Star Wars Outlaws Review

It wasn’t that long ago that the future of Star Wars games felt pretty bleak. DICE’s 2015 Star Wars Battlefront had come and gone, being critically and commercially panned for shipping with little to no content, and its sequel had lit the industry aflame with its horrible monetisation structure that was nothing short of pay-to-win. Now we have games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Star Wars Squadrons, whose quality never felt like it dipped below good while having its moments and periods of sheer cohesive brilliance. In comes Star Wars Outlaws, an open-world Star Wars game developed by Massive Entertainment, the studio behind The Division games and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Having played through it, I can say that I am thoroughly surprised with how much I enjoyed the game.

Playing as Kay Vess, a young scoundrel from Canto Bight, the game takes place right as she is hired for a contract that would pay her enough money to live her life exactly how she pleases with his little animal companion, Nix. The contract goes awry, and she finds herself on the run with a bounty on her head from a vicious criminal organisation known as Zerek Besh. In the process of fleeing from the Zerek Besh, she steals a ship named the Trailblazer and crash lands on Toshara, a moon in the Toshaal system (I am just as lost with all the names as you are, trust me). From here, Kay Vess aims to stay alive and out of the sights of Zerek Besh, the Galactic Empire, and the three underworld syndicates (the Pykes, Crimson Dawn, and the Hutt Cartel, and a fourth to be discovered as you progress through the game).

Kay’s travels put her in the company of various friendly faces and exploring numerous locales and planets, including some fan favourites like the little-known popular Tatooine and Mos Eisley. The ever-expanding cast of characters that Vess finds herself interacting with become part of her crew as she aims to effectively strike back against the Zerek Besh’s leader, Sliro (who looks like a combination of Nicolas Cage and Chris Evans), via a heist. In gathering a ragtag crew, her odds of pulling off the heist continue to increase.

As is par for the course, each member of the crew is distinct from the rest, and their presence is vital to the experience of the game, even beyond the immediate story writing. The characters also behave uniquely, and their familiarity with Kay Vess ranges from old friends to new acquaintances, and they all offer Vess some kind of tangible benefit. Whether it be new unlockable skills or upgrades to your gear, each character is important to the expansion of the gameplay.

In terms of the actual story, Star Wars Outlaws is by no means one of the best-written games out there, but it’s also not easily dismissed. The story has its twists and turns and genuinely does a good job of earning the player’s intrigue. The characters emote and develop, the pacing mostly feels good, and I found it difficult to hate any individual character that I was not supposed to.

While the story is solid for the most part, I did find that its opening stages had some crazy fast pacing that I didn’t exactly jibe with. You went from getting your data spike repaired to breaking into a fortified mansion to being on the run, all in what felt like the first 20 minutes of the game. It was quite jarring and, as a result, some of the earlier dialogue felt rushed. There are also occasional moments where neither the dialogue nor its delivery was great, but more often than not, it was solid.

As a game, I was impressed that Star Wars Outlaws did not feel phoned in by any measure. It’s commonly understood that Ubisoft games are typically formulaic – big open worlds with a bunch of meaningless drivel for content. While Star Wars Outlaws is not exempt from this, it peels back the static design enough to make the whole thing feel far less cynical than you’d expect. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the plains of Toshara or riding my speeder across the open, arid wastes of Tatooine, and discovering the little things these worlds held. Don’t be mistaken, it’s still an Ubisoft open-world,  but it’s just enough to feel better than most Ubisoft open- worlds.

The slight peeling back of the overly homogenised design also extends to the game and level design. The game allows you to turn off the little accessibility features like the yellow paint on climbable environment pieces. It doesn’t sound like much, but allowing the player to do this means that you need to have confidence that your level design is good enough to guide the player without the use of visual aids. Obviously, it doesn’t compare to the likes of Elden Ring, or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but much like how the general open-world design is just peeled back enough from the typical Ubisoft design motif, the level design here is enough to make traversing the smaller sections of the world feel engaging and fun.

One thing I wasn’t expecting myself to enjoy so much is how the main story quests take you into sections and levels that don’t feel like open-world content contextualised with main story beats, but rather a lot of encounters feel curated and specially designed for each time they are used in the main quests. It’s a small thing, but it makes the main quests feel much more distinct and separate from the rest of the game in a great way.

Given that the last Ubisoft game I played (which wasn’t the recent Rogue Prince of Persia) was Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, I was expecting more of the typical generic stat/skill tree design that the developer/publisher is known for. Colour me surprised when I discovered there is no arbitrary stat system, but rather your skills are earned when you complete certain criteria, including gathering the necessary materials or engaging with specific activities.

After the disappointment that was Starfield, I had no hope that I would experience good spaceship flying and combat in a AAA game. Unfortunately, Star Wars Outlaws does not buck that school of thought, and its ship flying is terrible, while the combat is just fine. The concept is cool, but it goes far beyond just being arcadey and steps into the realm of being downright forgettable. Guess I will just have to wait 30 more years for Squadron 42 to be released.

The music is easily one of my favourite parts of the game, as it really leans into the more classic orchestrations and melodies of Star Wars. It made me feel like I was playing a game that was paying homage to the IP’s glory days rather than the tumultuous and disappointing state the IP has been in (except Andor, which rules).

Funnily, I see a lot of similarities in the game’s goals and positioning to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Neither game is especially great in a game design sense, but the things they do as Star Wars games are pretty good, and so they become greater than the sum of their parts.

The part that easily frustrates me the most is the game’s performance. Star Wars Outlaws uses Massive’s Snowdrop engine, which made a name for itself as one of Ubisoft’s proprietary engines with The Division and The Division 2. It has since gone on to show how flexible and robust it is, and for the most part, is used excellently in this game. However, there are a few pain points for performance. The game sports a recommended specification of either an Intel i5-10400/AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti/AMD RX 6700XT for 1080p on a High preset and Upscaling set to Quality with a target of 60fps. My PC far exceeds that, with a Ryzen 9 7950X and an RTX 3080 Ti, yet the plains of Toshara were absolutely horrid. While running at 1080p Ultrawide (which is not too different from regular 1080p), the large open areas went down to as low as 30fps. Pretty disappointing considering the disparity between my PC and the recommended specifications. Additionally, the game features ray tracing, which is cool, but you cannot turn it off, which just feels unnecessary. Ray tracing is one of the needless settings that fits under the “bells and whistles” category, and by leaving it permanently on (albeit a software-bound version and not just RTX) you leave a lot of performance on the table.