I played and finished Star Wars Outlaws thanks to early access provided by Ubisoft. At first, the game really bothered me, and with the embargo in place, I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I sat there by myself thinking, “Oh no, how is this game going to end?” This thought continued until the game allowed me to go into space for the second time, and generally, as I progressed through the game, the annoyance gave way to satisfaction.
Star Wars Outlaws feels like a collection of different games while playing. Some parts feel like Tomb Raider, some like Deus Ex, and some like Assassin’s Creed.
Story
In the game, you control Kay Vess, a mix between a thief and an outlaw. Kay’s life of stealing to make ends meet changes when she robs the wrong person. After stealing a very valuable item from a man named Sliro, he uses all his power to put a death order on Kay Vess. Throughout the game, our main goal is to escape this death order.
To save your life, you steal a spaceship and jump into space, but Kay has no idea how to fly a ship. As a result, you crash on a planet. On this planet called Toshara, while a mechanic named Waka repairs your crashed ship, you start to get involved in Toshara’s criminal underworld. The game takes place after Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back. Crime organizations and cartels have spread throughout the galaxy, and these cartels are in conflict with each other. You’re trying to find your own way within this conflict of interests.
Reputation System
The game has a reputation system. The decisions you make throughout the story and the missions you complete affect your relationship with the crime organizations we mentioned earlier. A mission you complete might benefit one group while going against another. As a result, your relationship with one group improves while it worsens with another. Your relationship with these groups doesn’t affect the course of the story. I think it only changes a 5-10 second scene in the finale, that’s all. The impact of the reputation system is on gameplay. For example, you need a material to upgrade your weapon. This material might only be available from various cartels. If you’re on good terms with that cartel, you can go and buy the item from a vendor affiliated with that cartel. If you’re on bad terms with that cartel, you can sneak into the cartel’s warehouse and steal the item. If you get caught while stealing, your relationship with that cartel deteriorates even further.
There’s a design flaw in the game. We need to sneak into a cartel’s warehouse, get the item we want, and sneak out again. If we get caught trying to get in, the cartel officials kick us out, and our relationship drops. You try to sneak in again. Here’s the problem: if you get caught after sneaking in and stealing the item, they don’t take back the stolen item. Your relationship just drops a bit. You don’t need to bother with slowly sneaking out again. You can easily repair that relationship by doing a short side mission anyway.
The reputation system attempts to add an RPG experience to the game but fails. I wish they had made an RPG like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and added this system to that game. That would have been much better. As it is in Star Wars Outlaws, it only makes your job easier in some places and harder in others during gameplay. For example, if you enter an area belonging to a cartel you have extremely bad relations with, they attack you. That’s about it.
Gameplay
As I mentioned earlier, Star Wars Outlaws has a collection of gameplay mechanics. Basic mechanics have been taken from many games, but nothing has been added to them. There’s very little depth to the gameplay. The “shoot, kill, advance” or “sneak to the target” cycles are done in their most primitive forms. While the stealth sections provide a bit of depth thanks to our companion Nix, the action is very plain.
Nix
Nix is our axolotl-like pet. Sometimes it brings items dropped by enemies we’ve killed, sometimes it passes through tiny holes to press buttons in rooms we want to access. Before playing the game, I didn’t think it would have much function, but you constantly need it in the game. There’s a part in the story where we can’t use it, and in that part, you realize how useful it is. You can use Nix to distract your enemies and sneak past them, or to progress in platform sections. Sometimes when an enemy attacks you, it jumps on their head, blocking their view and saving your life. It reminded me of Reuben from Minecraft: Story Mode.
You have to use Nix effectively in the game, especially in stealth sections.
Stealth
Maybe it’s because I just finished the Hitman games, but the stealth felt very shallow to me. These stealth sections usually involve using Nix to make an enemy look the other way so we can enter the ventilation behind them. These parts reminded me a bit of the stealth sections in Deus Ex. Sometimes you need to sneak through very large areas. In these parts, stealth can be challenging, but it’s not a satisfying challenge. I generally played the game focusing on stealth. In most missions, it’s up to you whether to go stealthy or just charge in guns blazing. But in some missions, stealth is mandatory, and in these missions, going stealthy is very overwhelming. In these sections, your goal is to progress without triggering an alarm. You can engage in armed action if you want, but if they sound the alarm, you’re done. When enemies spot you, they go to the nearest radio station-like thing and sound the alarm from there. You can use Nix to disable the radio station in advance. This way, even if you abandon stealth, the enemy can’t sound the alarm. You can make as much noise as you want. This breaks the game’s credibility. We’re having a world war in the room, lasers are flying everywhere, things are exploding. But the person in the next room doesn’t hear and the alarm isn’t triggered.
Apart from the places where we’re forced to go stealthy, I enjoyed the stealth. Especially moving through ventilation in places belonging to the Galactic Empire feels enjoyable.
