Star Wars Outlaws: A Flawed but Ambitious Open-World Adventure

'Outlaws' Is One of the Best 'Star Wars' Games Ever Made

When Star Wars was first released in 1977, it introduced a galaxy's worth of lore for audiences to sink into. Between the superpowered mysticism of the Jedi, the sexy roguishness of smuggling, and the unending strife of interstellar conflict, there's something to capture the interest of just about anyone, built upon exponentially as the franchise has expanded. In Star Wars video games, however, the focus has often been narrower. Certain pieces -- lightsabers and the Force, starships and ground battle -- translate easily to the mechanics of play. The power fantasies of laser-sword dueling and clone trooper platoons have made for dozens of successful Star Wars games across shooters, real-time strategy, and even "Soulslikes." Yet, somehow, one vital piece often remains forgotten: the swashbuckling adventure of an everyman with an eye on the stars. Isn't that what Luke Skywalker was about, after all? Star Wars Outlaws is about that too, among many other things. Setting aside space monk mythology and guerilla warfare, Outlaws aims to bring the wonder back to a galaxy far, far away, albeit through the lens of its shadier underworld. It's an open-world exploration of all the divey places you imagined Han Solo was hanging out long before he was conscripted into a cause greater than his own. Developed by Massive Entertainment, a subsidiary of Ubisoft studio, Star Wars Outlaws (out Aug. 30 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) centers on the story of Kay Vess, a two-bit thief from the casino city of Canto Bight, who's just trying to make ends meet. Paired with her adorable four-legged sidekick, Nix, Kay is a capable grifter looking to line her pockets, although she dreams of something more. When an ill-advised gig leads her to steal a ship from the Zerek Besh syndicate, she and Nix find themselves fleeing the planet in desperation to figure out their play. As these things tend to, their situation cascades as they run afoul of more syndicates, ruthless bounty hunters, and the Empire itself. Outlaws is somehow the first-ever open world take on the Star Wars franchise and allows players to travel (mostly) unrestricted across huge swaths of terrain, cities, and bases not just across five planets, but in their orbital space too. It takes the very premise of the original Star Wars -- a person with a simple life stumbling into an ever-expanding saga -- and leans in harder than pretty much any game in the series has before. Picture picking up the controller as Kay, leaning against a bar eavesdropping on a cartel mole spilling their guts. Your next step in mind, you leave the bar into a crowded market, through the city to your speeder outside. You race off into the desert, through a canyon to a landing pad, hopping into your ship. You break atmosphere, cross the nebula, and into hyperspace all the way to the other side of the Outer Rim to an entirely new planet. Micro to macro, all done seamlessly in "real-time," no load screens or menus. This is what the moment-to-moment gameplay looks like in Outlaws. Shockingly, it all works. Although the visuals can be spotty with some shoddy textures and graphical glitches, pretty much anything you can do in the game happens briskly and in fluid lockstep. In cutscenes, characters are richly detailed and move naturalistically, the product of exceptional motion capture work and acting that, as detailed in our behind-the-scenes look earlier this year, was produced to hue as close to the cinematic language of the original films as possible. In-game, however, character models are more rigid, and dialogue flows more robotically as the many diegetic voices from the environment pop in and out without rhythm. The game's settings provide the option to pick between a high-fidelity Quality mode or a Performance one that scales down the visuals to run more smoothly, but the difference is negligible. The game looks great at times, but textures like Kay's skin can appear muddied, and her hair and clothing movement is janky. By trying to render a seamless open-world with minimal load times, it's likely that much of the technical horsepower behind the game is focused on keeping things running, leaving the game looking less polished than some of its modern peers. There are moments though when everything clicks; speeding through the grassy plains of the planet Toshara with heavy motion blur while the wind bends the trees in the distance is a sight to behold. It certainly has the look of Star Wars. Conversely, it also has the general vibe of the franchise down pat. Whimsical audio cues and screen wipes give scene transitions the serial style that George Lucas brought to the screen in 1977, and there's a playfulness that imbues the tone with the kind of charm that earlier entries in the film saga had in spades. Special attention should be paid to actress Umberly Gonzalez, who plays Kay with a disarming coy that made Harrison Ford's Han Solo such a loveable scoundrel, even as he ad-libbed and fumbled his way through life-or-death scenarios. The general gameplay loop involves taking on quests that mostly require a mix of stealth and shooting, with some rhythm-based and puzzle solving minigames in between. Missions usually require infiltrating a facility, be it a rival cartel's stronghold or an imperial satellite station, to steal data or smuggle