Star Wars Outlaws lives and dies on its most marketed aspect– the scoundrel fantasy. Shifting the perspective character in the galaxy far, far away from sword-wielding monk or Rebel pilot to a humble street rat gifts Outlaws a unique viewpoint and gameplay systems with which to push and pull at the edges of an otherwise familiar universe. This is, we’re told, decidedly not an epic tale of light and dark but a more personal story as we get to put boots on the ground of Star Wars’ seedy underbelly, the syndicate-dominated world of illegal trade, fast lies, and faster Credits.
Clambering her way out from the lowest socioeconomic rung of the opulent Canto Bight, Kay Vess’ ambitions of a new life land her current one squarely in the scope of the emerging crime syndicate Zerek Besh. Having crossed its leader Sliro and landing on the wrong side of a much wider conflict, Kay and her pet bestie Nix commandeer a ship and lightspeed jump into scoundrel on the run before either of them are ready. For all her bluster, Kay is a small-town girl in a big-city world and with a looming Death Mark dogging her every move, she soon finds herself in the employ of the smooth-talking Jaylen and his impossibly hot droid, ND-5.
Structurally speaking Outlaws cribs a lot from classic heist films; a likeable everywoman needs to put together a crew of appropriately quirky specialists while navigating the competing needs of the crime world’s biggest and baddest. This loosely allows developer MASSIVE Entertainment a narrative framework to implement the patented Ubisoft Open-World loop as Kay can freely-ish move between a handful of planets, gathering up resources, taking on odd jobs, raiding bases, and planning the big final heist, you know, the one that’s gonna get them all out of the game for good this time.
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Landing somewhere between the third-person action-adventure structure of Uncharted and the open-zone, immersive Star Wars vibe-extravaganza of Jedi: Survivor, Outlaws plots an uneven path through the galaxy. It is, on paper, exactly the kind of game fans have been clamouring for and will undoubtedly scratch a deep-seated itch for many. It’s also keenly aware of this though and subsequently seeks to craft an experience as frictionless and smooth as possible within the confines of its genre and tropes. Whether or not that gives you a bad feeling about this is up to you.
Outlaws, despite its scope and scale, is strangely hyper-focused. The limited range of action verbs it offers the player as Kay has a flattening effect on the game’s mechanical pacing, the final heist feeling systemically identical to the dozens of repeated Imperial bases you cleared while exploring and the tutorial mission you did way back when this all kicked off. It runs amok on the sense of scale in the galaxy, as everything from syndicate hideout to Imperial garrison to ancient waterways feels functionally indistinguishable thanks to heavy asset reused, linear climbing sections, and endlessly recycled hacking minigames that lose their charm before you’ve left your first planet.
There is a small escalation of available tools as Kay meets Experts, named characters who exist to abstract traditional skill trees into ostensibly more immersive, free-form gameplay expressions. Say you want Nix’s senses to reach further or your stealth takedowns to impact heavies, instead of investing points in a menu now you’ll run odd jobs for palatable faces and complete arbitrary challenges while exploring. In many ways this is a step in the right direction for Ubisoft, especially given that the skills Experts offer aren’t linear and can be focused at your discretion. But even a glance at the full list of upgrades reveals how little Outlaws will offer you at your best and how much it has stripped from you to do so.
Some of it tracks with conventional modern RPG-lite design; health upgrades and additional inventory slots bolstering additional stealth options like smoke bombs. Others though seem to have been reverse-engineered for the sake of it; your speeder, a BMX hoverbike, is awkward when you first begin exploring but can be “upgraded” to feel like something you’d actually want to use, same with your ship the Trailblazer, which controls like a shopping cart full of rocks until a Glup Shitto says its time for it to start feeling fun. Throttling the player like this feels like an attempt to slow the inevitable realisation of how little Outlaws has to offer beyond its opening hours but it has the opposite effect, rapidly exposing the game’s dated and overly simplistic mechanics.
These rudimentary systems are truly put through their paces in the game’s middling level design and mission structure. Outlaws leans surprisingly hard on stealth, often placing you in instant fail scenarios that expose baseline limitations and odd pain points. Moving through a space, Kay can crouch to ostensibly muffle sounds, crawl through vents to avoid line-of sight detection, and use Nix to distract enemies and so on. You’ve seen these loops before, but Outlaws struggles to make them functional; I would frequently and loudly jog behind guards who remained blissfully unaware, those same guards just as likely to walk over a dead body as they were to react to it, though could clock me from a mile away if they decided it was time to.
This strains on moment-to-moment enjoyment and immersion but has a disastrous impact on segments that will boot you back five minutes if spotted even once. And it cascades from there with Outlaws as missions break requiring hard reloads, level design and garish UI fail to communicate basic directions, and enemy pathing and AI feel absent. It grates more often than it impresses but MASSIVE rightfully has a reputation in the shooter space for its work on the Division titles and there are moments in Outlaws that feel of a piece with this legacy. A stripped-back third-person shooter that forgoes a constant arsenal or cover for an on-the-fly vibe, Kay will wing it in skirmishes by picking up dropped enemy weapons with limited ammo so as to always return to her reliable sidearm. This concept truly thrives during the Empire’s WANTED threat as imperials bring Hell down on Kay in escalating and tense shootouts.
It’s a nice bit of narrative and mechanical synergy and the blaster, a fully customisable weapon with several alternate firing modes and power modules, feels decent if never truly great. MASSIVE’s pedigree rears its head with some of the stray weapons you’ll find during combat, with a solid range of blaster types and a Star Wars arse shotgun that I would have killed to always have on me if just for how much fun it was to use. Kay can also whip out a thermal detonator or two but doing so is staggeringly clumsy, requiring you to hold left on the D-pad to access a submenu, fully halting movement as you leave the left stick cold in the process.
