Reviews

I reviewed Star Wars Outlaws back when it first came out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, and I was fairly lukewarm about it. It had some decent moments, but it was brought down overall by some of the most annoying stealth sections I’d ever come across. Still, I was interested in seeing how the game fared when brought over to the Switch 2 – not only in terms of performance, but in terms of how last year’s patch changed the game.

I was very pleasantly surprised on both counts.

First, the patch (both the one linked above, and others since then). It’s remarkable how much more enjoyable Star Wars Outlaws is when you don’t find yourself sent on stealth missions with zero room for error. You can still approach them that way, but now the game allows you to play them with a lot more freedom – by which I mean, you don’t fail the moment you’re spotted, and the game gives you a lot more leeway if you want to blast your way out. I suppose stealth fans probably won’t like that change, but as someone who found the initial version of the game so frustrating that I hadn’t gone back, it was pleased to see how much more fun I had this time around.

Those patches also made the game vastly improved in other areas. Take the speeder, for example: I remember it feeling kind of sluggish and unresponsive at times, prone to feeling like it was getting stuck at the worst times. There’s none of that here, though; you can zip around planets, dodging enemies and exploring to your heart’s content.

Which highlights the other fun thing about Star Wars Outlaws on the Switch 2: it performs really well. Where other third-party games have developed reputations for struggling due to poor optimization, there’s none of that here. While the game obviously doesn’t look as incredible as it could on more powerful hardware, that doesn’t mean it looks bad by any stretch of the imagination. More importantly, it runs well, regardless of how much action is taking place on the screen at any given time. Even when you’re racing across a planet on your speeder, you’re not seeing the world around you pop in and out of existence.

It’s a very good port, is what I’m trying to say – and not only that, it’s a very good port of a very good game. Whatever issues Star Wars Outlaws may have had last year, they’re all fixed now, which means that you get all the positives from the first version (a good protagonist, a fun story, some big open worlds), with all of the negatives pushed off to the side. If you didn’t get a chance to play the game the first time around, now is definitely the time to do so.

Ubisoft provided us with a Star Wars Outlaws Nintendo Switch 2 code for review purposes.

Score: 8.5