As I’ve written before, even though I’ve played a tonne of Star Wars games, I’ve never actually seen any Star Wars movies (nor do I even know much about the series’ lore, for that matter). Consequently, a lot of the time when I play Star Wars games, as much as I generally enjoy them, I usually feel like I’m missing a whole bunch of important references that would deepen my understanding of the story.

I didn’t feel this way when playing Star Wars Outlaws.

Obviously, that can be taken in both a good way and a bad way. Personally, I think it’s largely a good thing – it’s easy for anyone to jump into a world where you’re playing as a scoundrel pulling off heist after heist – but I can also see more diehard fans feeling the opposite. I mean, can it really be a Star Wars property if there aren’t lengthy digressions about Siths and various Darths and galactic politics?

Regardless of how you feel about that, the underlying idea behind Star Wars Outlaws is fantastic. Even someone like me knows how rich and varied the Star Wars mythology is, so it’s fun to see a game that ignores the usual suspects and focuses instead on the people living on the outskirts, the ones eking out a living in less-than-legal ways. Think of it as Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, but in space.

I’m not sure that the execution lives up to that promise, though. One of the key aspects of Star Wars Outlaws is that there are a bunch of rival gangs – the Hutts, Crimson Dawn, etc. – and you need to manouevre your way through tricky situations by pulling off jobs and figuring out who to support and who to betray – again, something that aligns with the game’s broader concept of, as the title implies, outlaws.

The problem is, a ridiculous number of these jobs seem to boil down to, “go here, be ultra-stealthy, and steal an item.” Even if the worlds are nicely varied, the missions aren’t. There are only so many times you can be sent to go steal some technobabble-y named item.

What’s more, the “ultra-stealthy” bit is probably Star Wars Outlaws’ biggest shortcoming. Enemies are hyper-vigilant, and can seemingly spot you through walls and around corners. There’s virtually no margin for error, either: the moment you’re spotted, you fail the mission and get kicked out of whatever area you’re in – which, unfortunately, lowers your reputation, which in turn makes getting into places stealthily that much harder.

Moreover, since you can’t really explore or try out new approaches, it’s awfully easy to get stuck in a failure loop where you’re just constantly making it harder and harder for yourself. It got so bad for me that, a few hours into the game, I finally just gave up on 3-4 hours of progress and started again from scratch because I’d botched things so badly that my character’s reputation was so low I couldn’t enter anywhere. (Admittedly, at least an hour of that progress was me completely misunderstanding a goal in an early mission, as I devoted countless efforts to trying to find a way to sneak into a door, only to finally that I was supposed to be climbing up a wall and sneaking into an opening above the door.)

To be sure, the game isn’t all stealth missions, nor does every mission instantly end the moment you’re spotted. However, in the instances where you’re not immediately thrown out the door, you’re still swarmed by a seemingly endless wave of enemies until you can a) somehow find the alarm and shut it off, b) hide until the enemies give up, or c) die hopelessly in a laser gun fight.

The other issue in missions is that Star Wars Outlaws seems really enamoured with its minigames for no obvious reason. You have a tool called a data spike that’s supposed to help you unlock everything, but for it to work you need to have exact button presses in a rhythm minigame that, at times, is awfully arrhythmic. It’s annoying at the best of times, and when you need to open a lock with enemies shooting at you from all directions, it’s enough to make you want to give up.

As much as I’ve complained to this point in the review, I wouldn’t say that I actually disliked Star Wars Outlaws – far from it, in fact. The game excels in between all those stealth missions, since that’s when you get to just explore the worlds and take in everything that have to offer. As you’d expect from a Ubisoft game, Star Wars Outlaws is filled with side quests and side stories, and many of them don’t require skulking in the shadows. It’s really enjoyable to simply wander around all the scummy backwaters that largely make up this game.

It helps, too, that you’re spending the game in the company not just of the game’s star, Kay Vess (one of the many eponymous outlaws in the Star Wars universe), but her pet, Nix, a cute little furball that you can use to distract enemies, steal trinkets, and press buttons. The two have a fun interplay, and when the game focuses on the story and their friendship, it’s easy to get sucked in.

Of course, all that goodwill gets blown away because you’ll inevitably get sent off on some stupid stealth mission before long. Star Wars Outlaws is a perfect example of a good game that could’ve been a great one if only its developers had played to its strengths. Hopefully we get an Outlaws II, because there are enough solid ideas here that you could strip out the annoying bits and wind up with a really incredible game.

Ubisoft provided us with a Star Wars Outlaws PC code for review purposes.

Grade: 7.5

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Star Wars Outlaws review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

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