Outlaws is better than you think, but still not great- Review – WGB

Based on the many reviews out there it would be easy to write Star Wars: Outlaws off entirely as a bad game, or at the very least, a wholly mediocre one that will likely be on sale for half-price in a month or two, based on Ubisoft’s usual business plan. The reviews don’t actually do the game justice though: sure, Star Wars: Outlaws does a lot of things wrong, but it also has some genuinely great moments. It’s also one of the most interesting Ubisoft games in years, taking quite a few of the company’s typical ideas and either throwing them out or improving upon them.

Here’s the gist of what you need to know: Outlaws is the story of Kay Vess, a young woman raised on the Star Wars streets to be thief. Think Han Solo, though the game does a fine job of making sure she isn’t just a gender-swapped version of Harrison Ford’s iconic smuggler. She’s smart and clearly has a good heart despite her vocation. She’s also on a run of bad luck. She’s surviving but only barely, so she takes a risky job and things go south, reinforcing her belief that she can’t rely on anyone but herself and her absurdly cute pet named Nix. But with a Death Mark now on her head, she’s given the chance to redo the failed heist at the behest of a mysterious man named Jaylan. So now partnered up with a droid named ND-5, Kay heads out to recruit a crew and pull off the biggest heist in the galaxy.

The good news is that Kay grows into her role as a rogue toward the end of the story. But that doesn’t stop the early hours feeling like Kay would have likely been blasted in an alleyway long before she ever got to the point of dealing with Rebels, infiltrating Imperial bases and navigating the world of shady crime syndicates.

The other big issue with the story is that for the first 10-15 hours of the game there isn’t one. The bulk of Outlaws is spent tracking down a few characters Kay needs to pull of the heist, so as the player you’re given freedom to travel between three planets (Akiva, Tatooine and Toshara) and find a droid smith, explosives expert and a gunslinger. On paper that sounds fine, but in execution the game’s writers don’t handle this freedom well, unable to construct satisfying narrative Lego blocks that be clicked together in any order. Each planet is a self-contained story and you barely interact with your intended crewmate until the very end. And then once they join your crew, you can only chat with them through optional exchanges that are surface-level at best. The crew also don’t talk among themselves, either, and very rarely interject in whatever you’re doing.

Basically, for the vast majority of the game your crew are just a part of the scenery on your ship. You don’t get to know them, learn about them, work with them or otherwise do anything with them. If you recruit the droidsmith first, it won’t have any impact when you go find the gunslinger or vice versa. This leaves about two-thirds of the game feeling aimless. There are storylines, with Kay’s trip to Tatooine being a major highlight for her character, but the overall narrative becomes background noise.

There’s good news, however: the game’s last few hours are so, so much better. It shifts into a linear adventure and once free of the typical Ubisoft open-world design structure the writers clearly thrive. Your crew finally comes together and begins to talk to each other and to Kay. It’s a bit jarring, to be honest, because all of a sudden Kay is acting like she knows and likes this group of misfits, despite having shared about 5 minutes of dialogue with each of them over the last 10-15 hours. Putting that aside though, the closing hours are what the rest of Outlaws should have been: a fun heist featuring a crew of interesting people. Sure, the big ending twist is more predictable than the cancellation of The Acolyte, but I actually found myself hoping for a sequel because the last few hours demonstrated that Massive Entertainment has something special here. There’s potential.

It’s just a shame that most of Outlaws is spent feeling like you’re stuck in a bad version of Ocean’s Eleven where all the fun heist action and cool character moments happen in the last five minutes. A few cool moments (like platforming through the interior of a crashed ship) don’t make up for it.

Putting aside the frustrating story issues, one thing Star Wars: Outlaws nails is its world-building. Star Wars games traditionally focus on the Jedi and for understandable reasons, but Outlaws is all about the seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe and gives us a chance to explore it as a regular(ish) person. We get cruise the vast sands of Tatooine on a speeder, walk the frozen streets of Kijimi and gamble on races on Toshara. Each planet features a major city and a few smaller settlements, and they all feel lived in and real. It’s a pleasure to explore these places and soak up the atmosphere. The art team have done an exceptional job, resulting in some gorgeous vistas, while the cities feel lived in and teeming with life in a way that other Star Wars games are lacking. If you’re a huge Star Wars fan, Outlaws may be worth checking out purely to spend some time exploring and seeing what life is like outside of the Force, the Jedi and choking work colleagues during a meeting.

Now we arrive at the gameplay. This is where Outlaws really comes apart. Not because it’s terrible – it’s a functional game at every level – but because it’s overwhelmingly bland and shallow.

Kay Vess isn’t swinging a lightsaber around or powering through enemies with the Force – she’s a rogue and a thief, so her main weapon is staying out of sight. She has a blaster strapped to her hip which we’ll get back to, but Outlaws is a stealth game in a Star Wars disguise. Which is exactly why it’s so frustrating that its stealth mechanics are barebones and stiff. It’s not even the instant-fail missions (there are heaps of those) because it’s not like the sneaking is hard. No, it’s just how rote and uninspiring it is. A few tricks like sending Nix to distract a guard aren’t enough to keep things interesting. If you’re going to constrain me by making it so I can’t even be spotted, at least give me some fun tools to play with. This is Star Wars, after all – surely crooks and criminals have some cool tech? Alas though, from the very first sneaking mission to the very last, you and Kay will be doing the same thing: hiding behind a box and scampering over to hide behind another, identical box. The enemies don’t become more cunning, the gameplay doesn’t evolve. The only thing that changes is the range at which you can be spotted thanks to inconsistent cones of vision.

