey, I know that! That’s one of my favorite Star Wars.
“To the burglar, each building is infinite, weaving endlessly into itself,” writes Geoff Manaugh in A Burglar’s Guide To The City. For Outlaw’s slow-moving heroine, Kay Vess, the streets and criminal dens of Mirogana unfold in a more linear fashion; fewer intertwining, more straight-line shots through living blueprints that have the robbery plans considered from the start. The hatches and ventilation shafts don’t require the ingenuity of a seasoned burglar to shine like beacons above dune-dust-covered market roofs—Kay’s felon gremlin, Nix, can track them down. “Cities get the crimes their design demands,” says Manaugh. Virtual cities like Mirogana get the kind of crimes that dictate their two, sometimes three, alternate routes to the big heist.
But Kay must first enter the city, having left her own planet after a mission (a reason, by the way) went wrong. As she approaches a stormtrooper checkpoint, Vess grabs the hems of her jacket and bends over slightly, making herself look about a thousand times more suspicious than before. The Empire’s finest scan her ID. She passes through, and once she’s two feet past the checkpoint, she yells, “I’m glad I have that fake ID!”
Honestly, she’s lucky the city was built for her.
In short: what you get here is a conceptually stale but still quite enjoyable potpourri of The Witcher 3 (Vess takes on assassin quests with decisions at the end and also plays cards), Watch Dogs (she’s sneaky, Nix is basically a remote-controlled hacking device) and Uncharted (she climbs yellow things. You can’t make them yellow if you want.) There’s a bit of Far Cry 3 (enemy camps, tagging with the binoculars) and a bit of Red Dead Redemption 2 (wanted levels, gambling minigames, the spaghetti western sauce stains on Lucas’ lenses.) Ghost Of Tsushima was also mentioned as a key reference by creative director Julian Gerighty. Cinematic? Sure, but none of the game’s notable qualities (diegetic map guidance, novel checklist elements, fluid stealth) are present here.
Outlaws is at its best when it melts its hodgepodge of duct-taped systems into shiny coins you can throw into the jukebox of Star Wars wish-fulfillment hits, and lets you awkwardly copy the choreography. It’s hard to find rhythm in a fight that’s only ever tense because most fights feature at least one kind of guy who can take Kay out in one or two shots, where she can safely blind-fire from cover with perfect accuracy. But there’s a familiar fun to be had in the pantomime of fending off waves of stormtroopers as your crew gets your ship’s cargo bay up and running; of hearing the echo of the elastic blaster sound over the docking bay.
It’s hard to get lost in the rogue fantasy of stealth that allows you to knock out an Imperial officer in the middle of a conversation with a subordinate without raising suspicion; that allows you to fall noisily off a walkway a few feet from an unsuspecting stormtrooper, only to knock him out with one of several clumsy, bubble-wrapped pre-written animations. But it’s still fun, Performance to outsmart science fiction’s most famous and clumsy idiots, even if it means crouching down to keep pace with the back of a floating luggage carrier.
And it all remains a performance, as there’s not really a sense that the planets you visit are much more than themed tour destinations, albeit striking and fairly vibrant ones. The constant contextual interactions with the scenery give the feeling of an intermediary between you and the world, like you constantly have to check with the boss if it’s safe to climb a few barrels in case you knock over a lamp. Even climbing a ladder feels like asking permission. Kay doesn’t jump onto ledges or climb them, she zooms toward them like a magnet, as if the force acting is coming from the rock face rather than from it.
If you want me to have a strong opinion about yellow paint, you’ll have to come over here and take a long, dehydrated pee in the pot of Dulux Brilliant White I’m currently painting my ceilings with. I can take it or – assuming you show me the bright yellow way out – leave it, because games like Outlaws actually annoy me more when they suddenly expect me to use my brain after lulling me into a comfortable numbness. It’s not an exciting way to design a game, but it’s at least consistent in its concessions to a head dazed by whatever else life has thrown at you that day. There’s value in that, even if there’s not much more than approximating a tried and tested formula for a safe product.
So here’s something I have to praise in principle, even if I think it’s a little out of place given the aforementioned lazy insensitivity. Most of the climbing parts in Outlaws break through ledges and nets with either giant fans that regularly hurl Kay into a death pit if she jumps at the wrong moment, or with moving blocks that can knock her off. Environmental hazards?! In my blockbuster climbing part! I know, low bar. But if you play enough gritty, realistic Playmobil sets, a wall made of Lego starts to look downright complicated.
Things are better in space. A bolder game would have relied more on freelancers, done away with open plains, and expanded on parts trading and the conceptually interesting but otherwise ineffective faction reputation: some areas require sneaking into rather than traversing. Certain side jobs are unavailable if you piss off the wrong syndicate. Affiliated traders will sell you cheaper, better gear.
Still, there are some nice touches in what might otherwise have been a fast travel menu between planets. Targeting points show you where to aim at enemy ships to offset laser drop-off. Your wings and boosters spread out like a mechanized bird as you increase thrusters. The space above Toshara is a glorious mess of junk particles and rusted debris hurled across ochre mists like clouds of churned sand at low tide, and more planets reward with similarly beautiful atmospheres. Outlaws isn’t a stunning game, but I bet a lot of its concept art is.
If I had money to spend, I might even spend some on a special edition art book. And even if Kay’s axolotl companion chewed Nix’s spine off, I don’t think I could take him out on the patio and throw him over a fence. That, folks, is how you endear your audience to your obligatory Star Wars merchandise creature. First, he’s just incredibly useful. One moment he’s rolling around in front of a camera, playing a spleen explosion so Kay can sneak past. The next, he’s activating a switch on the other side of a laser barrier. Like I said, it’s Watch Dogs. He can even activate explosive barrels in tiny increments, letting you time the final push for an explosion to go off when a couple of stormtroopers walk by.
This is where the game leans most into Star Wars; a universe that’s more about animatronic Gribblies making squeaking noises than anything else. It’s not just Nix’s practical advantages – the relationship between him and Kay makes for the game’s most authentic and touching story moments. She’s not particularly convincing as a blasé Han Solo type, but as a hard-working pet owner who just wants to give her beloved crime gremlin the best life possible, I’ll totally buy her.
Even the little moments are authentic. Tatooine’s towns look like dioramas, but a hidden junk shop is teeming with sparking wires, specks of dust, and droid chatter. You can practically smell the soldering. Alien gangs in the recesses of the cantina deliver brilliantly animated and somewhat entertaining Sabacc matches. For a game where Kay can’t eat without first performing a quick-time event, Outlaws at least populates its dioramas with a healthy dose of interactive elements, simple minigames, and wayward souls who can be cheered up with a quick conversation.
It can be very endearing in those smaller moments, but it still all feels a little wrong, a little watery. And it manages to sometimes induce boredom that should be easy-going. “The core goes here, I guess?” Kay muses as she clumsily slides a battery into a door, finally letting me through many seconds after I politely asked the game to let me continue. But escaping an Imperial station on high alert only to find my buddy waiting outside on speeder bikes, then speeding through a chase across sand dunes invokes a certain gritty Star Wars thrill like few things have before. I don’t love outlaws, but I’m not mad at them. The brief hug that fish woman gave me was too nice for that:
This review is based on a trial version of the game provided by the publisher. I got the expensive edition key, but I was only wearing a pair of goggles that made Nix look like the crazy frog, so I had to take them off.
