Star Wars Outlaws Is Another Middling Outing in The Galaxy Far, Far Away

Star Wars has been in a rough stretch for quite some time now. There hasn’t been a new film in nearly five years, specifically since Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker ended the latest trilogy with a dull thud. Aside from the excellent Andor and a few animated highlights like the Tales anthology or Visions, the bulk of its TV shows, from Obi-Wan Kenobi to the third season of The Mandalorian, have been mediocre. The Acolyte was starting to do some interesting things but was abruptly canceled, seemingly indicating that Disney is doubling down on fan-service-oriented premises that tie in closely with the movies. And while there have been a few good videogames like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor, EA has had a ten-year exclusivity deal on Star Wars, leading to fewer games in this world than you may expect.

However, that contract has finally expired, and so we have Star Wars Outlaws, a Ubisoft-developed open-world game set between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. On its face, it presents exactly the kind of nebula-spanning adventure that many Star Wars devotees likely want, letting you whip a speeder through rolling hills, smuggle spice through asteroid belts, and make yourself known in plenty of wretched hives of scum and villainy. But despite delivering many elements of this scoundrel fantasy, the game buckles from a pair of central issues; it’s not very fun to play when the blasters come out, and sneaking around foes is even more tedious. Although its story has some moments, this tale isn’t quite resonant enough to make up for these core inadequacies.

To set the stage a bit, this adventure follows small-time thief Kay Vess and her axolotl-looking animal companion Nix, who are scraping out a meager existence in the shadow of Canto Bight’s casino. Kay’s been running alone for as long as she can remember and is reminded why she has this solitary policy after taking the blame for a heist gone wrong. While she manages to escape her home planet, the scuffle lands her with a death mark from a massive crime syndicate, meaning nearly every bounty hunter from the core worlds to Mos Eisley is gunning for her.

Things look grim until Kay fortuitously meets Jaylen Vrax, a man who offers her a chance at the score of a lifetime. It’s a dangerous heist, as it involves crossing the very mobster out to get her in the first place, but with credits from the jobs, she could have enough to outrun her enemies. From here, she has to assemble a team to pull it off, traveling the galaxy to recruit this squad.

It’s during these planet-spanning adventures that this experience is at its strongest. I went in expecting a standard Ubisoft open-world game inspired by Assassin’s Creed where you scale towers to fill in your map with cluttered objectives, but what’s here is somewhat more freeform and compelling, encouraging you to spelunk through caves, explore valleys, and investigate strange islands. Sometimes, you’ll come across dynamic events in the world where a group of farmers are under siege from bandits or see Imperials confiscating a smuggler cache, giving you time to swoop in as the Stormtroopers and pirates exchange fire.

Mechanically, these detours frequently lead to equipment that provides sizable buffs (you can equip a jacket, blaster holster, and pants, each with unique effects) and resources that help you improve your weapon, ship, and speeder. Sometimes, you’ll even run into “Experts,” seasoned hands who will allow you to unlock new abilities if you complete their quest chain.

And more than the rewards, it’s intrinsically satisfying to traverse these spaces, humming through the swamps of Akiva or the tall grass of Toshara on your speeder as you chart a path under twin suns. It helps that your ride controls sharply; you can make gratifying hairpin turns by hitting the break, dash to the left and right, and hit thrusters that further enhance the sense of breakneck speed. But perhaps even more importantly, Massive Entertainment (the Ubisoft studio that developed the game) immerses us in this setting through intricately designed backdrops crafted with a superfan’s glee. Each of the four planets you explore feels distinct; Akiva’s humid foliage couldn’t be more different than Kijimi City’s snow-swept homes, and each of these planets captures the grungy, lived-in atmosphere at the heart of the series. All these particulars ground us in this specific time and place, where the Empire is still a constant presence but is being beaten back as crime syndicates exploit those outside Imperial grasp.

And as a rogue working outside the law, you’re frequently frequently forced to deal with these syndicates, like the Pykes, Hutts, and Crimson Dawn. Specifically, there’s a reputation system where after Kay interacts with these gangs, whether helping them smuggle a package or brawling with their members in the streets, these actions will positively or negatively affect your standing with the group. If you buddy up with an organization, it means discounts with their affiliated merchants, one-time gifts, like exclusive armor sets, and access to off-limits areas. And if they don’t like you, it means the opposite, that certain places will be harder to access and items will cost more or be off limits. If they really hate you, they’ll even send kill teams after your head (which is very much a pain to deal with). Where things get complicated is that you often can’t help one organization without pissing off another, meaning you’re in for a whole bunch of choices.

While the reputation system successfully captures a sense of shifting alliances and leads to decisions that initially seem weighty, it eventually ends up feeling somewhat inconsequential in the grand scheme of the story, and I largely ignored these interactions once I got the special armor sets I wanted from these groups. It’s a neat idea, but ultimately, it would fit better in an RPG or something based more on conversations than this one, where you’re more likely to punch someone than chat with them.

This takes us to the biggest issues with this experience that undermine much of the previously mentioned upside: it is not very fun to get into shootouts, and it’s even less fun trying to avoid them. Battles feel clunky and awkward, in large part because your character is relatively fragile but you can’t snap behind terrain like in a cover-based shooter. Aside from an ineffectual roll and a slide, there aren’t many ways to avoid enemy fire besides crouching behind things and hoping that projectiles won’t hit you.

