Functional. That is the greatest praise I can give Star Wars Outlaws. It is not a broken game where the Stormtroopers are phasing through walls or spawning right in front of the player. It (mostly) works. The blasters fire. The speeder bikes move. The imperials get shot. But there is not much here that feels inventive or evokes a feeling of awe from the player. Instead, there is a lasting feeling of sameness that is tough to shake. The standard open world tropes: menial side activities littered around the map, vast stretches of barren land on planets – it is all content for the sake of content, stuff that is playable and extends the runtime but is not engaging enough on its own to warrant the player’s undivided attention.
Now you may be looking at that screenshot and scratching your head, but in my defence, I only mentioned that Stormtroopers don’t phase through walls; I never said NPCs don’t phase through the playable character.
So anyway, what does work?
Frankly, I found the best element of this game to be its music. Of course, you would expect a Star Wars game to feature a strong score, given that John Williams composed some of the most iconic tracks in cinematic history with his work on the mainline films, but the composers on this game really outdid themselves. Beyond the superb orchestral pieces, there are also catchy electronic beats that play in nightclubs or during stealth infiltration sections. Those latter tracks do a lot of heavy lifting in the stealth segments, because as we will discuss later, there are serious pacing and level design issues present there. Luckily, the music lends a grimy, tense atmosphere to those sections, as well as something to occupy your ears, while the gameplay is boring your brain to oblivion.
Hive of Scum and Villainy
The criminal underworld of Star Wars features heavily in this game, as you would expect given the title. Now I will not speak to how lore accurate the depiction of these criminal enterprises is, but it is refreshing to see them spotlighted, as they don’t have a huge presence in the mainline films. Outlaws tactfully uses these enterprises in place of the traditional factions you might find in an RPG. What elevates the faction mechanic here is how much impact it has on the actual gameplay.
Being friendly with the Crimson Dawn, for example, allowed me to freely enter certain restricted areas, whereas if we were on poor terms, I would have been turned back at the door and forced to find some hidden path inside. Keep in mind that you often cannot increase your affinity with a faction without the consequence of lowering your reputation in another. It is only natural that the underworld enterprises may have to fight over the shared turf, so it would feel like a copout if you could easily buddy up with a specific faction without bothering the others present in the area.
I also appreciated that the enterprises had a physical presence in the world, often in the form of a base, hideout, or even a vast patch of land on larger planets like Toshara. Hilariously enough, I irritated the Pyke syndicate with so many transgressions, including liberating their prisoners and trespassing, that they now open fire on me the second I step foot on their land. This level of intricate gameplay impact adds much-needed weight to the player’s decision-making and ensures this underworld loyalty system does not feel shoehorned into the overall experience.
Another strength of Outlaws is its comprehensive use of the PS5’s DualSense controller. The speakers echo the sizzling sounds of an overheated blaster, the adaptive triggers offer an appropriate amount of resistance to make the player feel like they are pulling back the trigger on an actual weapon, and the haptic feedback helps with the unique, rhythmic lock picking mini game.
If you think I am scraping the bottom of the barrel here with some of those positives, then you would be right. Not only is this game lacking in strengths, but it is also so comically indistinctive, that I could describe almost every individual mechanic and feature present here, and you wouldn’t be able to tell if I was talking about Star Wars Outlaws or any one of a plethora of other adventure games.
Now This is Stealth Racing
The open world sections on the planets Toshara and later in the game, Tatooine, are filled with empty spaces, as well as generic side content like outposts or bases to conquer, activities you have completed dozens and dozens of times in other games in the genre. What bothers me about this is not necessarily that these activities have appeared in other titles, but that they are executed in such a bland and uninteresting way that it is genuinely tough to motivate yourself to explore the world. For example, where you might have an enemy camp with goblins and a big ogre walking around in another open-world game, here you have a similar area, but instead it is an imperial base with Stormtroopers and an AT-ST guarding the entrance. If you think about it from that perspective, it really feels like this is a generic adventure game with a Star Wars coat of paint instead of an experience that was built from the ground up as a project revolving around that IP. And if you think I was exaggerating about the emptiness of the open world, just look at this screenshot from Tatooine and admire the miles of nothing but sand in every direction.
