Star Wars Outlaws
SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.
The TLDR for Star Wars Outlaws is that as of this writing I don’t recommend buying the game. Instead, I’d wait to see if Ubisoft, the games developer, releases patches to address the numerous issues players have encountered before playing it.
Early results are encouraging. The game was released on August 30th, 2024. Ubisoft released a patch to improve stability on September 10th, 2024. I’d bet by Q1 of next year the game will be in a much better state, and probably on sale, so if I could go back in time, I’d recommend to myself to wait until then to play it.
The issues I’ve run into run the gamut; random crashing, visual artifacts, missions that aren’t completable forcing me to go back to an earlier save, erroneous false new item indicators in the UI, missions that fail before you even start the mission with no explanation, and a particularly annoying issue where my droid companion tells me that I have been invited to an exclusive Sabac game on Tatooine every time I approach the Trailblazer, the ship that the main character in the game uses to fly from place to place. Some of the missions and map items are not completable. It took me probably 30 hours to get through the main game, and another 30 hours at least of side missions and collectables. Of that, I’d bet I’ve wasted 5-10 hours on game play that ended up being moot.
Once those issues are fixed, Star Wars Outlaws will be a great game. The player character is Kay Vess, a thief from the city Canto Bight on the planet Cantonica, which appeared in The Last Jedi movie. The game is set in the Star Wars universe between Episode 5 and 6. She is joined by her creature companion Nix, who is ostensibly a pet but from a game mechanics point of view gives Kay the equivalent of some force powers a la Star Wars Survivor. By the late game Nix is a holy terror. Once the invincible and untargetable Nix gains the ability to run up to most enemies and pull the pin on their grenades, causing them to explode and kill themselves and possibly their neighbors, Nix can basically take down an army all by itself why Kay hides in the bushes snickering.
Nix is a super fun companion. One of the actions you can ask Nix to perform is called “Distract”, where Nix will run over to an indicated location and, with a histrionic squeal, dramatically keel over, sticking its tongue out and little legs into the air as if it has just died. Then it will twitch for several seconds in its death throes. The whole act is hilarious.
It is that attention to detail which I find charming. A lot of the missions have very creative story lines that mix game play elements. My favorite missions were the ones that start out as a straightforward fetch, kill, stealth, or stealing mission, and then go completely sideways. Some missions will start with one type of gameplay and end with another, like playing Sabac to pay off a debt. The main story line missions are the strongest and the ones I found the most enjoyable. Many of the scenarios have at least two options, to go in guns-a-blazing or us stealth to achieve your goals, which I found reminiscent of the Batman: Arkham series of games.
The developers made some thoughtful choices which I appreciate. Kay only has one weapon (if you disregard the Demon of Exploding Hand Grenades Nix), a blaster that has a variety of modes. Matching the mode to the enemy is challenging enough to keep combat engaging for the early and mid-game. While you can pick up some enemy weapons to use them against other enemies, those weapons, unlike your blaster, have limited ammo and can’t easily be taken from one region to the other because virtually any action forces Kay to drop the enemy weapon she is holding.
If that wasn’t the case, the difficulty curve would be all out of whack, as the player could bring a grenade launcher to a gun fight. This kind of out-of-context thinking makes for comical interactions in other open world games like the Grand Theft Auto series, but also removes most of the challenge for players savvy enough to come up with work arounds.
I remember in one particularly difficult mission where the player has to overwhelm a checkpoint in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, I realized I could hijack a truck from across the map, drive it to the checkpoint, and drive over the guards instead of gunning them down. I found pleasure at coming up with a novel solution that worked, but I also quickly lost interest in the game, because most problems could be solved with a rocket launcher from the right distance.
As Soren Jonson said, “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” Thankfully, Star Wars Outlaws helps you keep the fun in the game by preventing these kinds of approaches. When I attempt the same kind of tricks in Star Wars Outlaws, I can’t, because inevitably I need to drop my weapon before moving on to the next area. This means that while a lot of out-of-the-box approaches are foreclosed, the game has a more satisfying difficulty curve (at least early and mid-game) and is more engaging.
Another smart choice is the way Star Wars Outlaws handles fast travel vs intraplanet travel.
While on a planet, fast travel is for the most part what you would expect. So long as you are not in combat and not in a restricted area, you can save and fast travel within the same planet easily.
However, if you want to go to another planet, you must travel back to your ship, the Trailblazer, and launch into space. And even if you elect to skip the cut scene, you still see the launch sequence for a good 10-15 seconds. Then you must spool up the hyper drive and then hyperspace jump to one of the four or five planets which are available at different points in the game. During the hyperspace jump, sometimes you are treated to a bit of dialogue between Kay and other shipmates. Once there (or even in the planets atmosphere), the player can fast travel again, but only to locations on that planet.
The drawn out experience of moving from planet to planet conveys a feeling that you are really traveling when you go from one planet to another, even if the whole sequence takes only 30-60 seconds, avoiding the complaint which was levied against Starfield that fast travel obviated any feel of distance, while avoiding the hours and hours of traveling from one place to another that can occur in a game like Elite Dangerous. I suspect that is the point of the transitions; while I am sure they are also covering up loading times, I think the choices were intentional to avoid the Starfield issues.
Speaking of space, flying and fighting with the Trailblazer is a real pleasure. The flight model is simplistic; the Trailblazer cannot reverse nor translate up and down. There is no yaw control for the ship either. Eventually the Trailblazer can execute some rolling and flip maneuvers, which seem to introduce small invulnerability windows. That means there is roughly 4 degrees of freedom, which leads to WWII-style dogfights, just like in the Star Wars movies. The missions that take place in space are great fun; taking on waves of waves of Tie Fighters is a pleasure, a completely different pleasure than Star Wars Squadrons, but a pleasure none-the-less.
The Sabac mini game is wonderful. In addition to learning a whole new poker like game, Kay can can cheat, reminiscent of some of the cheats used in the indie game Card Shark. Whether or not you succeed at cheating is most often determined by a timing mini game; I wish there was some better alternative to using a timing mini-game, but I can’t think of one.
There is also a meaningful reputation system which effects how Kay is treated by different criminal organizations and criminal aligned players, a system which I am not going to go to in detail but can effect how easy or hard certain missions are to achieve.
My only complaint (other than the crazy number of bugs) is that a lot of the mission rewards and discovered treasures are cosmetic items which do not alter the game play. It is very strange to go through one challenge and receive a key upgrade for your ship that allows for a totally different attack technology, and have another challenge give you a completely non-gameplay involved cosmetic. I get it that there are only so many things which can be given as rewards and some people like cosmetics but I’m not a huge fan of them and was always disappointed when I got a cosmetic versus a “real” gameplay altering material or upgrade.
All in all though Star Wars Outlaws is fantastic fun, or at least I predict will be once they fix all the bugs.