The new Star Wars game captures some of the series’ magic

Review: Star Wars Outlaws

My favourite part of Star Wars Outlaws could easily be another player’s least favourite part. Midway through the game, protagonist Kay Vess needs to travel to Tatooine, Luke’s home planet from the original Star Wars, to track down a legendary gunslinger. It’s exciting to visit a planet that means so much to Star Wars canon, rendered so lovingly – but what really made me happy is that Tatooine is realistically awful. The Endless desert, lawless towns, and Mos Eisley, the infamous hive of scum and villainy – all of it felt appropriately oppressive and unpleasant.  

I appreciated that the game did not try to romanticise the planet – and in fact, Star Wars Outlaws never felt too concerned with iconography, trusting enough that the player likes Star Wars without feeling the need to constantly remind them of all the bits from the movies they enjoy. This isn’t a game about Jedi or chosen ones or the Skywalker family, and because of that, it’s better able to get at some of what makes Star Wars interesting – even though it’s a deeply flawed game in many ways.  
 
Star Wars Outlaws is a multi-planetary adventure set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, in which you explore numerous intergalactic biomes – and the cold depths of space itself, occasionally – in the hopes of putting together a crew to perform a big climatic heist. Aside from Tatooine, the planets and locations you visit are a mix of new settings and ones that haven’t yet been overused in Star Wars lore, like Kijimi and Canto Bight. Having the game on modern systems means that you can fast travel between planets with minimal loading times, and everything looks gorgeous – roaring across the open plains on a speeder bike is an inherently captivating experience.  
 
But as much fun as it is to play around in the world of Star Wars, too often Outlaws shunts you into a series of near-identical enemy strongholds. Breaking into an Imperial base – or any faction’s base, for that matter – means a lot of sneaking through vents, hiding behind identical chest-high crates, and using your limited repertoire of stealth techniques against the fairly unintelligent enemies. Too many times I found myself playing through what felt like identical encounters, and it turned me off taking on too many sidequests or extra missions – the game has a huge amount of content, but much of it feels repetitive. 
 
The checkpointing is rather punitive. Many missions fail you immediately if a character triggers an alarm, or make you replay massive sections if you get taken down. Combat, when it breaks out, can be underwhelming too – Kay’s blaster overheats fast, and enemies don’t have many interesting tricks up their sleeves. There are a few sections where the game locks you into a fight against a set number of enemies in an interesting space, and these can be quite enjoyable – but when a stealthy approach fails and you have to blast your way out, the cracks in the game’s design start to show through. 

All of these issues add up over time, and I found that after being charmed by the first 10-or-so hours, my patience started to wear thin with the game’s numerous design quirks and irrelevant systems. Star Wars Outlaws is a game of highs and lows. At its best, it fleshes out the Star Wars universe, giving new colour and character to corners that haven’t been explored, making you feel like you’re living in a graphically beautiful recreation of the worlds fans have grown to love. At other points, it feels much less functional – there are poor mission designs, bugs, and camera issues that frequently pull the experience down.  
 
But even at its worst, there’s still the Star Wars of it all. As someone who has struggled to keep up with all the Star Wars media out there, I appreciate Outlaws as a game where the lasers make that satisfying pew-pew noise, where awkward-looking droids roll around all different environments, and where cantinas are filled with different alien species drinking together uneasily. I like the uneasy alliances you form, even if the game’s attempt at a loyalty system (whereby your actions raise or lower your standing with various crime syndicates) never quite coalesces into a good mechanic. I enjoyed playing Sabaac, an odd lore-specific card game, and found the occasional references to events from the films unobtrusive and largely earned. I never got so annoyed that I didn’t care what happened to Kay next. 
 
I love the scene at the end of The Last Jedi where the kid with the broom stares into the stars, perhaps wondering how big the universe is outside his own experience. Star Wars Outlaws often feels trapped by publisher Ubisoft’s conventions of excessive collectables, crawling through vents, and storming compounds. But there’s just enough of that starry-eyed wonder to it to make it an interesting and worthwhile Star Wars experience.  

Star Wars Outlaws is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. A PS5 review code was provided by the publisher.  

James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of “Untitled Goose Game” for Boss Fight Books.