‘Outlaws’ Is One of the Best ‘Star Wars’ Games Ever Made
When Star Wars was first released in 1977, it introduced a galaxy’s worth of lore for audiences to sink into. Between the superpowered mysticism of the Jedi, the sexy roguishness of smuggling, and the unending strife of interstellar conflict, there’s something to capture the interest of just about anyone, built upon exponentially as the franchise has expanded.
In Star Wars video games, however, the focus has often been narrower. Certain pieces — lightsabers and the Force, starships and ground battle — translate easily to the mechanics of play. The power fantasies of laser-sword dueling and clone trooper platoons have made for dozens of successful Star Wars games across shooters, real-time strategy, and even “Soulslikes.” Yet, somehow, one vital piece often remains forgotten: the swashbuckling adventure of an everyman with an eye on the stars. Isn’t that what Luke Skywalker was about, after all?
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Star Wars Outlaws is about that too, among many other things. Setting aside space monk mythology and guerilla warfare, Outlaws aims to bring the wonder back to a galaxy far, far away, albeit through the lens of its shadier underworld. It’s an open-world exploration of all the divey places you imagined Han Solo was hanging out long before he was conscripted into a cause greater than his own.
Embodying the scoundrel life
Developed by Massive Entertainment, a subsidiary of Ubisoft studio, Star Wars Outlaws (out Aug. 30 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) centers on the story of Kay Vess, a two-bit thief from the casino city of Canto Bight, who’s just trying to make ends meet. Paired with her adorable four-legged sidekick, Nix, Kay is a capable grifter looking to line her pockets, although she dreams of something more. When an ill-advised gig leads her to steal a ship from the Zerek Besh syndicate, she and Nix find themselves fleeing the planet in desperation to figure out their play. As these things tend to, their situation cascades as they run afoul of more syndicates, ruthless bounty hunters, and the Empire itself.
Outlaws is somehow the first-ever open world take on the Star Wars franchise and allows players to travel (mostly) unrestricted across huge swaths of terrain, cities, and bases not just across five planets, but in their orbital space too. It takes the very premise of the original Star Wars — a person with a simple life stumbling into an ever-expanding saga — and leans in harder than pretty much any game in the series has before.
Picture picking up the controller as Kay, leaning against a bar eavesdropping on a cartel mole spilling their guts. Your next step in mind, you leave the bar into a crowded market, through the city to your speeder outside. You race off into the desert, through a canyon to a landing pad, hopping into your ship. You break atmosphere, cross the nebula, and into hyperspace all the way to the other side of the Outer Rim to an entirely new planet. Micro to macro, all done seamlessly in “real-time,” no load screens or menus. This is what the moment-to-moment gameplay looks like in Outlaws.
Shockingly, it all works. Although the visuals can be spotty with some shoddy textures and graphical glitches, pretty much anything you can do in the game happens briskly and in fluid lockstep. In cutscenes, characters are richly detailed and move naturalistically, the product of exceptional motion capture work and acting that, as detailed in our behind-the-scenes look earlier this year, was produced to hue as close to the cinematic language of the original films as possible. In-game, however, character models are more rigid, and dialogue flows more robotically as the many diegetic voices from the environment pop in and out without rhythm.
The game’s settings provide the option to pick between a high-fidelity Quality mode or a Performance one that scales down the visuals to run more smoothly, but the difference is negligible. The game looks great at times, but textures like Kay’s skin can appear muddied, and her hair and clothing movement is janky. By trying to render a seamless open-world with minimal load times, it’s likely that much of the technical horsepower behind the game is focused on keeping things running, leaving the game looking less polished than some of its modern peers. There are moments though when everything clicks; speeding through the grassy plains of the planet Toshara with heavy motion blur while the wind bends the trees in the distance is a sight to behold. It certainly has the look of Star Wars.
