GamerEscape

Star Wars video games have covered an awful lot of ground in their forty-odd years of existence. From its first platformer in 1987’s aptly titled Star Wars, to its first FPS in 1995’s Dark Forces, its first MMORPG in 2003’s Star Wars Galaxies… The list could go on ad infinitum, but suffice it to say, there have been a lot of game genres adapting a galaxy far, far away.

And soon, on August 30th, 2024, Star Wars Outlaws will carry the unique distinction of being the first proper open world Star Wars game. It arrives from lead developer Massive Entertainment, publisher Ubisoft, Lucasfilm Games, and the combined efforts of no less than ten other Ubisoft subsidiaries for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. With so many hands on deck and an intriguing emphasis on exploring the more unscrupulous characters of Star Wars, I was eager to get my hands on the game for PC to see just how well things panned out.

A Less Civilized Age

Set smack dab between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Outlaws follows certfied scoundrel Kay Vess and her loyal pet critter Nix, doing their best to eke out a living above the local cantina by taking odd jobs and pulling off the occasional heist or two by unsavory means. When things suddenly go sideways for her, Kay is forced to travel offworld and compile a team of fellow ne’er-do-wells with their sights set on the heist of a lifetime.

Throughout the course of her recruitment venture, she’s constantly crossing paths with syndicates, bounty hunters, and the Empire, and the narrative never forgets to establish Kay as a very small fish in the very large pond that is the criminal underworld. She’s inexperienced, makes mistakes, and isn’t always certain about how to proceed despite her confidence, which makes her stand out from the usual characters we see depicted in a similar style. It would have been an easy emphasis to ignore, so I appreciated how commited the story is to establishing just how green she can be.

And in the same vein, the characters are consistently the stars of the show in Outlaws’ storyline rather than the plot itself. They feel very grounded in comparison to Star Wars characters of yore with realistic goals and interactions, a notion that’s particularly highlighted when they have antagonistic views towards figures and groups we’re used to seeing pitted as the good guys. I do wish they could have been a little more at the fore of the narrative, as Kay is usually on her own and speaking to them over long distances, but even with this restriction their dialogue is still fun to hear play out.

The overall story arc isn’t quite as deserving of the same praise, though. For most of the game it flows at a very consistent, flat pace with some sequences that start to border on predictable. There’s always somewhere to break into, something to steal, and something to go wrong in order to extend your time there. It mercifully isn’t a hard and fast rule Outlaws always follows, but it is something that happens pretty often. Especially during longer play sessions when you’re really focusing on advancing the story, things can feel a bit samey, which leads to some “surprise” developments being anything but. This a problem that fades away as the game carries on and the stakes get higher, but it’s a difficult drawback to ignore all the same.

No Ancient Weapons Here

A big pain point in many open world titles is one of pacing, but Outlaws’ opening hours avoid this pitfall by keeping things focused, slowly unveiling core mechanics and gameplay to the player before letting them run loose in its wider open world. The most prominent and unique of these mechanics is certainly how the game handles Kay’s reputation with the various factions she comes across. Throughout your time with Outlaws, you’re able to make decisions regarding which groups you’d like to support and whom you’d like to share your ill-gotten information and goods with. These decisions can alter Kay’s standing positively with one group while being detrimental to another, and manipulating her reputation is something of a through line for the entire game for the way it affects so much of what you do.

Certain areas are under control of specific factions, meaning those on good terms with Kay will allow her to come and go freely while those she’s fallen out of favor with will refuse her outright, requiring her to find another point of entry and sneak her way through to avoid detection. These areas often contain quests, optional objectives, and general loot for progression, which gives both them and your decisions importance. Reputation levels also lead to opportunities to earn specific gear and passives for Kay and even hold an influence on which items you’re able to buy from vendors, too. Nearly everything you do affects the reputation system in some way, which makes Outlaws feel intertwined to a degree I wasn’t expecting. It’s also a very freeform mechanic, where your alliances and choices will oscillate depending on which pieces of Kay’s toolkit you prefer and which groups you want to interact with.

