Star Wars Outlaws Review: The Adventure We’ve Been Waiting For

Star Wars Outlaws

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Platform reviewed on: PlayStation 5

Pros

• As faithful to the films as it gets
• A great heist adventure
• Open world has tons of secrets
• Stealth and combat feel great

Cons

• Mission formulas begin to show after a while
• Spaceflight and combat a bit lacking

ESRB Age Rating: Teen
ESRB Content Descriptors: Mild Language, Simulated Gambling, Violence
ESRB Interactive Elements: Users Interact, In-Game Purchases

Review code provided by the publisher.

Trying to capture the magic of Star Wars in a game has proved difficult and elusive ever since LucasArts started trying decades ago. Star Wars Outlaws nails it. And what’s better, it nails a new dimension of exploring that galaxy – far, far away – as just some average bum called Kay Vess, on the way to becoming a legend.

Starting out on Cantonica, the casino planet from Rian Johnson’s much-maligned sequel trilogy middle child The Last Jedi, Outlaws taps into one of the more interesting unresolved aspects of that world: the plight of the commoner. Kay is a street kid, abandoned to a life of petty crime and a strong belief that depending on others is for chumps. That makes her sudden need to assemble a crew to hit a vault the perfect way to examine those trust issues, while showing off the seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe.

Kay can even bet on the weird long-legged cat horses that Finn and Rose escaped on after their own failed heist in a Canto Bight casino, for a few extra credits. And if you find the right datapad, maybe even know exactly which racer has been rigged to win. Everything’s fair in the underworld.

The story is enjoyably heist-y – imagine Ocean’s Eleven but with Jawas. And the action – described to us by creative director Julian Gerighty in a recent interview at Gamescom, as “matinée action” – is perfectly in line with the swashbuckling nature of the original trilogy, in the midst of which Outlaws is set. You can find Han Solo frozen in carbonite, if that helps narrow it down for you.

As a rookie thief, attempting to save her own life by putting together a crew, Kay has a surprisingly good right hook – and is handy with a blaster. Melee takedowns in stealth have some camp-comic timing, tapping on shoulders and pointing up, etc. And she has this stance when firing from the hip that could be taken straight off a Harrison Ford photoshoot. The blaster can be customized, not just with a paint job (as can your speeder and your stolen ship, The Trailblazer) but with modules that do one of three types of damage, useful for solving puzzles and combat against droids, shields, and stronger enemies.

Building up adrenaline from hitting headshots or taking sustained enemy fire unlocks a deadeye sharpshot technique where Kay can target three (or more) foes and drop them with a quickfire volley from her blaster. Pulling the trigger for the shot feels satisfying in an old western gunslinger way, but it does feel a little strange for Kay to just have this near-superhuman capability right off the bat.

Luckily this is the only area in which Kay feels above average at the start of the game. She is terrible at lying, has basically no thieving toolkit other than her grappling rope, and can’t spot a double cross at 10 paces let alone parsecs. She is the epitome of a greenhorn, something Gerighty stressed to us was not the original plan for Kay.

“The character [of Kay] really evolved, you think you know Star Wars when you start [developing] but you really don’t,” Gerighty told us. “There is so much to learn about how Ralph McQuarrie, George Lucas, approached worlds and characters that you start evolving and simplifying some things, making others more complex, more relatable. Relatability is so important to Star Wars, so for this character we wanted that evolution to be from a street thief, to an outlaw.”

“In this galaxy, we put her in front of Jabba the Hutt, of Lady Q’ira, of some of the most fearsome, notorious criminal syndicates in the galaxy, that’s the journey we wanted to look at. [Initially] she was more experienced, it was a little rougher, a little bit more mature, but it evolved over the course of the development.”

It feels better this way, that she is basically a complete novice in both her skill set and her ability to intuit the intentions of others around her, a skill as important as lockpicking to a scoundrel in the Star Wars underworld. In the early half of the game, it’s easy to feel like a pawn, being ping-ponged around between syndicates, used for nefarious plans Kay can understand no better than a womp rat can understand astrophysics.

But as the story progresses, Kay does gain that street savviness. At first just not hesitating in a lie, then understanding when a contact is flubbing a translation with Tusken raiders to try and trick her into paying off his cantina tab as part of a deal she has already fulfilled. It’s a gratifying arc as her early decisions have you tearing hair out at how naive she is being.

Her characterisation develops in tandem with a broadening skill set, upgrades that can be unlocked once meeting certain criteria (x headshots on a speeder, y credits scavenged, find ways to make Nix happy z times). Each upgrade is through a certain Expert, whom you have to befriend through their own little quest line, each of which is tied nicely into the world and Kay’s journey through it.

It also mirrors your own skill as a player, knowing when to cross syndicates, managing your reputation between all four to maximize your personal gain while maintaining access to restricted areas and enjoying the freedom of not being hunted. Each city has districts within it dedicated to syndicates that are active on that planet, and sometimes in the open fields outside the cities, too.

Only friendly syndicates will let you go through them without lasers being exchanged, as well as offering you better prices at affiliated traders and sending you some swag. But if, at some point, you fall into the extreme bad graces of a syndicate, it really does put an element of risk into basically any job on worlds where they are active.

