I spent the first 15 hours or so in Star Wars Outlaws feeling like I wasn’t completely invested, but I was hopeful that the game would be a fun time. The main character, Kay Vess, was starting to develop as a character for me. I enjoy the look and feel of the game’s various Star Wars locations.
It took me another 15 hours to complete the game’s critical path, but my hopes were not met. Star Wars Outlaws is a visually beautiful experience set in a fascinating series setting, but what you actually do in the game is so simple and the same that it fails to generate any interest or momentum. Eventually, I started to feel that just the main story was rewarding.
Over the course of its first 10 hours or so, Outlaws introduces Kay and her salamander-cat-like partner Nyx. The incident that started the story (a robbery at her home in Canto Bight went so wrong that she was sentenced to death by a crime syndicate). And as a result, they flee from the world to pastures new. While on the run, Kei steals an old but valuable ship called the Trailblazer and crashes it on Toshara, a manned satellite in another part of the galaxy. The opening hour also introduces a number of main characters, all the major gameplay systems, and a variety of open-world activities that you can get into in earnest before culminating in a quest to fix the Trailblazer’s hyperdrive. Masu. This upgrade opens up access to the rest of the planets in the game, the icy Himalayas of Kijimi, the swampy jungle of Akiba, and the familiar desert hell of Tatooine.
Once the galaxy opens up to Kei, you can travel back and forth to wherever you want to pursue different activities. Obtain contracts from underworld brokers, find mentors to teach her new skills, and fly through the local space surrounding each planet from the perspective of a Trailblazer. Lost cargo (or pirate annihilation)…whatever strikes your fancy. The proceedings are tied into an Ocean’s 11-style heist plot. This involves recruiting the experts needed to break into the same safe from the intro that gave Kei the Death Mark in the first place.
Thankfully, Outlaws doesn’t shove a map full of icons in your face and scream “swim forever!” After pushing you into the lake. The location of equipment, the creation of materials for upgrades, other treasures, and the activities that provide them are provided in the form of information. Overhear people talking in bars in the game’s densely populated safe areas, hack computers in imperial bases and crime syndicate hideouts, and even literally shout “Hey, Kay, Vess!” You might even walk up to someone and talk to them, just by walking by them.
Image: Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft
The amount of work to be done is staggering. The Broker will give you missions everything from transporting cargo around the city to blowing TIE fighters out of the sky. Each of the game’s four competing crime syndicates hides bases and vaults on every planet, allowing you to extort wealth and gather information. As you pass, people on faster bikes will challenge you to a race. There’s Kessel Sabacc, a variation on the classic Star Wars Universe card game that lets you play against random gamblers and high rollers alike. Without the Ubisoft Icon Glut Map, you’ll have to encounter many of these activities naturally, and poking around in your corner of the world can feel like there’s some kind of reward.
The big problem here is that even though there are so many things to do in the galaxy, it didn’t take long for me to decide that I didn’t want to do any of them because I didn’t find them particularly appealing or interesting. . A major factor in this is that many of the rewards and treasures I chased ended up being Kay’s speeder paint job or the Trailblazer’s engine color options. There is no problem with compensation for cosmetics. But after spending a frustrating 30 minutes trying to be a good little space thief sneaking past Jabba the Hutt’s legion of veritable villains, I ended up discovering a shiny treasure chest in the heavily guarded basement of Tatooine. If you discover that there’s a spaceship paint job inside, well… that’s a bit annoying.
Another concern here is that Star Wars Outlaws is trying to incorporate so many elements, including stealth, third-person firefights, vehicle racing, space combat, and arcade-style mini-games. It means you can’t spend the time you need to make yourself feel any of those things. Robust and complete. Exploring the open world made me wish I had played Breath of the Wild or Skyrim. Every time I had to fight, I wished I had played Mass Effect instead. It’s not that the gameplay design here is poor, it’s just very superficial.
An apt comparison might be the later Saints Row games, which are open-world games filled with similarly repetitive activities. The big difference is that Outlaws’ missions don’t have the pomposity and bombast that made Saints Row obsolete on this side. Instead of “now I’m going to kill a pedestrian with a dubstep cannon,” Kei ends up doing the same thing over and over again in the same way, using the same tools. To make matters worse, some activities are frankly over-designed. The 5 minute quick time event of eating corn on the cob is overkill, but it’s there.
Image: Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft
Stealth, which is what Star Wars outlaws most often ask you to do, is sadly probably the worst offender here. A large portion of Critical Path, and indeed most of the open world content I’ve tried, involves stealth. That means infiltrating locations, stealing items, and escaping safely. There are hints here of Assassin’s Creed, and more surprisingly, Metal Gear Solid 5, which hints at an interesting setting. But in reality, Kay has a very limited range of tools at her disposal.
Yes, she can sneak up behind stormtroopers or guards and silently knock them out…but then she has to leave the body there and hope no one comes across it (They absolutely come across). Kei’s animal friend Nyx is the main stealth tool, but isn’t as useful as one might imagine. Yes, Knicks can do things like detonate explosive barrels from a distance, but that usually ended up being even more troublesome instead of helping me (with a swarm of curious guards) They arrived to see the explosion, which made finding the location even more difficult (to actually hide it). Knicks are most useful for luring guards away from their posts so you can take them down silently, but they can only distract one at a time, and the controls for doing so are tedious to get right. I often get frustrated.