Conversely, it also has the general vibe of the franchise down pat. Whimsical audio cues and screen wipes give scene transitions the serial style that George Lucas brought to the screen in 1977, and there’s a playfulness that imbues the tone with the kind of charm that earlier entries in the film saga had in spades. Special attention should be paid to actress Umberly Gonzalez, who plays Kay with a disarming coy that made Harrison Ford’s Han Solo such a loveable scoundrel, even as he ad-libbed and fumbled his way through life-or-death scenarios.
All’s fair in the crime game
The general gameplay loop involves taking on quests that mostly require a mix of stealth and shooting, with some rhythm-based and puzzle solving minigames in between. Missions usually require infiltrating a facility, be it a rival cartel’s stronghold or an imperial satellite station, to steal data or smuggle out contraband and VIPs. Scenarios can be pretty long, especially when depending on slow moving stealth to avoid detection, and there’s some hiccups baked into how autosaves and checkpoints can be frustrating (more on that in a bit).
The big draw of the game’s underworld setting, which sets it apart from most Star Wars stories, is the ongoing balance between the syndicates. Early on, Kay is introduced to warring crime families, including the Pykes, Hutts, Ashiga, and Crimson Dawn. Players can take on jobs big and small for each, but every decision made as to who to align with will piss off someone else. It’s a constant sliding scale whether any one clan is happy with you at any given time, and every bit of progress made will inevitably be undone when players choose to betray their employer mid-quest when staring down the barrel of a blaster.
While other games like 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas are also famous for having a shifting allegiance system for criminal outfits, Outlaws makes these decisions feel more impactful, even though they can be easily undone later. Imagine arduously sneaking into an underground vault for the Pykes, only to meet a member of the opposition offering double for the loot and a frame job on others. These scenes often play out dramatically, with the binary choice of who to screw over with a slow pan in on Kay with ratcheting tension.
Getting on a clan’s good graces has its benefits, from unlocking more gigs to having access to their resources. Every planet and city are broken into regions controlled by different syndicates. If you’re on the outs with the Pykes, you’re not welcome in their part of town, blocking off easy access to their shops and areas. As an ally, you can saunter right in without issue, making it easy to steal intel as long as you don’t get caught. If you’re marked, it’s going to be an arduous stealth mission.
The Empire, too, poses a looming threat. Unlike the more amicable crime families, there’s no way to get on their good side. Running into Imperial territory will result in a hail of blaster bolts, one way or another, and if the Stormtrooper body count rises enough, a Grand Theft Auto-style bounty level will be placed on Kay’s head. It’s all fun and games until a Deathtrooper squad bursts down from the sky. To clear a bounty, players must either break into an Imperial facility to wipe their records or find a dirty officer to bribe in the underworld.
The pendulum effect of Kay’s alliances makes every mission feel consequential. Once you’re in, you’re in, and the game actively ensures that there are consequences for a slip up. In some games (like Fallout), many players utilize a tactic called “save scumming,” meaning that you make multiple save files to go back to if you get caught, killed, or mess up the tidy gameplay run you’ve meticulously planned. Outlaws forbids it.
Early on, I was tasked with planting evidence on the Pykes, with whom I was friendly. But as soon as I was caught and heavily under fire, I tried to load up a prior save file to undo my transgression. Lo and behold, even with a recent save, I was kicked all the way back to the beginning of the mission, losing over an hour’s progress. There’s no easy way to game the meta without the penalty of time. The creators want you to be true to the roleplay, and deal with the blowout that comes with it.
It’s an admirable quality, to be honest, even though it conflicts with the ways people have trained themselves to play, min-maxing their odds for the best possible outcome. Unfortunately, it bumps up against some poor level and confusing AI design that can lead to major missteps. It can be frustrating to delicately creep through an entire compound only to be spotted inches from the goal by an unseen enemy or worse, a wall-mounted camera position on the other side of a door. Some would say it’s a worthy challenge, and it often is good for raising the tension, but it frequently feels like the game’s systems are unpredictable in ways not intended.
But when all else fails, you can always shoot your way out. Mostly. Many of the main story quests have guardrails in place that demand stealth otherwise the mission fails. The game is at its best during the optional quests where mistakes foster improvisation, again and again, as plan A becomes plans B, C, and D. When everything goes to shit, that’s when Outlaws feels the most like a Star Wars sequence brought to life.
