I’ve been playing Star Wars Outlaws for the past couple of weeks, just finishing the main quest line last night after about 25 hours or so of play time.
Overall, it is a good albeit somewhat basic journey through some of the ‘darker’ aspects of the Star Wars universe. I would recommend it to anyone who likes Star Wars and the stories that occur in that universe, enjoys a bit of stealth action, and likes some direction to their narrative experience.
The hate and toxicity around Star Wars Outlaws are in my opinion just worthless noise. Kay isn’t ‘woke’ unless you consider ‘normal looking women’ to be ‘woke’. There was, in my experience, no egregious monetization or excess ‘Ubisoft quest marker’ spam. There were few bugs, serviceable AI, enjoyable combat, and good difficulty controls. The game is not ‘genre defining’ and may not be for everyone, but for me it was worth the money spent.
| Title | Star Wars Outlaws |
| Developer | Ubisoft |
| Type | Action / Stealth RPG |
| Platform(s) | Playstation 5, Xbox Series X / S, Windows; Reviewed on Xbox Series X |
| Kelly Score ™ | 75 / 100 |
Onward to some details…
Gameplay overview and controversy
Star Wars Outlaws is a stealth action game set in the Star Wars universe. The main character is an outlaw with a long criminal history of mostly petty theft named Kay Vess. There is no relationship between Kay’s story and the Skywalker clan- she has no force powers, isn’t a member of the rebellion, and for most of the game has limited interaction with the Empire. The game has some basic role play elements like a skill progression mechanism, equipment upgrades, and optional side missions.
But unlike many RPGs, Outlaws is a mostly linear game where you have no real choice about the character you play. Combat is primarily focused on stealth takedowns and sneaking past enemies, although full-blown combat breaks out pretty regularly when things go wrong. Kay has a companion in the form of a critter that follows her on almost all missions. This companion can be leveraged for some more sneaky shenanigans through opening doors via otherwise inaccessible switches or by disabling alarms.
Star Wars Outlaws is in some senses similar to other Ubisoft games like the Assassin’s Creed series. But it is definitely different in many respects as well, and I would say that most if not all of these differences are improvements. This makes the uproar amongst a certain group of fans a bit hard to understand. The game has reasonably good critic ratings with an overall Meteoritic score of about 75%, but fan ratings are around 2.5 out of 5 starts or barely 50%.
There are a ton of one-star audience reviews, and I really think this is review bombing more than any actual fan feedback. Looking at various Reddit threads including this one, it appears that there are a lot of people for whom the game ‘breaks’ a number of personal rules. On the perhaps rational side are the people who think a game can’t be called ‘Star Wars’ unless it has Jedi and/or Sith in it. Some folks just call it ‘bland’, which is perhaps fair but isn’t exactly a scathing indictment.
Then there are those who hate the fact that the protagonist is female and not ‘hot’ by conventional definitions. Kay Vess is perfectly normal in appearance, rather asexual in terms of behaviour, and has an interesting personality. But the hatred against her runs deep for some misogynistic and/or sex-starved gamers. And of course there are those who simply can’t have a ‘meh’ opinion: everything needs to be extreme to the max, either the greatest thing ever or the end of all civilization as we know it.
The controversy is, in my opinion, pure garbage. Star Wars Outlaws is good: largely bug free, decent graphics, interesting characters, enjoyable story, and mostly decent combat and stealth systems. Rating it below 50% is completely unreasonable.
Story
I’m going to try to keep my description of the Outlaw story mostly ‘spoiler free’, but I will be touching on aspects of the narrative that aren’t necessarily obvious at the outset of the game.
The Outlaws story is set sometime after the Battle of Hoth and the events of the Empire Strikes Back movie. Kay Vess is effectively an orphan, given a roof over her head by a grumpy bar keep in casino town Canto Bight and accompanied by her animal companion, Nix. Kay’s upbringing involved being used by her mother to help commit various crimes such as shoplifting and pick pocketing. Her mother abandoned her at a young age, and Kay continued with crime as her primary source of income.
The story begins when Kay sets out to earn enough to get off of Cantonica and start a new life elsewhere. A series of mishaps introduces Kay to more sinister criminal organizations. Eventually Kay is marked for death by one of the main syndicates in the region after being double-crossed while breaking in to their leader’s vault. After stealing a starship from the same syndicate, she manages to get off of her starting world. This begins the larger story which continues to introduce additional worlds as it progresses.
Kay meets a technical whiz named Waka who helps her repair the ship she stole. Waka’s requests for repair materials entangle Kay with several other syndicates. Kay is repeatedly double-crossed, eventually connecting up with Jaylen Vrax. After saving Kay’s life, Jaylen expects her to form up a crew to break back in to the syndicate vault on Cantonica that started her down the dangerous path she was on. He claims this will clear the death mark on her that sends a steady stream of assassins in her direction. Jaylen assigns the commando droid ND-5 to protect Kay while making sure she doesn’t try to double-cross him.
