Star Wars Outlaws

The Star Wars universe has many corners. When one thinks of Star Wars, images of Jedi and lightsabers immediately come to mind. But some of the franchise’s strongest material takes place on the fringes of that world, in circles where stories of midichlorians and the Force aren’t mentioned, thought about, or even believed. There are plenty of normal old people in the Star Wars universe, most of whom are just trying to get by under the oppression of the Empire (or the First Order, or whatever). For every Luke Skywalker, there are probably one hundred Han Solos.

One of these is Kay Vess, the charming and fun new heroine of Star Wars Outlaws, and a clear Han Solo type. Kay is a small-time thief, con, and hustler, bumming around the back alleys of The Last Jedi’s gambling world Canto Bight with her pet/buddy Nix. When a series of unfortunate events ends with Kay and Nix stealing an unexpectedly valuable ship from a local crime boss, they are hurled into a planet-hopping adventure through the Star Wars underworld.

There are a lot of elements from other games mashed together in Star Wars Outlaws. Kay spends a fair amount of time Nathan Drake-ing her way through abandoned shipwrecks and underground lairs. There is a touch of Watch Dogs in the way she interfaces with tech and manipulates her environment. And you could name thirty space shooters that align with the game’s utilitarian ship battles.

But more than anything, Star Wars Outlaws is a stealth game. Sure, Kay has a handy blaster on her hip, but if you find yourself using it, more than likely something has gone wrong and you are shooting your way out of a bad situation to go hide somewhere while things cool off. This is not a game where you want to run in guns blazing, and frontal assaults are never the way to success.

It is very important that potential players understand what they are getting into here. If you come for Grand Theft Star Wars, you are going to be sorely disappointed - you are instead going to get Siphon Filter Star Wars. I’m not a stealth guy, typically finding stealth segments to be the most irritating parts of otherwise fun games. So, I was a little taken aback when every single mission in Star Wars Outlaws had me sneaking into bases, space stations, and city regions to try to steal some McGuffin or another. These segments are very deliberately paced; run in shooting and you are going down in flames in about 2.5 seconds. Kay Vess is a vent crawler through and through, using her wits, her gadgets, and her friendship with the extremely helpful Nix to get in and out unscathed.

Nix is a videogame revelation – an adorable sidekick that doubles as the handiest tool in the game. You can send him out to distract enemies, open doors, trigger switches, set off explosions, or simply jump on someone’s face and start clawing them up. He is a loyal companion in a world of backstabbing liars, and only becomes more powerful as the game progresses and you unlock his advanced abilities. I loved sending him out to set traps on alarm panels, then deliberately taking potshots at nearby dudes just to watch them get fried when they tried to call for help.

As a player unaccustomed to stealth games, I don’t mind saying that I failed a lot during the opening hours of this game. There are a variety of ways into and out of installations, but the goals are not always clear, and at times, getting caught seemed outright unfair. I was constantly getting arrested or killed, and unceremoniously dumped back at the beginning of missions due to the game’s super sketchy save system (why, in the year of our lord 2024, can I not save in the middle of a mission whenever I damn well please?).

But, about five hours in, the gameplay clicked with me. I began understanding how to use Nix more effectively, came to grips with the super-useful-but-takes-too-long-to-cool-down sleep function on my blaster, and learned how to appropriately distract, take down, and otherwise incapacitate my opponents. Before long, I was confidently striding into rooms littered with sleeping (or dead - Kay can straight up murder dudes if need be) gang members and imperial officers, taking whatever I wanted and strolling out with impunity.

Infiltration areas, for lack of a better term, are well done. There are usually multiple ways in and out of every situation, and the game is smartly designed in a way that makes areas feel larger than they probably are. I enjoyed playing Cassandra, and creeping around the high points picking dudes off from above before finally deciding to move in on an area. Just like the open world, exploration is rewarded during missions, as treasure, materials, and other goodies are laying around everywhere for sticky-fingered intruders to pocket. Still, around the 30th or 40th time you break into a hidden base, you might start getting the feeling that you've done this same thing one too many times. 

I also experienced lingering issues with some of the more "hidden" secrets. Some of my least favorite game mechanics involve walking in circles around a mountain and trying to figure out how to get to the thing on top/inside it. "I don't know where to go" is never fun, and I really detest when games repeatedly put me in a position where I'm wandering around feeling like I'm missing something. I liked finding alternate ways into bases; I did not like bases where I couldn't figure out how to access the base at all. 

The much-vaunted alignment system in Star Wars Outlaws turns out to be a bit of a bust. As you complete assignments for one faction or another, your loyalty rating for that gang goes up or down. There are some decision points presented where you can decide to stab someone in the back or not, but these have minimal impact on the results of your quest. For example, in the early game I was doing a heist for the Hutts. Crimson Dawn showed up and convinced me to screw over the Hutts and deliver the desirable data to them instead. The end result? My rating with Crimson Dawn went up, AND my rating with the Hutts went up, just not as much as it would have if I hadn’t double-crossed them.