out contraband and VIPs. Scenarios can be pretty long, especially when depending on slow moving stealth to avoid detection, and there's some hiccups baked into how autosaves and checkpoints can be frustrating (more on that in a bit). The big draw of the game's underworld setting, which sets it apart from most Star Wars stories, is the ongoing balance between the syndicates. Early on, Kay is introduced to warring crime families, including the Pykes, Hutts, Ashiga, and Crimson Dawn. Players can take on jobs big and small for each, but every decision made as to who to align with will piss off someone else. It's a constant sliding scale whether any one clan is happy with you at any given time, and every bit of progress made will inevitably be undone when players choose to betray their employer mid-quest when staring down the barrel of a blaster. While other games like 2010's Fallout: New Vegas are also famous for having a shifting allegiance system for criminal outfits, Outlaws makes these decisions feel more impactful, even though they can be easily undone later. Imagine arduously sneaking into an underground vault for the Pykes, only to meet a member of the opposition offering double for the loot and a frame job on others. These scenes often play out dramatically, with the binary choice of who to screw over with a slow pan in on Kay with ratcheting tension. Getting on a clan's good graces has its benefits, from unlocking more gigs to having access to their resources. Every planet and city are broken into regions controlled by different syndicates. If you're on the outs with the Pykes, you're not welcome in their part of town, blocking off easy access to their shops and areas. As an ally, you can saunter right in without issue, making it easy to steal intel as long as you don't get caught. If you're marked, it's going to be an arduous stealth mission. The Empire, too, poses a looming threat. Unlike the more amicable crime families, there's no way to get on their good side. Running into Imperial territory will result in a hail of blaster bolts, one way or another, and if the Stormtrooper body count rises enough, a Grand Theft Auto-style bounty level will be placed on Kay's head. It's all fun and games until a Deathtrooper squad bursts down from the sky. To clear a bounty, players must either break into an Imperial facility to wipe their records or find a dirty officer to bribe in the underworld. The pendulum effect of Kay's alliances makes every mission feel consequential. Once you're in, you're in, and the game actively ensures that there are consequences for a slip up. In some games (like Fallout), many players utilize a tactic called "save scumming," meaning that you make multiple save files to go back to if you get caught, killed, or mess up the tidy gameplay run you've meticulously planned. Outlaws forbids it. Early on, I was tasked with planting evidence on the Pykes, with whom I was friendly. But as soon as I was caught and heavily under fire, I tried to load up a prior save file to undo my transgression. Lo and behold, even with a recent save, I was kicked all the way back to the beginning of the mission, losing over an hour's progress. There's no easy way to game the meta without the penalty of time. The creators want you to be true to the roleplay, and deal with the blowout that comes with it. It's an admirable quality, to be honest, even though it conflicts with the ways people have trained themselves to play, min-maxing their odds for the best possible outcome. Unfortunately, it bumps up against some poor level and confusing AI design that can lead to major missteps. It can be frustrating to delicately creep through an entire compound only to be spotted inches from the goal by an unseen enemy or worse, a wall-mounted camera position on the other side of a door. Some would say it's a worthy challenge, and it often is good for raising the tension, but it frequently feels like the game's systems are unpredictable in ways not intended. But when all else fails, you can always shoot your way out. Mostly. Many of the main story quests have guardrails in place that demand stealth otherwise the mission fails. The game is at its best during the optional quests where mistakes foster improvisation, again and again, as plan A becomes plans B, C, and D. When everything goes to shit, that's when Outlaws feels the most like a Star Wars sequence brought to life. Kay's abilities help create the sense of freedom in how to approach a scene. Besides basic punches and shooting, there are unlockable abilities that play heavily into the screwball scoundrel antics. A personal favorite is an unlockable feint: when spotted by an enemy, players can quickly trigger Kay to throw her hands up -- "Whoa, whoa, whoa" -- making her assailant pause as time slows down just long enough to draw the blaster from her holster for a headshot or bum rush them with the haymaker. Again, it embodies the mindset of a scoundrel like Han Solo, where troublemaker charm is its own weapon. Nix, too, plays a huge role in gameplay. Similar to the dynamic between micro-droid BD-1 and Jedi Cal Kestis in 2023's Jedi: Survivor, Nix serves as an extension of the player and can open hatches, disable alarms or sabotage bombs, and even directly distract or attack at the touch of a button. It's rare to see a sidekick mechanic with as much functionality as Nix. Half the game can be played by pointing him around the level as an agent