On a somewhat inconsequential note, Outlaws features some of the anaemic takedown moves I’ve seen. Kay Vess looks like she weighs about as much as Master Yoda, yet she is capable of knocking out a fully armoured Stormtrooper by punching their helmet with all the force of a puppy’s sneeze. What? The worst might be when she very slowly drags a foe to the ground, giving them plenty of time to voice an alarm if they wanted to, and then lightly punches them, somehow rendering them unconscious with a gentle tap to the noggin. I’m convinced Jabba the Hutt would be capable of more athletic displays.

When the Jabba shit hits the fan it’s time to whip out a gun and get blasting. Considering Massive Entertainment’s pedigree I had high hopes for the combat in Outlaws. After all, The Division and its sequel both have excellent gunplay. That’s just not the case though.

When it comes to firefights, Kay favours her trusty blaster over anything else. It can be upgraded to provide different modes – like rapid fire – and Kay can pick up dropped weapons too, but as soon as the ammo runs out she automatically tosses them. In fact, Kay can’t keep hold of weapons at all, as climbing a ladder, entering a vent, interacting with anything or triggering a cutscene causes Kay to throw the weapon away like it’s just insulted her mother. Much like the stealth, the gunplay would probably best be described as bland. You crouch down behind a wall, don’t move and gun down the braindead AI. It’s basic stuff, and again fails to evolve over the course of the game.

Exactly how a publisher that built itself around stealth games and a developer best known for its shooters managed to create gameplay this lacking in anything interesting or engaging is beyond me. And that sadly applies to the space combat as well. Mind you, in the case of dogfighting in the black void Massive Entertainment seems to understand it doesn’t have much to offer and keeps the space battles to a minimum. In fact, I think I probably spent less than an hour total flying around, which is fine because there’s absolutely nothing out there worth checking out, although it does look very pretty.

Now though, we to to the truly interesting stuff. Well, interesting in terms of Ubisoft as a whole and how it approaches building games. As open worlds in general go, there isn’t much to say about Star Wars: Outlaws, but if we compare it against the standard Ubisoft template there are some signs that the company is evolving its formula – albeit slowly. The climbable towers that reveal surrounding quests and areas of interest are absent, for instance, and the game isn’t completely stuffed with a million interchangeable missions designed to fool you into thinking playtime equals fun. No, this is a quite lean package, clocking in at around 15-20 hours for a playthrough and maybe 30-40 if you want to do everything. Many missions and contracts are presented more organically than normal for a Ubisoft game too, sometimes discovered by eavesdropping on some chatty mercenaries or found out in the world as you cruise around on a speeder bike. It’s a far cry from what Ubisoft normally does, and hopefully, it’s an indication that the company is changing some of its more obsolete ideas.

A lot of what you do in Outlaws feeds into the interesting reputation system. As a thief, scoundrel and general doer of wrongs, Kay is willing to work for any of the big crime syndicates provided they’ve got the credits. But Kay’s mercurial loyalties mean almost every job she takes has a chance of pissing off a Syndicate, especially if she opts to hand over sensitive data to a rival Syndicate at the last second for some bonus credits. There are palpable gameplay reasons to staying on a Syndicate’s good side, too – they’ll let you free amble around territory under their control and access their special vendors. Let your reputation with them falter and you won’t be allowed to enter their areas, forcing you to sneak in or draw your blaster. If it goes low enough, they’ll actively start hunting you by sending out hit squads until you can pull off a job or two to rebuild the trust.

It’s a cool mechanic, one that never feels as fully explored and utilized as I wanted. Part of the problem is that the devs have to tie it all back into the main storyline, so sometimes your standing with a faction will radically shift one way or the other regardless of how you’ve been handling it through the rest of the game. But the bigger issue is that it’s pretty easy to stay in everyone’s good books most of the time. It’s fun to take a mission to infiltrate a Syndicate’s turf and then do a few other jobs to build up their trust so that you can walk in through the front door and make life easier. However, for most of the game I was only ever disliked by one faction, and that’s because I was deliberately driving my reputation with them down for the sake of a Trophy. Still, it’s a great idea and arguably the best thing in the entire game.

Another area in which Outlaws improves on the standard Ubisoft formula is how it handles the idea of leveling up. Instead of a bloated, shallow skill tree packed with a hundred useless little stat boosts, Outlaws wants you to learn new skills by finding experts out in the world. These are entirely optional little quests, though the game does quite obviously highlight them. Once you finish helping out an expert you’ll unlock a series of challenges to complete, each unlocking a cool new skill for Kay to use. It’s a fantastic system that is rewarding and satisfying because you can chase the specific skills you want and each one feels useful.

Ah, Star Wars: Outlaws. You’re a tricky little bugger, aren’t you? Easily pushed aside and seemingly done so by all the reviews, Outlaws is worth delving a little deeper into. Like a Stormtrooper it often misses its mark, but sometimes it surprises and nails the shot. The last third of the game is vastly superior and shows some great promise, while the smart skill system and many small improvements on Ubisoft’s open-world template all give me hope that the French publisher is willing to move away from its bloated, rote designs.

The gameplay though….yeah. It’s not bad. It isn’t. It’s functional, and you can have fun with it. But for a triple-A Star Wars title, this level of mediocrity in stealth and shooting is disappointing. Combined with the aimless storytelling across two-thirds of the game, and you get an experience that struggles to keep you invested in the action, despite how fun Kay Vess and her absurdly cute animal pal can be.