I’m more shocked than anyone that Star Wars Outlaws didn’t resonate with me. I love Star Wars, and have been hoping to get a new game in which we don’t play as yet another Force-sensitive person. But after playing through three different sections of Outlaws at Summer Game Fest–each of which was about 15-20 minutes long–I walked away disappointed. Nothing about Outlaws feels bad; hell, bad would have been better than what I played, because then at least it could have been memorable in some way. Instead, Outlaws feels fairly mediocre and unmemorable. What I played feels like an amalgamation of different features and mechanics borrowed from other games that do those things better, all while masquerading as a Star Wars game without actually embodying the themes and storylines of Star Wars.
Taking place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws sees you play as Kay Vess, a smuggler striving to be a famed scoundrel by accomplishing heists throughout the Outer Rim. Though I didn’t get to see these elements, Outlaws will feature instances where Kay can talk her way out of trouble and the game will feature a system akin to Grand Theft Auto’s Wanted levels, in which Kay’s actions have consequences that can chase her across the open worlds she’ll be able to explore.
At SGF, I played in three contained, linear levels. The first saw Kay working her way through an Imperial facility before leaping into her ship and engaging in a dogfight against some TIE Fighters. The second part focused on the game’s platforming mechanics, with Kay navigating a derelict ship. The third and final portion of the preview presented a level in which Kay was tasked with stealthily infiltrating an organization’s base to steal back some stolen tech.
I have individual complaints with each of the sections but my main gripe with Star Wars Outlaws, based on this slice of the game, is that Kay feels way too powerful. It’s possible Ubisoft put me on the easiest difficulty for the preview to make sure I’d get through each one in a timely manner, but if that’s not the case then Outlaws is laughably easy. The ease of the third part of the preview feels the most damning. I wanted to see what would happen if I broke stealth, inciting the dozen nearby enemies in the immediate area to attack me all at once. I easily killed them all and subsequently completed the first part of my mission without having to sneak around. With this newfound confidence, I ran through the second half of the level, forgoing stealth entirely.
I eventually reached a locked door that I couldn’t go through until all the enemies who had seen me were dead. I was far enough away that I couldn’t quite see the enemies all the way back at the start of the area but my cursor occasionally changed from gray to red whenever the game registered that Kay was “aiming” at them, even if I could no longer see them. I just held the trigger whenever that happened and sniped the guards without even having to aim myself.
Kay’s apparent invulnerability and god-like powers persisted throughout the demo, whether it was surviving three-story drops in the platforming sections or getting into a firefight and tanking multiple hits. Aside from simply feeling dull to play, this actively gets in the way of Kay’s characterization as a scrappy scoundrel and smuggler. If anything, playing as Kay should feel more like how Han Solo accomplished problems in the original Star Wars trilogy–you take your shot when you can but you’re far better off running away when the blaster bolts start flying. Even if Kay has no apparent Force powers (it’s entirely possible we discover she does in the full game), Outlaws seems to be designed in a way to encourage you to play like she actually does–she can easily perform huge acrobatic leaps, make pinpoint shots without a sniper rifle, and take on hordes of enemies like they’re nothing.
Kay’s strength also detracts from one of the core pillars of Outlaws, which is Kay’s adorable partner-in-crime Nix. Nix can be commanded to aid Kay in a number of ways, such as distracting guards, fetching an out-of-reach weapon, or exploding a grenade in a person’s pocket. Causing someone who’s just minding their own business to suddenly explode is hilarious, but I never felt like I needed to use that command, or any of the others, in order to accomplish my goals. Kay is so versatile and able on her own, I never actually used Nix save for a few moments when the Ubisoft rep beside me told me how I could use Nix to solve the problem at hand and I did so to see how it would play out. I left the preview wondering why Nix is even a part of the game.
My misgivings about Outlaws’ lack of challenge aside, what I saw of the minute-to-minute gameplay also isn’t all that remarkable. Kay handles a blaster just about as well as any other third-person shooter protagonist, and much like her peers in the action genre, she is regularly stymied by locked doors that can only be bypassed with annoying lockpicking minigames or finding an energy pylon to energize with an electrified shot. Again, none of what I played feels outright bad but it is very familiar and none of it stands out as notably good as a result–it doesn’t help that a lot of what Outlaws does, Star Wars games that have come out in recent years have done much better. The shooting is fine but pales in comparison to Battlefront II, for example. The ship combat is unremarkable, especially on the heels of Squadrons. And the platforming challenges and puzzles feel like unimaginative speed bumps that don’t take into account the same level of spectacle or narrative importance as those in Fallen Order or Survivor.
I also didn’t get a strong impression of Kay or any of the characters she met during the three sections I played. Perhaps Ubisoft is going for more of a blank slate for Kay to make her easier to connect to for more people, but even so, Star Wars lives and dies by its characters and it’s difficult to feel excited for Outlaws when I played the game for nearly an hour and didn’t really relate to anyone. It’s an odd miss for Ubisoft, which usually develops games that are hit-or-miss for a lot of people but–at least for the story-driven ones–tend to have a handful of fairly memorable characters. Granted, Outlaws still could. But the sections I played through don’t suggest that to be the case.
The aspect of my time with Star Wars Outlaws that stands out to me the most is just how much my preview experience reminded me of previewing 2022’s Saints Row, a game that paints over half-baked systems and average storytelling with the trappings of a franchise I love. Outlaws so far feels exactly the same, using the imagery and sounds of Star Wars to disguise an otherwise mediocre game. Maybe the full release of Outlaws will surprise me in a way the full release of Saints Row didn’t, but I have serious misgivings about Outlaws that I didn’t have prior to playing it. The full game could be fantastic, but if so, this preview didn’t sell me on it.
As one final addendum, what I played at Summer Game Fest did not look anything at all like what was shown off during Ubisoft Forward–that gameplay seems way more exciting and appropriate for a Star Wars game about a smuggler struggling to survive during the height of the Galactic Empire. That gameplay showcase dives into how Kay can use her scrappiness to learn new skills that will aid her in a pinch while still highlighting her shortcomings as an easily overwhelmed flesh-and-blood human who is better off fleeing from a dangerous situation than sticking around. If Outlaws plays more like what we saw at Ubisoft Forward and less like what I actually got to play at SGF, I think it will prove to be an entertaining Star Wars game. Only time will tell which experience we’re going to get, though.
Star Wars Outlaws is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC on August 30.