of chaos to tee up Kay's next move. It helps that he's filled with life, too, programmed to dart along paths and handrails with a bounce, and rolling around on the floor in a nuzzle when stationary. Beyond the basic boots-on-the-ground stuff, there's action to be found on speeders and in ships too. While traversing the planets at breakneck speeds on her space motorcycle, Kay is never more than a moment away from danger. The speeder can be upgraded, but in its base form is clunky, leading to frequent collisions with rocks and wildlife that will send players careening into the dirt. In space, players control Kay's ship, The Trailblazer, in real time from the moment they leave the launch pad. In zero gravity, dog fights with TIE fighters and smugglers can be harrowing and downright nausea inducing in the best possible way, as survival requires constantly spinning and swirling across all axes. While not quite an RPG, Outlaws has multiple progression systems that allow players to upgrade Kay's weaponry, speeder, and ship, and learn new abilities. It's sad to say but completing quests without getting experience points or leveling up can leave you longing for the Pavlovian tinge of satisfaction, but unlocking new skills is done more cleverly than that. To obtain new abilities, Kay must track down experts, NPCs hidden throughout the worlds, and complete tasks to be granted access to their teachings. By removing the XP grind, the developers are pushing players to genuinely explore and roleplay, often only leaving vague teases and rumors about where treasure and experts may be in pieces of intel. The last bit of roleplaying that rounds out the scoundrel experience is a card game called Kessel Sabacc. Like any open world game worth its salt (The Witcher 3, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth), Outlaws' take on a card-based minigame is quickly addictive. Unlike The Witcher 3's Gwent, Sabacc delivers both the strategy of play with the scummy joy of gambling in a sleazy bar, complete with the ability to cheat. The rules are complicated to explain, but just know that this is a game where you can sit across a table with the likes of Lando Calrissian himself, nervously eyeballing your hand while your sidekick Nix peers at his cards over the shoulder. Look, as anyone with a Disney Plus account can tell you, Star Wars isn't exactly in a great place in 2024. Mismanaged and oversaturated, the rudderless direction of the franchise's movies and shows have repeatedly shown that, since the response to 2017's The Last Jedi, the execs in charge aim to play it safe and mitigate backlash at all costs. Every time something bold creeps up, it's fed to the wolves. So, it's strange to think that video games of all mediums may be where the brightest future lies for the brand, but it may well be true. While its many systems are familiar, playing like a cross between Uncharted and Horizon set to a Star Wars tune, Outlaws proves that a clear vision and commitment to the bit will go a long way. By burying the Jedi for the more lurid, lesser-seen corners of its universe and following a dynamic new POV through the eyes of Kay, the game does more to leap the franchise forward than any streaming nostalgia parade has thus far. By celebrating the outlaw life, Star Wars is a vibe again.

Star Wars Outlaws review: a flawed but enjoyably roguish heist epic that gets the small things right

Star Wars Outlaws promises to shake things up in the galaxy far, far away. There's no sight of the Jedi and every mention of the Rebel Alliance is met with a smirk, an eye-roll and a thrown insult. The idea of living out your 'scoundrel fantasy' in the same universe as Han Solo, Bobba Fett and Jabba the Hutt really is an engaging one. It's also a pitch Lucasfilm has tried and failed at time and again, from Star Wars Bounty Hunter to the unreleased Star Wars 1313. The marked difference with Outlaws is everything you do and experience in the game has been funnelled through the belief in bringing to life the cut and thrust, double and triple betrayals of living your worst-best life in Star Wars' underworld - waistcoats and shooting first are optional. The setup is suitably lowkey for a game of grand hustles. Loner and petty criminal Kay Vess dreams of escaping the slums of Canto Bight (the casino world from The Last Jedi), and after a heist goes wrong she escapes on a stolen but damaged ship, the Trailblazer, which turns out to be special - for reasons. With a target on her back she needs to fix her newly acquired ship and flee, a simple plan made more complex by a series of unfortunate run-ins with the syndicates of the Outer Rim, and the need to assemble a crew to take on one last heist. Billed as the first open-world Star Wars game, the simple story setup is an excuse to be shamelessly unethical in this famous universe. This means a focus on shooting, hacking, gambling, treasure hunting, stealing, bartering, dogfighting and stealth. Indeed, that last one really is the main focus. While Outlaws is an open world game, with an upgradable speeder bike for exploring each world, when the main-side-and syndicate quests get going, anti-hero Kay Vess gets sneaking. The pull of Outlaws is not simply how it manages to build a believable mix of open worlds, four main planets and Cantonica, to lose time in, but Ubisoft has managed to make one of the year's biggest blockbusters a stealth game. Outlaws doesn't simply have occasional