I would have loved the open-world areas if they were more dynamic and alive. Instead, they feel barren, with little in the way of spontaneous activities or events that would otherwise convince you that these planets are living, breathing worlds and not backdrops for mediocre sets of missions. To Massive Entertainment’s credit, their artists have done an impressive job with the open world’s underlying visuals, much like they did with 2023’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Natural elements like foliage and rock surfaces really stand out, as they are rendered with incredible detail and can be seen from far away, thanks to the long draw distances in place on most planets. Some adapted elements look and feel similarly impressive, with cantinas specifically being recreated so faithfully that you can practically smell the sleaze seeping off the criminal patrons.
Unfortunately, that level of visual detail is not cheap, and if you are playing this on the PlayStation 5 like myself, then you are going to pay, with the currency being image quality. I cannot personally confirm what combination of upscaling and anti-aliasing is being used here, but I can tell you that in the performance mode, literally any form of on-foot movement will give protagonist Kay’s hair a distracting, fuzzy appearance, and the same can be said for smaller objects like grass and moving foliage. If you are not using a 4K screen, these issues may not be as apparent, but the lower performance mode resolution stands out when you are playing on a UHD television.
Let us circle back to the mediocre missions I hinted at before. This game has a litany of sluggish missions, several of which are present in the opening few hours. Even the first mission struggles with this awkward pacing, beginning with a segment where you are walking around, picking random things up to sell and scrounge together a menial number of credits. Not exactly the exciting start that many would have hoped for. On top of that, there are several unskippable quests where nothing of note happens but the quest itself seems to keep going and going and going. Allow me to outline the flow of one of these quests, and keep in mind I was forced to complete this to advance the main story.
Talk to a specific bartender. Bartender says talk to these people on this part of the map. Those people say go to this specific shop. And then the shopkeeper finally upgrades the bike, so I can move on with the story – SIKE. The shopkeeper cannot just upgrade the bike; why would they? Instead, you must go to this wind facility and steal an atmospheric accelerator. You get to the facility; there is no combat, and it’s just a climbing section that goes for too long, just like this fetch quest that goes on for too long, just like this paragraph goes. You get the idea.
There are also several missions in Star Wars Outlaws that contain extended stealth sections, where the player instantly fails if they are discovered. I cannot understate how much I hated these sections. There is immense joy to be had from well-implemented stealth mechanics, but here, the implementation is extremely basic, and the player is left with little in the way of abilities, tools, or flexibility to sneak around areas in the ways that they see fit. The level design is also not flexible enough to accommodate these stealth sections, as there are rarely alternate routes to take outside of the ones the developers intended for the player to take. For example, there are only two paths forward in a syndicate’s turf; one route leads directly to two guards and the other goes around the right side where no-one is patrolling. Hmm. I wonder which one I am supposed to take. The slower movement speed when sneaking, combined with the linearity of these segments, make them a chore to play. And if you get caught, you are often sent a long way back as you cannot save in restricted areas, whereas even stealth-focussed games like Dishonoured allow the player to quick save more frequently, so they don’t have to lose significant progress upon failure.
I cannot recall any riveting skirmishes, shootouts, or dogfights I had while playing Star Wars Outlaws. The gunplay is serviceable but not uniquely enjoyable in any way, although it is nice to shoot blasters since you do not have to scavenge for ammo. As far as genuine fun is concerned, I would say the shooting segments are the most consistently enjoyable parts of the game, thanks to the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback adding impact to each shot and active reload, and because the game makes an active effort to add complexity here by allowing for a wide range of modifications and upgrades for the blaster. There is also a neat ‘Adrenaline Rush’ ability, where targets can be marked in slow motion and then stylishly eliminated, akin to say the deadeye skill found in the Red Dead games. Depending on the enemy, you might even be required to use a different ammo type, for example, Ion ammo against droids. While these shooting mechanics might not sound revolutionary, they are significantly more fun to play around with when compared to the stealth or space battle segments.