A roleplaying experience without the RPG bloat
Kay’s abilities help create the sense of freedom in how to approach a scene. Besides basic punches and shooting, there are unlockable abilities that play heavily into the screwball scoundrel antics. A personal favorite is an unlockable feint: when spotted by an enemy, players can quickly trigger Kay to throw her hands up — “Whoa, whoa, whoa” — making her assailant pause as time slows down just long enough to draw the blaster from her holster for a headshot or bum rush them with the haymaker. Again, it embodies the mindset of a scoundrel like Han Solo, where troublemaker charm is its own weapon.
Nix, too, plays a huge role in gameplay. Similar to the dynamic between micro-droid BD-1 and Jedi Cal Kestis in 2023’s Jedi: Survivor, Nix serves as an extension of the player and can open hatches, disable alarms or sabotage bombs, and even directly distract or attack at the touch of a button. It’s rare to see a sidekick mechanic with as much functionality as Nix. Half the game can be played by pointing him around the level as an agent of chaos to tee up Kay’s next move. It helps that he’s filled with life, too, programmed to dart along paths and handrails with a bounce, and rolling around on the floor in a nuzzle when stationary.
Beyond the basic boots-on-the-ground stuff, there’s action to be found on speeders and in ships too. While traversing the planets at breakneck speeds on her space motorcycle, Kay is never more than a moment away from danger. The speeder can be upgraded, but in its base form is clunky, leading to frequent collisions with rocks and wildlife that will send players careening into the dirt.
In space, players control Kay’s ship, The Trailblazer, in real time from the moment they leave the launch pad. In zero gravity, dog fights with TIE fighters and smugglers can be harrowing and downright nausea inducing in the best possible way, as survival requires constantly spinning and swirling across all axes.
While not quite an RPG, Outlaws has multiple progression systems that allow players to upgrade Kay’s weaponry, speeder, and ship, and learn new abilities. It’s sad to say but completing quests without getting experience points or leveling up can leave you longing for the Pavlovian tinge of satisfaction, but unlocking new skills is done more cleverly than that. To obtain new abilities, Kay must track down experts, NPCs hidden throughout the worlds, and complete tasks to be granted access to their teachings. By removing the XP grind, the developers are pushing players to genuinely explore and roleplay, often only leaving vague teases and rumors about where treasure and experts may be in pieces of intel.
The last bit of roleplaying that rounds out the scoundrel experience is a card game called Kessel Sabacc. Like any open world game worth its salt (The Witcher 3, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth), Outlaws’ take on a card-based minigame is quickly addictive. Unlike The Witcher 3’s Gwent, Sabacc delivers both the strategy of play with the scummy joy of gambling in a sleazy bar, complete with the ability to cheat. The rules are complicated to explain, but just know that this is a game where you can sit across a table with the likes of Lando Calrissian himself, nervously eyeballing your hand while your sidekick Nix peers at his cards over the shoulder.
The future of Star Wars is in gaming
Look, as anyone with a Disney Plus account can tell you, Star Wars isn’t exactly in a great place in 2024. Mismanaged and oversaturated, the rudderless direction of the franchise’s movies and shows have repeatedly shown that, since the response to 2017’s The Last Jedi, the execs in charge aim to play it safe and mitigate backlash at all costs. Every time something bold creeps up, it’s fed to the wolves. So, it’s strange to think that video games of all mediums may be where the brightest future lies for the brand, but it may well be true.
While its many systems are familiar, playing like a cross between Uncharted and Horizon set to a Star Wars tune, Outlaws proves that a clear vision and commitment to the bit will go a long way. By burying the Jedi for the more lurid, lesser-seen corners of its universe and following a dynamic new POV through the eyes of Kay, the game does more to leap the franchise forward than any streaming nostalgia parade has thus far. By celebrating the outlaw life, Star Wars is a vibe again.
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