stealth, it revels in, and celebrates, the art of silently stalking enemies in a variety of creative ways. Kay and her pet Nix, an adorable dog-like creature that's essentially a slobbering grin and googly eyes on four legs, can work together to set traps, take down enemies, break locks and hack computers (using an inventive rhythmic mini-game and a take on Wordle). New gear, upgrades and abilities grow Kay's arsenal of options and come the end of the main campaign she will be able to dominate a room of Imperial Troopers with a mix of Nix attacks, traps, hacked turrets and stealth takedowns. Or, just scurry past the lot of them making swift use of vents and secret routes for a satisfying non-confrontational escape. Kay can also tap into her inner-Tomb Raider to ledge-leap, swing, and scurry up craggy mountains, explore wrecks, sneak about Imperial bases and, in one fan-baiting moment, slide into Jabba's Palace. For the most part Outlaw's platforming is nicely done, but it can feel a little stiff and occasionally Kay can simply not register with a ledge of surface, resulting in a fall to her death and a restart. Ah yes, restarts. Stealth games are notoriously trial and error and Outlaws is no different. You'll often want to experiment with the tools in Kay's arsenal or explore a risky platform leap for the tease of a hidden treasure, but one false move will result in death, and poor checkpointing can mean being sent to the start of a mission. Worse still, on a number of occasions, Kay randomly restarted the other side of the entire map, meaning a lengthy speeder bike ride just to try again. Unfortunately there's a further downside to Outlaws' stealth, the game's AI isn't exactly playing with all its marbles. It's very easy to noisily punch-out a guard while his mate 10ft away is oblivious. Likewise, when an enemy does find a body their attention wanes in a blink of an eye and everyone goes back to stoically monitoring those flashing lights every Star Wars base is littered with, despite a body being right there. Yet, out in the open world, the AI can be overly aggressive and eagerly chases down Kay in gangs, on speeder bikes, furiously peppering the world with laser bolts. It also makes for some occasionally frustrating and comically overblown slapstick moments as a crew of Pyke Syndicate goons on speeder bikes will plough into Kay as she's trying to hear a random character pour out his heart, as you do in open world games. This is partly my fault, as I've been spending my time aligning with the Crimson Dawn syndicate, and actively working against the Pykes. Venturing into Pyke territory means an instant chase unless I can massage my way back into their good books. Syndicate jobs can be taken at various brokers found in a world's Canteena, and while many are often fetch quests some veer off into larger schemes and you'll often be faced with dialogue choices to double-cross your paymaster. There's a lot of fun to be had exploring how the world of Outlaws works, and it's satisfying to make choices that can affect Kay's standing in this corner of the universe. Not least because in a world where everyone is bad, there's no such thing as a wrong choice. When everything does go wrong, whether on a mission, bartering with a syndicate or out in the open world, Kay will need to pull a blaster and shoot her way out of a bad situation. Here the game stumbles again, a little. Blaster combat can feel stiff and functional rather than truly satisfying; enemies soak up laser fire while two shots and Kay's dead. Dropped weapons can be picked up on the run, but really nothing improves on Kay's all-purpose blaster. While gunfights look visually appealing, with smoke, sparks and blaster bolts illuminating the screen magnificently, it's surface level, and behind the graphical spectacle combat feels lacklustre. Things improve in the late-game once Kay's blaster has been upgraded, so you're able to hot-swap between rapid fire, bolts, electric shots and more, giving gunfights a new tactical lease of life. It means once the main campaign is concluded and the worlds of Tatoonine and Toshara are teasing you back to explore, there's more fun to be had from gunfights. You will persevere too, because Outlaws is more than the sum of its many parts. And yes, those parts may be co-opted from other Ubisoft games, a bit of Watch Dogs 2 here, a smidge of Assassin's Creed there, and a dash of Massive's previous game, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, in Outlaws' world design and mission structure. But when it all comes together you'll find yourself spiralling into Star Wars' underworld, because taken as a whole, there's a lot to enjoy. Behind the core stealth gameplay that dominates the missions are layers of ideas that build Outlaws' complex world and make it a memorable place to simply immerse yourself within. There's room to explore the small area of space above each planet for treasures, unusual side quests and shootouts with pirates and TIE Fighters. Back in the surface you can hunt for lost loot, pick up random jobs, enter high stakes card tournaments and loose all your earnings on the track. Naturally, this being a game of scum and villainy you can cheat - whether that's getting Nix to spy on your rival's card hand or collecting intel on which horse will win the next race (of course they're fixed). Governing how you experience the worlds of Outlaws are the syndicates. As mentioned, which you