The ship combat is unfortunately very vanilla and not given enough of a focus to even warrant inclusion in this game. It plays very similarly to the space battles in Starfield, or Battlefront 2, where you have access to lock-on missiles and lasers that fire at a faster rate. The customization options are not quite up to the same level as Starfield for example, and I also felt that flying the ship in combat was slightly unsatisfying because the thing had the manoeuvrability of a tank and wouldn’t turn easily, which made some of the dogfights frustrating as you are pitted against more agile ships. Space battles are given such a small focus in the main story that it may have been wise to omit them and focus on the open world and on-foot gameplay. Early on, a side character even discusses how much they admire Kay’s ship, the Trailblazer, and at that point I was thinking, “welp, I wish I could experience how cool this ship is, but I can’t even fly it right now because I am quite busy completing the 7000th dull mission so far.”.
Speaking of characters, I felt the narrative here was uneven and suffered from a similar sense of sluggishness as the rest of the game, albeit with some occasional high spots. Those high spots are mostly comprised of interactions between the protagonist, Kay Vess, and her droid ally, ND-5. Their banter is frequently funny and delivered quite well by both performers. As a protagonist, Kay works well enough, and her companion Nix is a cute, otherworldly creature. Aside from the odd flashback or dialogue here and there, there is not a lot of focus placed on her background or history, so she does feel like a character who is focused on reacting and adapting to the events happening around her, as opposed to someone who is fixated on her past, a smart decision on the writing team’s part, since she has to be morally flexible to accommodate some of the greyer choices that can be made if collaborating with the criminal enterprises.
Aside from that, the story is relatively unremarkable. The unfolding plot, which involves Kay assembling a heist squad with specialised members from all corners of the galaxy, works as an excuse to visit an array of different locations but is not exactly a riveting plot line in and of itself. One of the antagonists is also painfully generic. The bad guy in question is a power-hungry British man who is constantly in a bad mood and occasionally monologues about how old ships get scrapped and replaced, insinuating he could do the same to his lackeys if they keep failing him. About as dull of an antagonistic force as you can imagine. The story does pick up slightly after Kay gets off the planet Toshara, leading to some ambitious twists and surprises, but considering how slow the plot moves in the first 5-6 hours, there is a good chance that many gamers won’t even stick around for the narrative to pick up steam. Even when the story gets more interesting, it can’t overcome the issues in the gameplay loop, although I am rooting for some of these characters, especially ND-5 and Kay, to make appearances in other Star Wars media.
At the end of the day, whether I recommend Star Wars Outlaws to you depends on two factors.
Firstly, how burnt out are you from the traditional open-world gameplay loop? If you recently played an open world game and thought to yourself, “I am really not enjoying completing generic side missions, exploring a barren world, or clearing bland outposts, hideouts, or bases,” then yeah, you ought to avoid this one.
Secondly, how much do you love Star Wars? Do you get a kick out of the incoherent babbling that is the Huttese language, or revel at the opportunity to collaborate with the galaxy’s underworld syndicates, such as the Pykes or Crimson Dawn? Do you yearn to walk through the interiors of seedy cantinas, soaking in the surroundings, which are mostly made up of shady creatures, holographic gambling tables displaying rigged races, and booths filled with contractors offering you work for the galaxy’s most devious criminals?
If you answered “not even remotely burnt out” and “yes,” respectively, then congratulations. This is the game you are looking for.
To everyone else, I would say wait for a steep sale, or if you’re a subscriber to PS Plus Extra or Premium, a potential arrival on the games catalogue, so you can try it without paying full price. Just understand that this plays like a very conventional, sluggish adventure game, featuring a faithful coat of Star Wars paint and odd visual hiccups, the fuzzy appearance of moving hair strands or foliage being prime examples. If all of that is still okay with you, then by all means: give it a chance.
While Star Wars Outlaws features an intricate depiction of the franchise’s underworld, its tiresome gameplay loop, indistinctive open world, and frustrating mission design make it tricky to recommend, even to devout fans of the galaxy far, far away.
