Star Wars Outlaws Review

With all of the Star Wars games out there, exactly how many have let you play as Han Solo? Jedi and Sith are cool, sure, but a street-smart, down on their luck, morally questionable scoundrel with a blaster and a furry sidekick? Well, you still won’t get to play as Han Solo in Star Wars Outlaws, but you play as Kay Vess, who also meets literally all of those above criteria. You can literally get an outfit to make Kay look like Han.

As this third-person, open-world stealth-shooter (it’s an Ubisoft game after all) opens, Key is eager to leave her home planet and make it rich in the core worlds. She and her pet Nix get into trouble and wind up leaving home aboard a ship called Trailblazer, and you’re off to the races. Yes, I just summed up an hour’s gameplay in a single sentence, you can discover the specifics if you decide to play the game.

Outlaws takes place between the fifth and sixth movies, so the galaxy is in upheaval, the Empire is stomping its boot down, the Rebel Alliance is fighting its fight… Oh, and criminals are flourishing. Throughout the game, Kay will be introduced to multiple crime cartels, and be given a lot of opportunities to do jobs for them. I mean a lot. You can spend hours on just the first moon you arrive at post-prologue, exploring the large open area, investigating things in either of the two cities and doing jobs for the cartels. Of course, some of the jobs will eventually require you to get into space, which is where Trailblazer comes in.

I like to fly spaceships, and while I know that there are Star Wars titles that let you just do that, I’ve found that I tend to prefer it as part of the game, rather than the main focus. Once you’re given free rein of the galaxy, you can just hop into Trailblazer and take off, whether it’s to do something in orbit or travel to another planet. The ship handles smoothly, it’s equipped with lasers and missiles (upgradable/changeable later in the game), and space battles are easy enough to navigate. My one issue is that you cannot reverse: if you overshoot your tractor beam target, you have to spin around rather than just reverse a skosh.

So that’s space, which will take up about as much time as you want to give it, outside of some story missions. The majority of Outlaws, however, takes place on planets, moons, and space stations, most of them pretty ambivalent towards your existence, so long as you stay out of restricted areas. With Kay being a rogue, you will have to sneak into those very areas, of course, so learning to use Nix is a necessity. The little beastie can distract, attack, and steal for you — though “attack” is just a more aggressive “distract”. Nix can also activate switches, basically allowing you to open hatches and doors from a distance, though if you’re on a space station someone might wonder where a critter came from and investigate their way towards you…

Nix also gives you the usual Ubisoft “locate enemies” deal, as he can detect people through walls. This also allows you to sic him on people who are wandering too close, then take them down with a punch — I’m unsure how much damage a fist would actually do against a Stormtrooper helmet, but Kay certainly makes do.

While sneaking around you will often have to lockpick, which is called slicing. The mini-game requires you to press a button in time with the beeping, which is handily made more accessible by having lights as well as sounds. It can be as simple as two beeps, or I think I counted five? Given the patterns it’s sometimes difficult to tell, but so long as you press a full sequence you’ll unlock it.

If you’re playing with a PlayStation 5 DualSense, the lights on the pad will also indicate when to press a button, as well as the beeping sounds coming from the pad itself. The speaker in the controller is used quite a bit, and the adaptive triggers also get utilised.

Combat is a little hit-and-miss in Outlaws, because you would expect Kay to be outclassed by the military might of the Empire, and yet getting into a firefight isn’t always a game over. Even when your wanted level is high and a kill squad is after you, there’s the option of fight or flight. Sure, I played on Easy, but even other Ubisoft games have proven more difficult. You have Kay’s upgradeable/moddable blaster, but you can also pick up certain other weapons and use them until the magazine is empty. There are also grenades which are plentiful, since Nix can steal them for you while you’re wandering around town — I would say that Nix came back with a grenade about five times more often than he came back with credits.

Healing is something that makes combat more difficult, since one Bacta vial can refill your entire health bar, but it takes several seconds to do so. If you’re hurt again before it’s full, it stops healing you to that point, even if you literally just pressed the button…

The worlds of Outlaws all feel very lived in, which is pretty much the franchise’s whole aesthetic. Not all of them have appeared in the series before, but they were apparently designed with input from Lucasarts, so I suppose that tracks. There are plenty of NPCs filling the cities, with some interesting conversations around almost every corner. Some of them might even be tips for things you can go out and liberate from their rightful hands.

One of the crime syndicates is brand new too, which had me wondering about how many intergalactic criminal organisations there even are in Star Wars. Kay will get to interact with several of them, and building a relationship with one will usually count against you in the eyes of another. However, it’s not an “all or nothing” relationship, you’re free to court whichever you want in order to play the game (as it were), sometimes you’ll want to pally up with the Crimson Dawn, others you’ll wish the Hutt Cartel were a little friendlier. The better your relationship, the better paying missions you can get from them — and if they hate you, expect to get attacked by patrols.

Speaking of patrols, you will be using your speeder a lot, and so encounter them often. I was happy to find the speeder unlocking very early on, I had honestly expected to have to walk places for a while. But the plains are no place for walking, you might overhear a call for assistance and need to get a move on! If you want to bother with helping them, that is. Perhaps you were on your way to a hidden stash and can’t wait to get your hands on some new trousers! And don’t worry about losing your speeder, it will come when you call it and almost always try to knock you down at top speed.

Something that might jump out at you when you install Outlaws is how relatively small it is at about 50GB. That’s because the graphics might not be as good as you were expecting — the cutscenes are not made using the in-game graphics. It’s not a bad looking game, the environments are great and well designed, but some of the character textures suffer from blurring, and there is some pop-in while using the speeder. The binoculars also have a weird visual effect which causes it to “glitch” when you’re moving them. That seems designed to hide visual issues, more than a fun nod to something from the movies or shows given how it occurs every couple of seconds, and only when outside of cities.

All of the voice acting is great and emotive, things sound like you think they should, and the music very much takes its cues from the familiar soundtrack. Actually, on the topic of sound effects, I was surprised to hear Nix’s claws scampering across rock which was a nice touch. The writing helps cement it as a Star Wars game, right down to it being a family friendly franchise.

It’s unfortunate that I had multiple unrepeatable crashes throughout my time with Outlaws, as I enjoyed the heck out of it. While it’s not my preferred sci-fi franchise of choice, it has so much to do and fun nods to existing media, that I was utterly charmed. Even when Kay would get stuck on scenery or would get ejected from the speeder by the slightest nudge, it still wasn’t enough to negate the enjoyment I had. Those random crashes, when driving, walking, sneaking… those were super frustrating though. Especially since it respawns enemies even when it returns you into the middle of a stronghold…

In all, Star Wars Outlaws is a great game set in a familiar universe. It has some issues, but manages to avoid being “just another Ubisoft game”. Sure, there will be a store for, I assume, cosmetics (it was nonfunctional at the time of this review), and something that you could argue is a “climb a tower” moment in each region, but at least you won’t be swapping equipment every 15 minutes. Since Kay can’t climb or grab onto any surface, I didn’t encounter the usual issues of falling through the ground or textures failing to load, so I’ll count it as a win. If you’ve been yearning for a non-magical space wizard Star Wars game, then The Force is strong with this one.