side with has a blunt effect of how aggressively they treat Kay in the open world, but it can be more nuanced. How a syndicate views Kay, favourably or negatively, will in turn affect the kind of missions you can take on, what areas of a city you can explore and what rewards will be offered. The influence of the syndicates, and Kay's relationship to them, is genuinely felt and gives life to this corner of the galaxy. Often missions will cascade into one another and even main quests will offer up compelling reasons to go off the beaten path. Or a new upgrade to Kay's blaster, speeder bike or core abilities will demand a detour to scratch an itch to find a map's secret. But be warned, there are some surprising things lurking out in Outlaws' worlds, including something large hiding in the dunes. This leaves little breathing room to stop and dwell on those moments of AI lunacy or one of the many bugs that could hinder the immersion, whether it's a missing asset in a cutscene, a looping audio clip or a rebel leader who comically continues to bob, weave and perform an 'ocular pat down' even when debriefing Kay. Fundamentally, Outlaws oozes charm. Visually the Snowdrop engine delivers striking moments of beauty that will have you reaching for the Photo Mode every minute. Whether it's yet another smoky canteen drenched in neon or a sweeping moon-framed Tatooine vista, there's always something to make you stop and take in the visuals. Massive has opted for a widescreen cinematic ratio to present Outlaws action, which helps sell the scale of the space opera and evokes a subtle filmic quality. Each scene is loaded with effects, too, including chromatic aberration, lens flare, and a layer of grit and grime across the lens to really rub home the hustle and bustle of Outlaws' complex universe. And when Massive is not delivering the big moments the dev lets you relax and quietly enjoy this corner of the Star Wars universe it's built. Taking time to eat with Nix at a droid-run food hut turns out to be a delightful mini-game, while leaning at the bar not only means you can take in the atmosphere but a lead or two could be eavesdropped; some juicy intel to use, sell or barter. There's a moment when I'm out in a small diner in the middle of nowhere, some random jangly music playing on the jukebox, the hum of conversation and the clank of plates, and there's a guide telling Kay his life story. He doesn't want money, he doesn't want a thing fetching, he simply wants to unload his problems, and Outlaws clicks with me: it's a game of small moments, of telling stories in a corner of the Star Wars we've rarely seen done well before. Star Wars Outlaws does so many of these small details so well, anchored by its syndicate system, the drive of exploration and a heartfelt hero who's story is compelling enough to drive you to its dramatic conclusion. Everything builds into a compelling whole, and in turn brings to life Star Wars' underworld in an enthralling way. Is Star Wars Outlaws perfect? No, definitely not. But few rogues and scoundrels are.

Star Wars Outlaws review - stripped-back Ubisoft formula is admirable yet doomed

Massive bravely peels away the many layers of Ubisoft open world-isms in Star Wars Outlaws. It's a fatal error. If nothing else, I've had a wonderful time playing Sabacc. The new variant, Kessel Sabacc, invented for Star Wars Outlaws is infinitely moreish, a simple card game that takes elements of Blackjack and Poker and a few others, and blends them into an eminently snackable bit of video game gambling. In the simplest terms, four players are each dealt a hand of two cards and take turns, through three rounds, to attempt to make a pair of the two lowest numbers possible. Drawing a new card costs a token, as does coming anywhere but first at the end of each set of rounds. When you're out of tokens you're out of the game; last player standing wins. I could play it all day. In some sense this is open world Ubisoft at its best: a bit of colour off to the side, extraneous to the main story, and yet still woven into the world through unlockable cheats and sidequests and bonuses you can acquire and deploy. It's a byproduct of the kind of development the developer-publisher has come to be synonymous with, albeit usually in derogatory terms. This is Ubisoft 'formula' stuff, but it's also a reminder that the formula is often driven by generosity as much as anything. Development-as-gift-giving: have another system; chuck another mechanic on the pile; here's one more neat little thing to do. The problem with Star Wars Outlaws, however, isn't that it adheres too closely to a development approach akin to hoarding, but that it does the opposite, stripping away years of accumulated video game clutter. Admirably Outlaws does this quite aggressively - Kessel Sabacc aside - but in doing so it reveals an integral issue: Ubisoft open worlds are not only fun because of their formula; they are their formula. To strip it away isn't like peeling off some old wallpaper to reveal the original brickwork. It's lifting up the carpet to find a whacking great hole in the ground. It's a great shame, because there are some nice ideas here. Star Wars Outlaws is effectively a kind of gateway open world game, pitched more broadly at the young adult crowd, a stepping stone from, say, TT Games' Lego Star Wars to Respawn's Jedi series. This is good - Star Wars is a family franchise! We don't need everything to be extra