You’ll notice I’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing the reputation system so far and not much of the actual beat-by-beat gameplay, and that’s unfortunately indicative of its depth. A vast majority of the game is focused around stealth, guiding Kay and using the various tools you’ve unlocked to infiltrate locales scattered throughout the world. You’ll steal anything and everything you can find and promptly turn those items into credits or upgrades to make said stealthing easier, which sounds fun in theory, but Outlaws’ progression systems are mostly concerned with making the static gameplay loop easier as opposed to providing it with more depth. The controls are tight and Kay’s gadgets are varied, but they all provide different shades of the same features and don’t change things meaningfully enough for the gameplay to become truly exciting. Sure, you can go in guns blazing to switch things up for yourself, but the same is true for the shooting mechanics as well—flatlined from the jump by their highly repetitive nature.

But it’s in the finer details that Outlaws offsets this relatively simplistic gameplay the most. The quest dialogue and narrative situations do a lot to give each individual location its own flavor, but the game’s frequent emphasis on unique stealth situations, consistently different layouts, and wide variety of unique assets for the player to take in are what really kept me playing.

One quest will see you traversing acres of farmland, circumnavigating patrolling guards and snaking through animal pens, while the next will see you spelunking through an underground Imperial base replete with narrow hallways, environmental puzzles, and more of an emphasis on traversal or platforming. There’s a pretty impressive amount of unique content to find in Outlaws whether the player is guided directly towards it or finds it themselves.

Not every piece of content is made equally of course, and not all of it stacks up against the main storyline proper (which is where Outlaws is at its best) but it all feels worthy of its place in the game. That’s not something you can say for every open world title, and when you couple it with the well-realized reputation system and fun characters, you have a game that’s still pretty fun—even if you can just as easily see the untapped potential.

A Beautiful Binary Sunset

At first blush, the most striking element of Star Wars Outlaws’ presentation is certainly its rich attention to detail. The game oozes the classic Galactic Civil War aesthetic of the original trilogy from stem to stern, and that includes copious amounts of retro-futuristic tech with blinking lights of indeterminable purpose and chunky on-screen text. That being said, Outlaws also takes concepts from the prequel and sequel trilogies as well, giving them a fresh coat of paint and unique spin to keep them in line with the original trilogy setting. Even the AT-STs are animated in such a way that calls back to their wobbly, stop motion origins, and details like that can be found in many different places.

Outlaws also makes some impressive strides in establishing its atmosphere. Sifting your way through underbelly of a city in Imperial-controlled territory will treat you to no shortage of conversations about the hardships of the locals while Empire recruitment propaganda blares through a distant loudpseaker. Exploring every nook and alcove will usually result in something interesting to see, even if it isn’t necessarily a proper quest or the like. Outlaws is also never afraid to go all in with harsh light sources and stark contrasts, which work excellently in tandem with the volumetric fog to diversify the environments.

Sonically, the game takes a few big swings; the soundtrack has plenty of trills and strings in the style of John Williams’ original score, but also eagerly takes things in a more electronic direction to suit the tone of a given sequence when necessary. The same is true for every iconic sound effect you can think of from the films. The voiceover work is also universally excellent, particularly from the core cast, and I was shocked when I realized every line of dialogue in Huttese was uniquely recorded to feature proper nouns and match the emphasis of the sentences themselves.

And then we come to the animations, which are by far the a weakest link in the chain of the Outlaws’ presentation. While overall movement and action-centric animations are typically serviceable, facial animations and expressions have a tendency to feel basic at best and stilted at worst. It’s nothing outright bad or immersion-breaking, but they are severely overshadowed by the execution of the title’s other visuals.

Floating Home

One of Outlaws’ biggest appeals was always going to be how successfully it allowed players to experience the oft-overlooked, oft-underserved seedier side of Star Wars, and it accomplishes this angle with considerable aplomb. It puts you in the shoes of an inexperienced scoundrel, going toe to toe with fellow criminals and syndicates, meeting friends and enemies along the way who don’t always fit into the typical archetypes we’re used to seeing out of Star Wars. Moreover, it does so with the backdrop of a gorgeous and intricately detailed world that pulls in elements from every era of the franchise, bringing with it a feeling of familiarity without losing its own unique spin on things.

Unfortunately, the success of its world and characters belies a relatively stale gameplay loop that fails to shake things up enough as the title’s runtime increases. There’s an awful lot of content and mechanical ambition in Outlaws with its reputation system, and it’s fun enough to experience most of it, but it still isn’t able to prevent things from blending together once you’ve spent an extended amount of time with Kay and her crew.

~ Final Score: 7/10 ~

Review copy provided by Ubisoft for PC. Screenshots provided by reviewer. Featured image courtesy of Ubisoft.