In the end, I found that a high rating meant the delivery of some sweet loot to your ship, and a low rating meant that you had to sneak around that gang’s held territory, which you kinda have to do anyhow sooner or later. If you let things sink too low, that faction will send out a hit squad, which can be irritating when you are trying to get from point A to point B. So yeah, it’s a fun enough system, but not the make-or-break mechanic I was expecting.

The storyline in Star Wars Outlaws moves along briskly enough if you let it, but it is possible (and maybe even desirable?) to spend ten or more hours Hinterland-ing around on each planet. Though you can’t walk the circumference of each world (engage, Starfield haters!), the planets’ explorable surface areas are notably large, and each includes a wide swath of explorable outer space to plunder.

Each world – though they vary in size - has its own giant pool of side quests, intel dumps, and contracts to investigate and complete, and almost all of them are tied to an upgrade of some sort. You can easily burn away hours trying to get all the stuff needed to upgrade your blaster, your speeder, and your ship, all while scoping out for materials needed for the actual perk system. There are Sabacc games, armor sets, and hidden treasures dotting every landscape, all perfectly willing to entertain and distract you for as long as you allow them to. Dallying around feels rewarding – because it is rewarding – but sooner or later you need to pull the trigger and play through the story and move onto the next world. Don't worry - it turns out that you can quickly turn around and go back to polish up any unfinished business. 

So yes, Kay is a fun hero, the gameplay unfolds into something manageable, the by-the-numbers “put together a team and pull off a big heist” storyline is fun. And there are distractions galore. But there are aspects of Star Wars Outlaws that reveal that the game could have used some more time in the bacta tank before shoving it out the door.

Visually, this game just doesn’t feel up to par with what I expect from a title that has abandoned last gen hardware and is releasing only on current gen systems. It’s not ugly per se, but there are aspects that are distractingly fuzzy (what is going on with Kay’s hair?). Even after turning off the film grain effect, messing around in the settings, and running the game in Quality mode, the entire thing looks like I’m viewing it through a thin gauze. This game simply isn’t as vibrant as I want it to be.

And now I’m going to say something incredibly unfair, and I'm going to compare apples to elephants. My son was playing Spider-Man Miles Morales on PlayStation 5 concurrently with my Star Wars run on Xbox Series X and S. Every time I walked through the room where he was web slinging, I was struck with just how crisp and clean that game looked compared to the game I was currently playing. And I’m not implying that the PS5 could possibly run Star Wars better than Xbox – not at all. I super don’t care about pitting consoles against each other, and I'm sure the two versions look very similar to each other. What I’m saying is that there is a clarity to Spider-Man (and a lot of recent Ubisoft games, for that matter) which straddled console generations, that feels missing from Star Wars Outlaws, which committed to current gen. I hate to say it, but damn it, it just doesn’t look that good. No one is going to walk past this game and say "Wow, what is that?".

There are a few other issues as well. I mentioned the save system, which I found to be oppressively bad. Players can save their game out in the open world, but as soon as they enter a “restricted area” (which is basically any place that they need to sneak around) the option to save is grayed out. Players are then at the mercy of the game’s checkpoint system, which may or may not trigger as you move through a stealth segment. As someone with small children, I often have to stop playing in the middle of a mission. Waking up the next morning to find that the game didn’t save, the system went offline, and now it’s triggering Xbox’s booty-ass online save sync feature is utterly infuriating.

Speaking of which, I did encounter one situation where the game failed to upload my save to the cloud at all. To be fair, this could be an Xbox error and not an Outlaws error. But I bounce my game during reviews between a Series X and Series S, and when one failed to upload my save, Xbox automatically downloaded an old save, effectively deleting hours of progress. It could be a pre-release issue, but there is an in-game manual save upload feature in Star Wars Outlaws that errored out every time I tried it. Bottom line – if you plan on moving your save file between consoles, tread very, very carefully.

Beyond that, I ran into a few narrative issues. There was one funny instance where I watched a primary character be killed, only to be talking to them on a commlink five minutes later in the context of a different mission. A few other times, I attempted to go into space to complete a quest, and the game’s storyline took over and kidnapped me off to another world when I hadn’t intended to leave yet. Not deal breakers by any means, but enough to break the illusion of freedom. And I was wildly disappointed to discover that I couldn't steal vehicles and speeders - this felt like a huge miss. I really wanted to blast dudes off of a landspeeder, hop into it, and tear off into the desert. No dice. 

Still, Star Wars Outlaws is a sprawling game, and pretty good Star Wars. Most of the time, it’s pretty fun, but playing at length does reveal some frustrations. The save system is a bummer, and the visuals feel decidedly last-gen. That said, it’s always fun to bop around the world, running into protocol droids and banthas. Kay and Nix are great new heroes, and I’m hoping that this game is successful enough to see a sequel eventually. There are so many unexplored corners of the Star Wars universe, and I would love to break into all of them.