mature - and it leads to a kind of breeziness and levity, but also a more manageable and, in theory, focused take on open world structure that is at first quite welcome. After bursting free of the usual Ubisoft pre-credits funnel you're given one of four miniature open worlds to explore in Toshara, a savannah-like moon with one main settlement, the city of Mirogana. Really, 'city' is a stretch - Mirogana isn't particularly big, nor particularly dense - but it's a serviceable first hub area, with all the necessary vendors and contract-givers and a couple of nice touches in seedy, hard-to-reach back rooms for more sweet Sabacc (though how everyone else manages to get into these rooms behind perma-locked doors, which often require a bit of grapple-hooking and remote vent-opening for you to reach, is a mystery - one of many, many cases in Outlaws where it's best not to think too hard about it.) Beyond the city is Toshara's large-ish, predominantly empty open world. A bit more main questing and you'll find space flight available to you, which in turn opens up three more planets - frosty outpost Kijimi, steamy jungle Akiva, and of course the obligatory Tatooine - as well as a bit of space itself, in each planet's orbit. You may be delighted to hear there are no towers to scale to push back Outlaws' fog of war here: these open world areas - really a collection of entirely distinct biomes, separated by hyper space or fast travel - reveal themselves fully on arrival. Except they also don't. Major sections are hidden and locked off until you need to visit them as part of the main story, at which point suddenly a locked door will unlock, or a 'speeder-restricted area' will un-speeder-restrict itself. Suddenly you're off on a brand new path to the great, creaking ruins of a crashed star cruiser, say, or a vast underground facility. But like much of Star Wars Outlaws, these are places which look fantastic as static images or preview beats that seem to promise vast areas of opportunity, but can fall painfully flat in practice. It means Outlaws' most interesting spaces are always fenced away behind one-off missions featuring entirely linear, on-rails exploration and platforming sequences - the most exploration or player choice you'll encounter is an option to sneak to the left of a large cluster of guards, waist-high crates and explosive barrels, or perhaps instead to the right. Exploration and choice are two integral pillars of the Star Wars Outlaws pitch, and unfortunately also two of its biggest failures. Let's stick to exploration first: platforming in Star Wars Outlaws is everywhere, and it's dire. Not satisfied with some of the most egregious yellow paint in a modern video game, Outlaws couples this with yellow tubes on the floor that lead you to your next location, yellow arrows painted on white placards, often pointing towards large bits of yellow paint, and overt, continuous button prompts assigned to every ledge, grapple point and handlebar. The result is something several leaps beyond the faintly patronising but at least understandable yellow ledges that spark debate, to something utterly, inexcusably infantilising, regardless of the audience Ubisoft Massive is shooting for here. All that said, there is an option to turn this off, which I discovered late into the game. But platforming is let down again beyond that with a more basic issue, in the clumsiness of Outlaws' physics Kay's controls - frequently I'll find myself below a climbable ledge hammering X while waiting to be in just the right spot for the icon to appear and the action trigger. It also sparks the old problem of Outlaws then not being innately readable enough to work without such overt prompts - many unscalable ledges are half the height of ones I'll be leaping up to in platforming sections, for instance. Platforming suffers, as well, from the sheer repetitiveness of the obstacles you'll face - it's incredible how many giant, rhythmically activating wall fans there happen to be around here - and couples unfavourably with more repetition elsewhere. There are just two puzzle types in Outlaws, for instance: a rhythm-based lockpicking one, where you need to time right-trigger pulls to a series of two or three musical bleeps; and a game of Star Wars Wordle, which starts off as a slightly bland game of logical elimination, since there's no hard five-guess limit here, and ends as an easier and therefore even blander game of elimination when you gain access to an upgraded slicing kit that rules out most of the options for you. These are both neat at first - the Wordle clone has some lovely retro-future visual touches and audio cues, and the rhythm lockpicking is at least somewhat novel - but by the 50th, or the 100th time you've gone through these, mashing in symbol combinations and tapping away to the same tune again, that novelty is a very distant memory. The same goes for Outlaws' environmental puzzle solving, which involves Kay's animal companion Nix, here playing a kind of BD-1 and Atreus hybrid role as both egregiously cute shoulder mascot and solve-everything remote assistant. As you navigate the world you'll find various obstacles with conveniently Nix-sized gaps in them, where you can send him off to go hold a shutter open for you to shoot at a big power nodule, say, or push a button to open a door from the other side. Again, there are just a couple of these, and again, they tire quickly. Worst of a bad bunch, on the