The rest of the story becomes increasingly complicated. Kay mostly interacts with the various syndicates to earn her way and build some kind of reputation to keep herself safe. But there is also a strong link to the Empire, more double and triple crosses, and a couple of cameos by characters from the other Star Wars stories.
Kay and Nix
Kay Vess is a young, normal looking woman without any force powers. Kay is intelligent but somewhat clumsy when interacting with others, yet has a disarming charm that often allows her to get her way. She is good at hand to hand combat, capable of moving quietly and striking for non-lethal take downs. She is also handy with a blaster, the only ‘permanent’ weapon she can use in the game. Her skills extend to lock picking using a ‘data spike’, hacking into computers via ‘slicing’, and somehow communicating complex instructions to her animal companion Nix.
Nix is a strange little creature called a merqaal. Somewhat like a cross between a cat, a monkey, and a lizard, Nix is still somehow cute despite the weird tentacles on his head. I have to assume Nix and Kay share some sort of telepathic bond as she is able to direct Nix to perform complex actions without obvious verbal instruction. Nix can do things like detect people and certain objects on the other side of walls, distract enemies, ‘attack’ them (another form of distraction), retrieve items, push otherwise inaccessible buttons to open doors, pickpocket, and even sabotage alarms.
Adjusting difficulty
Star Wars Outlaws has extremely flexible difficulty settings. Basically anything from UI colour to lock picking difficulty can be adjusted either via presets or individually.
The difficulty customization was helpful to me early on. I found the lock picking mini-game was tough for me starting out. Unlocking things is a rhythm based challenge and, without visual cues, I was struggling. I also found the stealth to be a bit ‘punishing’ in the sense that guards going to ‘alerted’ state would spread their anxiety a bit too far and wide too quickly. I played with the custom settings a bit and eventually settled on switching the whole game to the ‘Explorer’ preset.
I’m sorry to say that ‘Explorer’ is the easiest of the settings, but I found it worked fine for me and stuck with it throughout the game. I still managed to die occasionally, but I no longer felt like I was repeating encounters too many times before progressing. The amount of customization for difficulty is appreciated- those who want greater challenge can make the game as tough as they like it to be.
Visuals
Star Wars Outlaws has a rather appealing art style. The usual ‘gritty’ and well-used Star Wars atmosphere is common to all the universe’s properties. But I found that the different worlds each had a unique appearance that was very well-established and differentiated.
The style used has a fairly ‘soft’ focus, more ‘water colour’ than ‘hyper-realism’. This generally works well with the environments and lighting used, although there were a few times I would have liked a bit more sharpness. Overall the graphics serve the story well and produces some often quite beautiful vistas.
Action / Combat
Fighting on the ground
Most of the action starts with trying to sneak around and either avoid sentries or gradually pick them off with quiet hand-to-hand take downs. It pays to scout the area out with Kay’s binoculars to mark out the enemies, and it is also wise to find and disable any alarms.
Nix can disable alarms or distract foes while you remain hidden to make the sneaking process easier. He’s also capable of retrieving items like healing packs (bacta) while you remain hidden. And the little scamp can also trigger any explosive barrels that happen to be lying around: this usually gets all the bad guys riled up, but they won’t know where you are and will usually quickly fall back to their normal less-aware state.
Despite my best intentions to be stealthy, however, I often end up getting noticed. Kay has a single combat weapon: the blaster. It can be upgraded over time to become quite formidable, and it has multiple firing modes. The multiple firing modes introduce a bit of strategy and skill: fire a couple of ion burst shots to take down shields from the heavies, then fire the plasma to whittle the foe’s health down. Or if they are particularly nasty, switch to the power bolt which hits hard but takes a while to charge up.
Kay’s blaster also has a ‘stun’ shot but, in practice, I found this to be largely useless. Although it is mostly a guaranteed single shot knockdown, it takes forever to ‘recharge’. In practical terms the stun can really only be used once every several minutes.The blaster’s firing modes are multi-purpose and can be used outside of direct combat. The ion burst can charge up certain electrical devices, for example, and the power bolt will break through weakened walls.
You can also use help from Nix to rapidly take down multiple foes with hand-to-hand: have the little beast attack one enemy, which will keep them busy as he chews on their face, while engaging the second with Kay’s skill at fisticuffs. This works well when there are a couple of isolated enemies, but can turn into a disaster if you miscalculate how observant the other guards are.
Fighting in space
Kay’s ship, the Trailblazer, is her ‘home away from home’ for most of the game. It is equipped with a weapon bench, quarters where she can change her appearance, and a holotable where any contract givers she’s met can be contacted for new quests.
The ship itself is the main mechanism for travelling between planets, although fast travel is also available via the map. Combat can arise when travelling in space near a planet, which mostly happens while completing contracts for the syndicates. The Trailblazer is fairly maneuverable, with two basic weapons: blasters and missiles.
Space battles are pretty easy with the difficulty set to ‘explorer’ like I had it. The visuals are impressive and combat is fairly exciting. In addition to destroying enemies with weapons it is occasionally possible to trick them into crashing into the abundant astroids that always seem to be floating around in Star Wars, which feels quite true to the movies.