Puzzles and Platform Sections
There are many platform elements and puzzles in the game. You throw a hook to a tree branch and jump across a cliff, you climb walls. These are the parts of the game that feel like Tomb Raider. They’re not challenging at all, and the places you need to jump to are bright yellow. It’s very obvious. The yellow sickness in modern games continues here too. But I like the platform sections in Assassin’s Creed where we don’t do anything other than pressing the run button anyway. The reason why Assassin’s Creed’s platform sections feel good despite being so simple is due to the quality of the animations. However, the animations in Star Wars Outlaws are very bad. To make sure, I went and opened the first Assassin’s Creed. Despite coming out in 2007, it has much more fluid animations than this game. Especially when I first started the game, these animations really bothered me, but fortunately, I got used to them after a while.
The puzzle sections of the game usually happen within the platform sections. As you progress, you find the way blocked. We solve fairly simple puzzles using Nix to remove the obstacles in front of us.
Action
The action in the game feels like Uncharted. Although the game is open world, the missions are actually very linear. There are plenty of moments where missions offer you freedom. But it’s a very controlled freedom. I encountered the “Return to the mission area” screen many times. It’s okay when you’re trying to infiltrate a headquarters or something, but I even encountered this during a chase in the open world. I stole an item from a cartel’s warehouse, they noticed and started chasing me. I jumped on my bike and started running. The screen suddenly went black, “return to the mission area”. Things like this undermine the game’s immersion.
Kay, our character, carries only one pistol throughout the game. This pistol has three different slots: Plasma, ion, and power. Each of these slots has different usage modes. Single normal standard shot. Triple shot modes are available, and you can develop these modes if you wish. You can make your pistol shoot more times before the magazine runs out, increase the damage it deals, and so on.
You frequently use all three different slots in the game. You use plasma mode during normal combat. When you encounter a robot or a shielded enemy, you switch to ion mode. You use the third mode when fighting few but powerful enemies. It allows you to make a slow but powerful shot. You can quickly switch between these slots in the game, but to switch between the modes within the slots, you need to go to weapon upgrade points.
There’s also a stunning shot mode for our weapon. You take a single shot, and the enemy you hit is stunned. However, you can’t use this consecutively. After using it once, it enters a long cooldown period. So you need to choose carefully when to use it. I mostly used it to neutralize two people walking side by side when going stealthy. I stunned one of the side-by-side enemies with the gun, then immediately made a close attack to neutralize the other.
There are actually other weapons we can use in the game besides the pistol. But we can only pick these up and use them from the ground. When their magazines run out, or when we need to interact with another object, our character throws the weapon to the ground. You collect these weapons from enemies you’ve killed. After killing an enemy, you can send Nix to get their weapon. I wish we could collect weapons. Going through the entire game with just one pistol starts to get boring after a while. Your enemies usually don’t appear in very large groups. If there’s a very large group of enemies in front of you, you’re required to go stealthy in that section anyway. And in this situation, you don’t have much opportunity to use weapons dropped by enemies. By the time you send Nix to bring the weapon, you’ve already killed the enemy with your pistol. This makes the action boring.
I started playing the game on August 21st. The embargo would be lifted on August 26th. So I had 5 days to play the game and prepare the review. The creative director of the game said in an interview that the main story would take 25-30 hours. Since I didn’t want to write the review without finishing the game, I focused only on the main story. I finished the game in 13 hours and 59 minutes. This includes the side quests that the game forces you to do. During this time, the boredom of the action didn’t bother me much, but if you play doing lots of side quests, you’ll probably pass out at some point.
Mission Variety
The missions in the game are divided into three: Main story, cartel missions, and side quests.
The main story missions don’t have much variety within themselves. I even infiltrated almost identical Empire headquarters on different planets more than once. So the game obviously repeats itself. Except for the beginning, even though the main story missions repeat themselves at times, they’re engaging. As our character Kay steps into the world of cartels, a mysterious man named Jaylen notices Kay’s potential and asks her to gather a team for an astronomically large heist. Our main story is about Kay gathering this team and the heist. In this aspect, it reminded me of Mass Effect 2 in terms of story mathematics. As I said at the beginning, this game is a complete collection computer.
In cartel missions, one of the 4 cartels in the game universe comes and gives you a job. You do it. For example, one of the cartels comes and asks you to steal a loot. Two different cartels will make an exchange. We need to steal the item that is the subject of this exchange, the loot. When you go to get the loot, we see that two different cartels are about to make a deal. But they notice our character Kay, and both sides think we’re from the other side. Thus, a conflict triangle emerges. Everyone attacks each other. At the end of the conflict, only we survive. When we search for the loot, we realize that the seller cartel didn’t actually bring the loot. We go to one of that cartel’s warehouses, secretly steal the loot, and take it to our employer. Our employer actually didn’t want this loot for himself. He put us on this mission for an Empire official. As we’re about to leave, the Empire official asks us for a bribe. If we don’t pay him, he says he’ll add us to the criminal list and we’ll be hunted by Stormtroopers. The decision is up to us here. If we want, we can pay the bribe and walk away freely. Or we can stand our ground and leave the scene. I didn’t pay the bribe and left the place. As soon as I left the place, Stormtroopers were after me. I remembered another Empire official who had asked me for a bribe before. He had said that if the Empire was after me, he could clear my name for a fee. I jumped into my spaceship and headed for that planet. When I landed on the planet and went to the official, I realized that the Empire had already stopped chasing me. If you change star systems, the Empire loses your trail.