exploration front, is Star Wars Outlaws' horrible, wicked, downright cursed speeder. Star Wars games have always had trouble with speeders - a function of their original design itself really, as flimsy, overtly crashable and ludicrously fast - but this thing is something else. Not only is it a nightmare to drive, revealing the blunt edges of Outlaws' very limited physics by slamming into near-invisible bumps and micro-ledges and coming to comically blunt, immediate standstills, it also has the unfortunate effect of emptying out the landscape. By implementing something so fast, Massive - a maker of open world games in The Division but, crucially, open worlds based entirely in a single city - has been forced to spread its open areas as thinly as possible, meaning they're both entirely impractical to ever navigate on foot and entirely unenjoyable to drive around on your bike. There's a smattering of rote open world activities here - some civilians are being attacked by some syndicate or another; Nix smells a pair of special leggings buried beyond this rudimentary platforming section; there's a guy with a gun. But as undeniably moreish as Outlaws' Bethesda-style trick of leaving question marks just off the main path will always be, the traversal is far too painful, and the payoff - in gameplay or narrative or otherwise - far too limited for me to ever want to go looking for them. Too often I found myself thinking of Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno's witheringly appropriate comments earlier this year about fast travel - ubiquitous in Outlaws - and what it says about travel itself in your game. "Travel is boring? That's not true. It's only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun." This is easier said than done of course, and I have sympathy for Massive in having to transition to wide open worlds from more concentrated ones, but it hasn't worked here. Back to player choice, and unfortunately it's more limited here than you might expect. A key place where this manifests is Outlaws' approach to stealth and combat, which has again been stripped back to the simplest possible implementation and, again, suffers for it. Stealth is a surprisingly major part of Outlaws. That's understandable - this is a 'scoundrel' game, after all, where Kay is intentionally a regular human scraping by with underdog, and often underhand tactics. The issue is stealth is painfully basic and somehow at once both far too easy, but also far too easy to fail at the hands of some awkward systems and controls. Often you'll be tasked with infiltrating an enemy base - always belonging to either one of the games' four crime syndicates or the Empire - but with your kit so limited compared to other stealth games, these can become a lengthy slog. Nix, again, is the star, capable of turning off or booby trapping enemy alarms, distracting enemies, or rushing them and jumping on their head while you leg it up for a quick punch. Much has been made of Kay's ability to punch out helmet-wearing Stormtroopers with a single biff, which frankly is a bit of a non-issue. Far more interesting to me is the fact that, as indicated by several guard barks on discovering the crumpled bodies of their peers, Kay is in fact killing these people. Casual unarmed brutality aside, there are more pressing issues. Enemy AI is by all modern standards quite awful, searching secret, high-security bases for all of 10 seconds after finding one of those battered bodies before resetting - this happens often, because you can't move the bodies to hide them, and most enemies are located somewhere fairly open on their wall-staring duty. Their line of sight is comically narrow, and their hearing equally limited, as I discovered by regularly punching the life out of enemies yards away from each other, running up to them diagonally, or even triggering lengthy, red-barrel-exploding gunfights barely a dozen metres away from other parts of a base that totally ignored it. Your own systems are equally limited, with most of the game involving sending Nix to a spot behind a trooper to dance in front of them, walking up to press Square for a (lethal) K.O., and repeating ad nauseam for about half an hour. There are also many air vents - many, many air vents - for you to squat in. Though rather than presenting as one of many sprawling, branching opportunities to navigate an outpost like in say Batman Arkham, these often function as the single linear way to get past an obstacle or through to another section. With stealth often combining platforming, puzzle-solving and stealth attacks all at once, there are moments when Outlaws genuinely feels like one, long quick-time event, as you flow from one explicit button prompt to the next. When the alarm does go off, or you just get bored, it's gunfight time. AI is again largely terrible here, with enemies often running around in seemingly random directions. There's no locking to cover, so you'll often find yourself getting clipped on the shoulder when it really feels like you should be safely in cover. Shooting itself can, at times, be good fun however. It's a classic third-person pop-up gallery for the most part, but some enemies are a bit tougher, requiring a nice rotation between stun mode and regular mode of your blaster, with a heavier, pseudo-grenade launcher upgrade available as you progress. It's eminently casual, which is fitting for the Han Solo template of Kay Vess and in turn makes it