On top of that, too many stealth missions include “don’t get caught” or “don’t set the alarm” failure conditions, where you can accidentally trip over someone due to lack of tools. I tend to. On top of that, the game has some quick-save limitations, meaning you can’t save mid-mission and have to rely solely on checkpoint saves, which are somewhat unstable. Then, deep frustration built up and I turned off the game, muttering to myself. Say “I’ll do it later” multiple times.
The PS5 dashboard will display a small tagline when Outlaws is selected. “The galaxy is full of opportunities if you’re willing to take risks.” Honestly, I wish Massive had taken some of their own advice into it.
There are many other issues that contribute to this feeling that the system is only partially built. Kei must carefully manage his relationships with the four criminal organizations he encounters (Crimson Dawn, Pyke Syndicate, Hutt Cartel, and Ashiga Clan), but this doesn’t really work out. A high reputation in the syndicate will give you a reward, but it is not a necessary reward. By later bribing the Syndicate you’ve irritated, or by doing the missions in an order calculated to avoid offending anyone, you’ll be able to take advantage of the Syndicate’s competing nature (many side missions allow you to take advantage of other missions (which involves gaining reputation at the expense of) can be carefully avoided. many. Honestly, I don’t even know if it’s worth bothering to stay on the good side of the Syndicate. Quite a few of the story missions also involve infiltrating friendly Syndicate hideouts, but these are all locations that are labeled as “no-go areas”, so it’s safe to say they’re friendly. It only means you lose reputation when you get caught there and they’ll shoot you if they find you anyway.
“Hey, isn’t this nice?” The energy at the core of Star Wars Outlaws, the loving little details of the world, the sheer amount of things to do, even the long QTE to eat the corn. Everything tells me that Massive Entertainment wanted to satisfy the charm of this world. It’s a game with the kind of activities you’d expect in a huge, “living” Star Wars universe. The problem is that in trying to cram all this together, the team had to cut out so many little pieces to basically make everything fit that the result feels a little half-baked. Perhaps the game would have felt more complex if I had focused more on managing the Syndicate’s reputation, but the journey to get there was full of repeating the same types of missions, so I didn’t care. I quit. It’s fine to gate something good, but if you don’t provide a taste beforehand, players will lose interest.
Massive deserves praise for the game’s accessibility options. The options are overwhelming (thankfully, it comes with several presets). “Difficulty” settings are really just gameplay presets that dial in factors like enemy health and combat intensity. Each preset lists specific options to change, so you can use them as a starting point and fine-tune individual settings. This should be the industry standard for now, as it allows any player to adjust various aspects of the game to their own tastes, making the experience tailored to them. For example, you can turn off the QTE for eating the aforementioned snack. And no matter how you view the infamous “yellow paint” signs, you can either disable them completely or change their color and opacity to make them still visible but more subdued. There are options to make it visible.
Image: Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft via Polygon
I didn’t talk much about the characters or story of Star Wars Outlaws, mainly to avoid spoilers. I will say that over time I really grew to like Kei, and the crew she hired for the heist were an interesting bunch. Gedik, a neurotic and idealistic droid builder, stands out because of his banter with Kay, which provides a playful depiction of their childhood friendship. But Kei just doesn’t spend enough time exploring or really developing a connection with these sailors, and some of the narrative turns late in the game feel like the game doesn’t really support them enough. It relies on believing that certain characters are fast friends when they don’t offer it. that. Massive finds dimension in Kei over 35-40 hours of Critical Path. For example, the presence of a protagonist who calls the Rebels shit when necessary, when many Star Wars stories are stories of clear binary oppositions between good and evil, where the Rebels are a bastion of heroism. was fun.
The PS5 dashboard will display a small tagline when Outlaws is selected. “The galaxy is full of opportunities if you’re willing to take risks.” Honestly, I wish Massive had taken their own advice there. I think Outlaws was intended to be “immersive”, a huge Star Wars world that you could “get lost in” and “inhabit” while doing endless activities. . This, in a nutshell, is the promise of open-world games. Please come visit and feel like you “live” here.
But what I think the continued advancement of this genre has made clear is that “living” no matter where you are is often a repetition of boring daily tasks like going to work, doing laundry, and making dinner. That’s what it means. I no longer want to be “immersed” in an open world (whatever that means). I want to have nice, customized experiences that allow me to do new and fresh things. If Massive had built tighter, more focused adventures and moved away from the current model of open-world games, I think the studio would have made the definitive Star Wars game. All the ingredients of greatness are here. As it stands, the result is a game that tries to do too many things, and simply doesn’t have enough time, energy, or resources to do any of them completely successfully.
Star Wars Outlaws is available now on PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X. This game was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code provided by Ubisoft. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, but Vox Media may earn a commission on products purchased through affiliate links. Additional information about Polygon’s Ethics Policy can be found here.