In side quests, there are tasks like “let’s play this card game” and so on. They consist of what we call flower-bug collecting quests.
Open World
Although the Star Wars atmosphere is nice, there’s not much activity in the open world. There wasn’t as much content as I expected, neither on the planets nor in space. Although we play on 4 different planets in the game, it felt like if we combined them all, it wouldn’t even make up an average open world map. I’m not a person who likes the open world concept. So maybe there might be things you would like.
We have another vehicle we use in the game besides the spaceship. Our Speeder, or flying motorcycle. We use this as a means of transportation after landing on a planet. However, using this feels like a lot of torture. It’s very difficult to control, you constantly crash. The vehicle moves at a constant speed. This causes you to constantly crash into places when taking turns. The game asks you to upgrade your speeder in various places to progress in the main story. With these upgrades, you add nitro, jumping, and so on to the vehicle.
There are times when you engage in action on the Speeder. However, during these times, you can only fire when Kay’s adrenaline bar is full. When the adrenaline bar is full, you stop time and mark 3 enemies. And Kay fires at them. You don’t have the ability to freely fire while riding the Speeder. By the way, you can use this adrenaline feature in the normal game too. It’s not exclusive to the Speeder. During a fight, you can take down your enemies using adrenaline.
Space
Space… Vast, dark, cold, endless void. Although space looks very beautiful in this game, it’s very empty. I move a little bit, it says “return to the mission area”. As for content, there’s not much besides pirates and cartels fighting each other. As for spaceship usage, you’re not controlling a spaceship. You’re controlling a bus in the shape of a spaceship. There’s nothing that makes this feel different from a battle in the sky. When you’re going from one planet to another, you open the menu and select the planet you want to go to. There’s no seamless transition like in No Man’s Sky, but it’s not as game-breaking as Starfield either. You travel towards the planet you want to land on for 10-15 seconds, and a menu opens where you’ll choose where you want to land. After you choose, your ship enters the clouds. They’ve hidden the loading screen in the clouds. I prefer this to a black loading screen.
As for spaceship action. There’s very little space action throughout the main story. You’ll probably encounter more space-related things when doing side quests. Because I didn’t even feel the need to upgrade the ship at all. A part of the ship was broken, I didn’t even need to get it repaired. There’s not much depth in ship action either. The simplest action system that could be made has been made. It’s not enjoyable.
However, being in space still feels very good. Because the visuals of space are perfect. It looks very good. Although the graphics of the game are generally bad, these parts are very nice.
Visuals
Although the Star Wars atmosphere of the game is beautiful, the graphic quality feels outdated. Except for the space sections, the graphic quality is poor. Animations, environmental details, texture quality make you feel like you’re playing a 5-10 year old game.
Bugs
I encountered numerous glitches, bugs, and crashes throughout the game. While I never ran into any game-breaking bugs that halted progression, the game did crash four times. I played the game through early access provided by Ubisoft, and I’d like to thank them again for that. The game will receive an update upon release, but I’m unsure how many of these issues it will resolve. This was my first time getting access to a game simultaneously with the rest of the press before its release. Therefore, it wouldn’t be fair for me to comment on bugs in pre-release versions of games. I experienced many issues such as characters stuck in T-pose, objects clipping through buildings, AI going haywire, and textures failing to load. The texture problems made it feel like I was playing a next-gen game on a dying hard drive. At one point, I even wondered, “Did I accidentally install the game on an HDD instead of my M2 SSD?” In the version I played, even frame generation wasn’t working properly. I hope most of these issues will be fixed with the day one patch, but I’m not too optimistic.
As I mentioned earlier, this was my first time preparing a review before a game’s release, without the ability to prepare a press review. It was quite an experience to play without being able to check YouTube when stuck or knowing any other people’s opinions about the game. In all my previous reviews, even if I didn’t read other reviews, I would at least see the scores the game received. This inevitably created some bias. Playing without this preconception felt more enjoyable.
Star Wars
I’m not very familiar with Star Wars. I had only watched Star Wars episodes 4 and 5. I also watched an animated series on Disney Channel when I was younger, but I don’t remember it at all. Star Wars Outlaws takes place between the 5th and 6th films. After finishing the game, I felt like watching the other films in the series. The game does a good job of capturing the Star Wars atmosphere. You’re not in a characterless world.
Is It Worth Playing?
If you’re a Star Wars fan, I definitely recommend it. However, if you’re like me and don’t have much connection to Star Wars, I’d suggest checking it out only when you’ve run out of other games to play. In its current state, it’s an average game that doesn’t stand out in any particular way aside from its Star Wars theme.
Please note that this review was originally written in Turkish. As a result of the translation process, there may be instances where the translated text contains inaccurate equivalents of terms or expressions.