Star Wars Outlaws

The first hour of Star Wars Outlaws is the best-looking thing anyone has made with this licence. Mos Eisley is a working town rather than a set: laundry, spice, food stalls, arguments in three languages. Then a stealth mission starts, a guard spots you, and the mission restarts. Twenty-eight hours later that sentence still describes the game.

Kay Vess is fine and the world around her is excellent

The character work holds up better than expected. Kay is a small-time thief who is out of her depth and knows it, and the game resists the temptation to make her the most important person in the galaxy. Nix, her companion animal, is a genuinely well-implemented mechanic rather than a mascot — sending him to trip an alarm across a room is the most consistently satisfying thing you do here.

The syndicate reputation system is the good idea. Doing work for one crime family costs you standing with another, and that standing changes which doors open and which planets are hostile. It is the sort of consequence structure this genre usually pretends to have.

Stealth missions restarted

Lost count

Planets visited

5

Speeder hours

Around 6

Where it slips, and it slips a lot

The stealth. Large sections of the game are mandatory stealth with instant failure on detection, in a game whose combat is not good enough to be the punishment for failing. So you reload. Repeatedly. This was patched to be less strict after launch and it is now merely frustrating rather than intolerable, which is not the same as fixed.

The open world is Ubisoft's standard model — activity markers, collectible chains, small camps — laid over environments far more interesting than the activities happening in them. Tatooine deserved a better game than the one being played on top of it.

The reputation system deserved a better game

Four crime syndicates track how you treat them independently, and the standing is genuinely consequential — high reputation opens vendors, unlocks fast travel through their territory and changes whether their patrols shoot on sight. Crucially, you cannot max all four. Helping the Pykes on a job means the Hutts hear about it.

For a game built out of open-world components this is the one system that produces stories. My third act was substantially harder than it needed to be because I had spent the second making a specific enemy, and the game never once softened that.

What it lacks is a mission structure worth applying it to. The reputation shifts are earned mostly through generic contracts, so a system that should generate drama mostly generates a slightly different loadout of guards outside the same warehouse.

The verdict

There is a tight fifteen-hour heist game in here, and it has been stretched across an open world that adds nothing except distance. Worth playing on a sale, in a hurry, mainlining the story. The version of this I wanted is visible from where I ended up, which is its own kind of frustrating.