So, Outlaws finds itself with two distinct playstyles but no real penchant for either, oscillating between fine and frustrating, basic and busted. For all the mindless vibes of the Far Cry games I could at least rely on their shooting to be consistently enjoyable and stealth systems, however stripped back, reliable. Outlaws offers no such smooth-brained ease, no flow state as Kay trips around scenarios that feel unpolished and fundamentally unengaging. To say nothing of the space combat that places you in some admittedly stunning nebulas but only provides barebones shield and laser management and a whole lot of dead air between where you jump into a system and the planet you’re trying to reach.
Comfort then is to be sought in the gorgeously rendered open-zones, the wheeling and dealing of syndicate powers and the loosely desirable “Star Wars” of it all. Here, at least, MASSIVE’s promise of immersion finds some solid ground as the assorted planets and environments Kay can meander through are universally impressive from both a technical and vibes perspective. The Snowdrop engine puts in the work as spaces feel appropriately dense and gritty, evoking the sights and sounds of Star Wars in ways that lull you into a serene and welcome sense of place, made whole by the game’s excellent emulation of camera lenses from the original trilogy.
Where Outlaws struggles is finding much meaning in this impressive tonal recreation. Not a single explorable hub location feels untouched by care but not a single one I found offers anything markedly different from any other, a series of beautifully crafted theme park attractions where the workers can sell you something and not much else. Kay can’t flip a table in a cantina and fire stray shots, civilian hubs deemed non-combat areas.
Likewise, the lauded Lens Project (MASSIVE’s use of Snowdrop tech to capture the specific lighting and image composition off 70s camera lenses) is a neat trick deployed to no discernible end as the game’s in-engine cutscenes showcase no cinematic flair and the pre-rendered ones move like YouTube fan films. It’s a long way to go to create a world so laboriously dedicated to Star Wars without bothering to understand that it wasn’t the camera or dirt that made those films what they were in the first place.
The syndicate system is ambitiously interesting at least, allowing you to define Kay’s loyalties through a series of choices big and small that impact your standing with any of the four major crime organisations in the game. So, as an ardent Solo: A Star Wars Story defender, I lent toward aiding the rise of Crimson Dawn and its queen Qi’ra, taking every chance I could to steal, frame, and sabotage other syndicates if it helped my CD pals. This raises a reputation bar and unlocks higher level missions (most of which have you doing the same stealth/shooting loop but with a dangerous tag on them for some reason), unique items and cosmetics, and how thugs in the world react to your presence. The syndicates themselves are relatively affable, from your iconic Hutts and Pykes to the strangely coded Ashiga Clan, an Outlaws original creation that leans all the way into Orientalism and has insectoid aliens espousing the “ronin” path and honour codes.
It also falls apart in the face of Outlaws’ competing priorities as a linear narrative experience. You can spend hours roaming planets running missions for the syndicate of your choice but if the next major story beat requires that same syndicate and Kay to have a falling out, enjoy watching your Reputation decrease and your investment deflate. The final mission of the game jarringly remembers it ostensibly allowed you to align yourself with someone and folds in whichever clan leader you have the highest rating with at the time, which for me meant I went from a rather hardline rejection of a character to playing buddy with them within the space of two hours and no additional context.
It’s not hard to be sympathetic to the balancing act of wanting to allow players to fulfil their fantasy while also wrangling the narrative into a functional shape but Outlaws seems entirely unsure about how to go about this, let alone what it even wants to be by doing so. It’s not just that its composite parts might be incompatible when assembled, it’s a permeating disinterest in its own ideas and world, edges smoothed so nobody could possibly cut themselves and the game becomes incapable of drawing blood.
Kay Vess is archetypal to a fault, a broad outline of a character whose lines are only beginning to be filled in as the game reaches its goofy narrative conclusions and sidelines her entirely (flowers for Humberly González who does her best to elevate the material). Much ado is made about the relationships that develop between the crew, especially Kay and ND-5, but missions rarely provide more interactivity than idle radio chatter and key moments rely heavily on telling you how much these characters have grown to care about each other rather than showing you in any meaningful way why, or even how, that came to be.
When I first played Outlaws earlier this year, I flagged the potential pitfalls of a game playing with this subject matter trying to remain largely apolitical in its writing, but Outlaws pushes this tension to breaking point with its narrative choices, firmly cementing it as an experience that wants the aesthetics of drama without bearing the weight of perspective or stance. I won’t spoil how things break bad but if you’ve seen any Star Wars media from the past five years you can hazard a pretty likely guess, Outlaws capitulating to fan service in such a convoluted way as to render its already flimsy “scoundrel fantasy” framing and overarching themes mute.
Something you could forgive on a game meant to be this broadly appealing at a scale of production this high if it weren’t for last year’s Jedi: Survivor, a game that Outlaws echoes in a disconcerting number of ways but lacks the perspective and refinement to stand shoulder to shoulder with. The best-case scenario is that this is MASSIVE’s Jedi: Fallen Order, a flawed but relatively ambitious experience that millions will play, and millions more will forgive so that a better version of it might see the light of the twin suns further down the road.
Impressive aesthetic charm and neat ideas aside, Outlaws is simply too unsure of itself to make much of a lasting mark. For a game so keen on living the scoundrel fantasy, Outlaws is oddly afraid to shoot first.
