“Star Wars Outlaws” Review

 

From the beginning, the Star Wars saga has had good guys and bad guys. But some of the more interesting characters — be it Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, or Anakin Skywalker when he was an impetuous young Jedi — are the ones who manage to be mostly good but also a little bad at the same time.

It’s to that list that we can now add Kay Vess, a low-level criminal who’s the main character in the new open world action game Star Wars Outlaws (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC).

And she’s an apt choice for this game, too, since Outlaws is also mostly good but a little bad as well, while also managing to be interesting.

Set between The Empire Strikes Back…

and Return Of The Jedi, Star Wars Outlaws follows Vess as she tries to stay one step ahead of the crime lord she robbed. Which is how she ends up on Toshara, a moon controlled by three of the galaxy’s most notorious criminal syndicates: Crimson Dawn (who we met in Solo: A Star Wars Story), The Pyke Syndicate (from the Boba Fett show), and the Hutt Cartel (Jabba’s family business).

Armed with her blaster, the tools of her trade, and a small furry sidekick who’s even more of a scoundrel than she is, Vess has to do jobs for one (or more) of these groups, while doing her best to not get shot by pirates, enforcers from one of the other syndicates, and Imperial Stormtroopers, who also control parts of Toshara.

For the most part, Star Wars Outlaws is a sci-fi open world third-person action / adventure game with gun-based combat and a good amount of stealth action.

Or, to put it another way, it’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice Planet.

Or, to put it a better way, it’s Star War Jedi: Fallen Order / Star War Jedi: Survivor if The Force was not strong with Cal Kestis and he had to use a blaster.

Except that’s not quite right either.

While Star Wars Outlaws does share a lot with the Jedi games, it also has a lot that they didn’t.

Take the aforementioned Toshara, one of the places you’ll go to in this game; it’s much, much bigger than anywhere you went in either Jedi game. And it’s not the only wide open space you visit.

Good thing Vess has a speederbike, one she can summon like she’s Geralt calling for his horse Roach in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, or V sending for their car or motorcycle in Cyberpunk 2077.

Which comes in handy when she runs afoul of The Empire, since they’ll chase after her, and with increasing vigor, not unlike whenever you do something bad in Grand Theft Auto 5.

What further differentiates…

Star Wars Outlaws from the Jedi games are the stealth action parts. Not only does this have missions in which Vess can’t be noticed or shoot anyone, lest she be thrown out and forced to start over, but they can often be rather intricate and intellectually taxing.

Aiding her in these sneaking bits is her aforementioned furry sidekick, a merqaal named Nix who looks like a cross between Stitch and a lothcat.

He’s also as mischievous as Stitch. Not only can Nix be commanded to pick pockets, but he can also sneak into tight spaces and hit buttons that open doors or vents which should remain closed. He can even distract people, albeit by faking his death in the hammiest way possible.

And yes, you can pet the dog. I mean the merqaal.

As different…

as Star Wars Outlaws may be from the Jedi games, though, it has just as many parts that are the same. Er, similar. Kind of like how Andor and Ashoka were very different, but still very Star Wars in their own ways.

For starters, Vess is as good at rock climbing as Jedi hero Kal Kestis (and God Of War‘s Kratos, and Shadow Of The Tomb Raider‘s Lara Croft…), but she also has a grappling hook that lets her swing over chasms and climb up some cliffs like she’s Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West.

Star Wars Outlaws also has a lot of the role-playing game mechanics found in the Jedi series (and a gazillion other games). Like being able to purchase better equipment, upgrade said equipment, sell junk and valuables you find for cash, and so on.

All of which…

works well together to make Star Wars Outlaws rather engaging. The combat is often frantic, the missions are nicely varied if you do a lot of the side quests and personal errands, and while the jumping and climbing isn’t as elaborate as a dedicated platformer, it still works well.

Y’know, kind of like those Jedi games.

It’s just too bad Star Wars Outlaws isn’t as good as those games.

The problem is that Star Wars Outlaws has a lot of little issues that are not that annoying individually, but collectively…

For starters,

picking locks in Star Wars Outlaws is more annoying than it is in Fallout 4 (though, to be fair, it’s not fun in any game). It’s also not explained well, an issue that also undermines the slicing, which is Star Wars lingo for hacking (though slicing is easier to figure out). You’d think a criminal like Vess would find it easier to pick locks and hack terminals.

Similarly, throwing grenades in Star Wars Outlaws is also needlessly complicated, and not as easy to do on-the-fly as it is in, say, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare III. Not since Gears 5 have I been so disinclined to toss a grenade, even when there’s a group of Stormtroopers gathered together.

But then, shooting in Star Wars Outlaws is also an issue, and a weird one at that. You see, Outlaws comes from the good people at Massive Entertainment who also made The Division and The Division 2. But while the shooting in those games is excellent — tight, fluid, and intuitive — the gunplay in Outlaws is so loose that you might think Vess was a Stormtrooper in a former life.

It also doesn’t help…

that Vess’ blaster overheats, and rather quickly, even when you’ve upgraded that aspect of your gun. Though, thankfully, there is a cooling mechanic similar to the active reload mechanic in the Gears Of War series.

Now, Vess can grab better guns from rocks or when they’re dropped by people she’s killed. And they do come in handy, even if they do have limited ammo. But be warned: Vess never learned how to hold onto things when climbing a ladder or getting on a speeder, so she drops these good guns faster than Han Solo drops cargo at the first sign of an Imperial starship.

Then there’s an issue only a Star Wars purist would care out: Qi’ra isn’t voiced by Game Of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke, who played her in the movie Solo.

Granted, they also didn’t get Scott Schumann to voice Jabba The Hutt like he did in the Special Edition of A New Hope, and then for The Phantom Menace (Larry Ward, who voiced Jabba in Return Of The Jedi, passed away in 1985), but this doesn’t seem as much of a missed opportunity as not having the Khaleesi in your game.

Star Wars Outlaws…

also takes a while to get good, both in terms of its gameplay and its story. Seven hours by my estimation. And the same can be said of Vess as well; she’s not all that interesting at first, though she did grow on me as the game progressed.

But what really undermines Star Wars Outlaws are the stealth missions. The unforgiving and often infuriating stealth missions. For starters, the mid-mission checkpoints are often unevenly spaced, forcing you to redo the same lengthy sections multiple times.

Then there’s the technical issues with the checkpoints. On two occasions, after infiltrating an Imperial base and finding the object I was searching for, I got myself killed by trigger happy Stormtroopers…only to respawn outside the base, but with the object still in my possession.

Your enemy’s intelligence and awareness can be uneven as well. While some are good at their jobs, and pay attention to their surroundings, others don’t even notice when Vess knocks out a coworker just a few feet away.

And that’s not counting…

all the stealth missions which require both split-second timing and for enemies to be in precisely the right position. Which, if you’ve ever played a video game before, you know sometimes won’t happen after five tries, but it will on the sixth, and if you blow that, it might be another six or seven times before conditions are right again.

There’s also often a similar level of frustration when you’re trying to infiltrate some place and can’t just walk in the front door. While there’s times it’s easy to figure out an alternate path, there’s just as many when it’s really difficult in a counter-intuitive way.

But while these parts of Star Wars Outlaws can be more frustrating than fun, and there’s enough of them to keep this from being as effortlessly fun as some Jedi games we could mention, they’re still in the minority as far the action is concerned.

Which is why…

Star Wars Outlaws may be less engaging than the Jedi games, and the other open world games I’ve mentioned, but it still manages to be kind of like Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, and Anakin Skywalker when he was a bratty teenager: mostly good, even when it’s being a bit bad.

SCORE: 8.0/10