Another central problem is that your blaster, the only weapon you have permanently, feels fairly ineffectual; there’s not a great sense of visual feedback and impact when your shots land and foes are a little more spongey than you would like, taking multiple headshots to take down. Stronger adversaries, like Death Troopers who get summoned when you get on the Empire’s bad side, are less an exciting challenge and more a groan-inducing chore because it takes so long to frag them. On top of this, health regeneration is finicky. It takes time for your HP to recover after using a healing item, and if you get hit while it’s recovering, the regeneration will stop altogether. When combined with the inability to snap into cover to avoid stray hits and the absence of useful movement abilities, getting out of a tight situation often feels like a crapshoot.

These battles marginally improve as you get more ability and weapon upgrades, largely because you unlock blaster upgrades with different firing modes, like an ion blast that is effective against droids or an explosive mode to deal with groups, but even with all these extras, these encounters still lack flavor. While there’s Kay’s Adrenaline ability, which is very similar to Read Dead Redemption’s Dead Eye where you freeze time and queue up a bunch of shots like a western gunslinger, for some reason, you can’t move when you activate it, and it doesn’t stay charged between scuffles, so I would sometimes forget about this mechanic altogether. One particularly strange decision is that you’ll frequently find more powerful and satisfying weapons on downed foes, but these are all limited use and impossible to keep—why they designed a huge arsenal of weapons for you to only use them for a few seconds is beyond me. I get that you’re playing a thief and not an amped-up super soldier, but considering how often you have to engage in gun fights, it would be nice if they felt better and presented more options.

However, there’s an even bigger problem: the stealth segments are worse than the shootouts, and they’re featured more often. There is a fundamental design mismatch here, as the game frequently forces you to avoid detection in mandatory stealth sequences but has the type of shallow mechanics in this regard you’d expect from a game where being subtle is more optional, like Uncharted.

The only real tools you have at your disposal while going quiet are to creep up behind guards and bonk them on the head, use the stun mode on your blaster, which takes literal minutes to recharge between shots, or use Nix to distract your foes, which often feels less reliable than other games where you can just huck a rock to draw attention. You can’t drag and hide bodies, there’s no way to consistently down foes from a distance without making noise, you can’t crawl, and there isn’t a way to see enemy vision cones. Guards move around interminably slowly, and there are segments where, if you’re caught, you get a Game Over screen and lose several minutes of progress. At least on PS5, there’s no quick-saving.

Look, Outlaws has a lot of other things going on, and I don’t necessarily expect it to reach Metal Gear Solid V or Hitman 3 levels of dynamic stealth complexity given how much else it’s trying to do, but considering how often you’re forced to do things silently, the lack of depth here is the game’s single biggest misstep. Even during stretches where you don’t have to use stealth, you’re heavily incentivized to avoid battles, as blasting syndicate members damages your reputation, and shootouts with the Empire will escalate until you have a high Wanted status that can only be cleared through bribery or assassination.

There are positive elements when it comes to infiltrating bases; the hacking/lockpicking mini-games are fairly fun, you can sync up with Nix to gratifyingly take out pairs of enemies in quick succession, and a lot of the locations you infiltrate have a good amount of detail, like multiple entry points and labyrinthine interiors. But overall, this part of the experience simply doesn’t provide enough tools to make it rewarding, which is a problem because you’ll be doing a lot of it. Between these issues with shooting and sneaking, I became increasingly disinterested in taking on optional objectives because almost all of these involve one or the other, hurting my ability to enjoy the game’s exploration.

I would have an easier time forgiving these flaws if the overarching narrative was a bit more consistent, and while it eventually works towards some decently delivered character moments, it takes too long to get there. To be specific, the first few hours are the weakest across the board, as it’s paced awkwardly, jolting you from one fetch quest to another, and you can’t engage with the open world yet. Thankfully, these elements improve once we learn about the big heist, in large part because the characters you recruit liven things up; we have ND-5, a stoic Clone Wars era commando droid who slowly forms a bond with Kay, the spunky bomb-loving Ank demolition expert, and Kay’s old mechanic buddy Gedeek, who is working towards fixing his deeds after being forced to serve in the Empire. Kay makes for a largely likable lead with some well-expressed hangups; she’s dealing with a lifetime of abandonment and anger at how hard it is to get by in this tumultuous time period. Ultimately, though, a big problem is that we just don’t have enough time with most of this crew, as the majority of missions are conducted alone. There are a few fun optional little conversations after major quests, but these aren’t quite enough to build up the camaraderie between the team that the climax hinges on.

In many ways, Outlaws delivers exactly what you’d want from an open-world Star Wars game. It nails its open expanses, making it exciting to cut through these vistas with your speeder or to explore asteroid belts in your ship as you punch the hyperdrive and get that iconic lightspeed view. You can feel the effort that went into sculpting these cities and backdrops, which seamlessly place us in this world that’s adored by many (sometimes a bit too much). As someone who has spent far too much of my ephemeral existence thinking about Star Wars, I expected to come away from playing this game with strong thoughts on how it fits into this current moment in the struggling series: would it signal a new path forward or repeat old mistakes? But in the end, it’s a game that isn’t undone by some grand philosophical tenet around how it portrays Star Wars but in something more mundane—it’s not very fun to blast guys, it’s not very fun to sneak around them, and there usually isn’t a third option. Star Wars has always had a scrappy spirit, but Outlaws is simply too rough around the edges.

Star Wars Outlaws was developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It is also available for the Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.