Abilities
Abilities in Outlaws are the skills that Kay can optionally develop over time. Unlike a traditional skill tree, these abilities are made available when certain “experts” are found in game; usually some kind of quest is required to get access to their training.
The first of these experts is Bram the bartender, the grumpy fellow whose bar provided Kay her home as a youngster. The skills he offers mostly relate to physical combat.
Skills can be unlocked by completing challenges once an expert is found. Generally these challenges are things that you might complete through simply playing the game. I never felt any need to ‘power game’ through these challenges, but I was playing on ‘easy’ mode. You’ll want to pay closer attention to the ability challenges if you have particular skills you want Kay to have.
Some of the skills don’t really seem directly related to the expert’s specialty: for example, the slicer (computer hacker) expert can unlock a number of combat options. It pays to look through what skills each expert has on offer once you befriend them.
Syndicate reputation
The syndicates of Star Wars Outlaws loom large in Kay’s daily life. They control large areas of the map, and being on good or bad terms with them can make getting around and completing tasks easier or much, much harder.
Kay’s relationship with each syndicate goes up or down based on her actions. Blow up a mob’s stuff or kill their people and they will grow to hate you, eventually sending kill squads to harass you throughout the land. Complete contracts or quests that benefit them and they will become downright friendly, even giving you lovely gifts. It is a wise criminal who keeps an eye on the big dogs that surround them.
Contracts (which are a type of quest) are basically a job offered by a syndicate. Complete the job and you get some rewards and usually a bump in your relationship with them. But there is also usually an option upon completion to betray the syndicate that gave Kay the contract. The seedy underbelly of the Star Wars galaxy is on full display in this mechanic: there is truly no honour amongst thieves.
I generally found that it was enough to make sure I never dropped much below ‘poor’ (the default relationship) with any mob. I’d actively start seeking out contracts for a syndicate if I got much into their ‘bad’ range. A single mistake made when the relation was deep in the ‘bad’ zone could trigger the syndicate to unleash the kill squads, which makes getting around a bit too ‘interesting’ for my tastes.
Gear upgrades
Kay Vess has gear that can be upgraded along side her skills. Items can be bought from vendors or earned through quests. My favourite items came from the syndicates. Make them ecstatically happy and you can get a full set of matched gear with helpful boosts to Kay’s abilities.
You can also replace in item’s appearance with that of any other item you possess while keeping the gear’s stats. So if you like the look of the Crimson Reign Tunic but prefer the stats of some other item you can scratch both your itches at once.
Kay’s blaster, her speeder, and the starship (Trailblazer) can also all be upgraded both in function and appearance. This involves collecting materials, both rare and common, in the world. Some rare items require completion of quests to retrieve.
I should note that the blaster is Kay’s only regular weapon. She can pick up ‘temporary’ weapons from enemies and, with certain abilities, even briefly use ‘heavy’ weapons used by elite storm troopers. But these short-term weapons are ‘dropped’ when emptied or if Kay uses certain abilities, so they are not (in my opinion) very useful. The blaster is versatile and capable, so it is best to get used to using it the vast majority of the time.
Quests
Outlaws has six different categories of quest: Main quests, Intel quests, Syndicate quests, Merchant quests, Expert quests, and Outlaw legend quests. Most of these are pretty straight forward, but I don’t believe any of them fall quite to the simplistic level of the “climb the tower” or “collect the feathers” quests that Ubisoft is notorious for.
Each quest I completed was different enough that I didn’t notice any obvious ‘cut-and-paste’ signs. I should note that I probably didn’t complete more than about 40% of the available quests in my play through: I suspect I’d start to find some quests becoming repetitive if I had gotten closer to 100%. But overall I am impressed that Star Wars Outlaws has a more or less ‘open’ world without falling into the usual repetitive quest design others in this genre have tended towards.
Contracts with the various syndicates are where I focused Kay’s efforts when her reputation took a hit. You get these from dedicated contract givers that you generally encounter while wandering the worlds of the game. Once you’ve interacted with a contract giver you can communicate with them from your ship’s holoconsole, picking up new jobs without having to return to the world you found them on.
Conclusion
Star Wars Outlaws is an enjoyable action RPG game. The main character, Kay Vess, and her companion Nix are well-written and have interesting back stories. The overall narrative involving criminal organizations, betrayal, revenge, and reconciliation exposes the seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe. And revelations that both the Empire and the Rebellion itself pull dirty tricks against the common residents of the galaxy reveals the grey areas that most of the Star Wars stories avoid talking about.
I would happily recommend Outlaws to someone who enjoys the Star Wars universe, particularly if they are people who enjoyed Rogue One or Andor. Star Wars Outlaws has gameplay elements similar to the Assassin’s Creed series but with a less repetitive and more ‘open world’ style: I honestly think Outlaws does stealth action better than the Assassin’s series does.
I’d also suggest ignoring extremely negative reviews of the game. I’m sure some people dislike it for valid reasons, but most of what I’ve read sounds like the kind of thing two six year olds shouting in a park might say about who is could win a fight, Batman or Superman.