Death Squads get dispatched after you, and unlike the Empire who act as a general 5-star wanted level police force for the open world – easily ditched by simply paying off a corrupt official or running for a comms relay in orbit to wipe your wanted level – syndicate manhunts require you to pull off missions to increase your rep. Missions that can be interrupted at any time by the very enforcers coming to claim the bounty on your head.

Luckily there are dozens of missions to choose from at any time to increase your rep with one faction, most of the time without decreasing rep with another – as long as you buy into the stealth gameplay. Gunplay in Outlaws feels great, thanks to The Division developer Massive’s storied experience with cover shooters. But the stealth is almost mandatory to try and keep everyone happy with you, given how much backstabbing you have to do. It isn’t that difficult, but can require some patience, or a mastery of some fiddly commands. That’s where Nix comes in.

Nix is a brilliant partner in crime, not just because he is comfortably one of the cutest sidekicks in modern gaming. His mechanics function broadly the same as one of Ubisoft’s other stealth-action experiments, Watch_Dogs – specifically the sequel, which tried to simplify the hacking to one-touch context-sensitive commands, rather than a long list of applicable actions to every object.

While Nix is indispensable as a gofer – picking up new weapons, bacta vials, grenades, and flipping switches you can’t reach – he can also play a part in your stealthy pranks. Later upgrades allow him to distract more than one guard at a time, lay a trap on alarm panels for any runners that try to call for help, and set off grenades on troopers’ belts. All using the left shoulder button, and most of the time just with a single tap rather than holding it down to choose exactly which target you want.

You can easily set up very cool ambushes on groups or pairs of guards with little practice, until you can pull them off on the fly without much preparation. Nothing beats the Double Trouble Classic: Sending Nix to jump on one guy while you stealth takedown his pal before turning on the poor soul left trying to get a creature off his face. Sending Nix out to play dead also allows you to sneak up and drop a smoke bomb on large groups of enemies before chaining takedowns and blaster stuns from within the cloud.

Your clothing can also shape your playstyle with useful boons. One legendary set I got from becoming best pals with Crimson Dawn (for all of 30 seconds before they realized I’d sold them out to the Pykes) meant that my blaster stun shot cooldown was shortened whenever I hit an enemy with my smoke bomb. Another boon in my loadout meant my smoke bomb cooldown reset whenever I stunned someone. Put together, they let me blow through bases like a thundercloud.

Loadouts that favored all-out aggression were also possible, with bonuses that increase blaster damage when swapping between damage types, or constantly built up adrenaline to give you deadeye shots every other second. But the methodical base-clearing stealth simply activated my brain in just the right way, which meant I didn’t tire as quickly of the formula as some might.

There is definitely a formula to missions, to the point that an entire subset of missions (syndicate contracts you pick up from brokers in cities) are essentially generated out of a set of parameters. Sneak into this place and install a listening device. Steal something from this syndicate. Slice this console without being discovered. These contracts purely exist so that you always have something to increase your rep with a syndicate, but you can basically get by with just story missions and side missions if you alternate your allegiances just right.

The story and side missions generally hide the formula by mixing and matching activities together and – crucially – having good narratives that help it all make sense as to why you would even care enough to do it. Starting some side missions are little scavenger hunts themselves, following leads you pick up by listening to someone in the next booth at a cantina, or reading a datapad with a tipoff. It all feels very immersive, which combined with just walking around a near-perfect recreation of the movie sets, makes it catnip for the average Star Wars nerd.

Even the above-average Star Wars nerd will also be entertained by just how much of the films are tied into this world. You can go to the booth where Han shot Greedo (first) and see the blaster scorch on the wall. You can go to the Lars homestead and see the soot from the fires which sent Luke Skywalker on his journey off-world and into legend. I spent hours and hours sightseeing around the galaxy, spotting something that tied into some event in a prequel movie, clapping in delight and opening up photo mode.

You may be able to tell from the volume of pictures in this review that the photo mode is absolutely phenomenal, but only because the artistic direction is doing all the legwork already. Star Wars is a series that is perhaps most synonymous with moody lighting, given the role lightsabers play in its most iconic shots. But even in stories told in that world a million miles away from the nearest neon blade, the light still sings. Massive went the extra mile to sell the game's cinematic value with its camera, which defaults to 21:9 with black bars – something I was able to appreciate at face value, but my fellow editor Henry immediately turned off in order to be able to see the HUD icons better.

It’s fitting that the game attempts to have you view it through the cinematic lens, as Outlaws is – at its very heart – a sincere desire to put you inside the Star Wars films themselves. On that, it succeeds. Just walking around feels great, a sign of a well-realized world. How much of that is down to the gearing of your brain – how early you began to crave being there, inside an imperial base, stealing a chaincode, or a data chip, or a schematic – is obviously dependent on the player. But if you have even the slightest beat of a cantina drum in your heart, then Outlaws is the chance you have been waiting for. To walk around and have your own adventure in a galaxy far, far away. What a treat.

Star Wars Outlaws

Release Date: August 30, 2024

• Windows
• PlayStation 5Buy
• Xbox SeriesBuy