enjoyable enough in short bursts, though without his swagger this can end up leaning more towards a kind of wafty chaos than any kind of intentional design around style. And intentional or not, that pervading sense of imprecision grows tiresome when dealing with tougher enemies towards the end. Lastly, still loosely under the topic of choice, comes Outlaws' system of crime syndicates, and their role in Kay Vess' story. They are loosely under the topic of choice because unfortunately, again, much has been made of a system that is ultimately very limited. The four crime gangs - Pykes, Hutts, Crimson Dawn, and Ashiga Clan - each have a very simple 'how much do we like you' bar. Do quests for them and the bar goes up. Backstab them, trespass in their forbidden areas, ruthlessly mow down hundreds of their grunts etc., and the bar goes down. At key moments of missions, usually right at the end, you'll also get binary dialogue choices when presented with a last-minute chance at stabbing one in the back for another, almost always with the same dated, cop-out moral equivocation where neither side's really in the right and you never have to feel particularly good or bad about anything. Aside from the bluntness of the system, the consequences in general range from mild to non-existent. There's no true bearing on the story from what I can tell. Instead, the bar nudging up or down simply results in better or worse deals at traders, some contracts temporarily opening or closing off, and the odd area toggling into or out of being restricted, until you get back in the good books. Crucially, and perhaps fatally for Star Wars Outlaws, there's also no effect on Kay herself at all. Kay Vess is as unchanging a character as I can remember. Played gamely by Humberly Gonzalez, Kay begins as a scrappy underdog who projects cockiness and continues at that exact level throughout, unimpacted by the people she meets, the events of the story, or anything else. Her desires are unclear to the point of parody - and almost plot point, right towards the very end - with her entire motivation being to get rid of the death mark put on her by a brush with a crime lord at the beginning, and maybe to bag a big score. Why does Kay want to land this score so badly? What does she value or care about - or, as it seems to be nothing, why is she this much of a cynic? Far too much Disney-era Star Wars finds itself equivocating between the Rebels and the Empire, in search of complexity and grey areas in the era of antiheroes and prestige TV and no doubt because, in relentlessly expanding as a universe, there's only so much you can get out of a simple good-versus-evil tale. Kay feels like the personification of the issue, her blankly disinterested nihilism feeling like a function of her as a simplified 'rogue' character spec sheet. The mistake Massive has made here is conflating a character archetype - scoundrel - with actual character. The same struggles continue into the storytelling as a whole. This is a heist story set amongst the seedy underworld of the galaxy. Cue all of the surface-level vibes of a heist story but none of the detail or intentionality that makes them what they are. There's rip-rollocking music and neon lights and cocky shrugs, but when a duplicitous contact is first met - a chance for noiry, pulpy heist flicks to fully lean into their atmosphere - it's a plain over-the-shoulder chat in the flat lighting of a corridor. There are no slatted blinds here, no figures cast half in shadow, no tests of boundaries or questions of integrity. Aesthetic choices like these, basic development of characters or examination of their intentions and desires, are treated like unnecessary afterthoughts. But the reality is that these aren't bits of set decoration that you can pick or choose between when you're assembling your genre flick, but actually are the genre itself. It speaks back to Outlaws' issues with stripping away the bulk of the Ubisoft formula and finding so little underneath - or more broadly, a general misunderstanding of what you ought to be stripping away here and why. The Ubisoft open world functions so well because of how this clutter weaves itself together so intoxicatingly that you can't help but flow from one to the next, from looting to crafting to combat to gear to unlocking another area of the world and more. The heist flick works because of its characters - their complexity, obsession or greed - as much as it does the sheer fun of actually doing a heist. Star Wars Outlaws, by comparison, feels like it's blagging it - much as Kay can, when regularly caught out by some far more worldly syndicate boss. The result is a series of quite painful comparisons: it lacks the branching, open stealth of an Arkham game, the systemic options of a Dishonored or the incisive, relentlessly satisfying speed of picking enemies off in Assassin's Creed. It lacks the linear polish and charisma of Uncharted. Lacks the animation flow to its yellow-ledge platforming next to a Horizon, or the sheer joy of taking platforming and making it into an actual game in itself, as in Star Wars Jedi. And, somewhat nightmarishly for Ubisoft Massive, couldn't have known about this when committing to it at the time, Outlaws opts to tell a Star Wars heist story in a world after Andor, which has already done so with such sensitivity, humanity and precision that Kay and co's cameo-ridden non-event is unfortunately left feeling lightyears behind.