Star Wars Outlaws Early Review (Patreon)

As the sort of person who just sometimes needs an open world game, Star Wars Outlaws is coming along at a pretty good time for me. I just kinda need an open world game. Actually, let me be more specific: I need a good open world game. I like Star Wars Outlaws! It’s an entertaining world with the right kind of faction interplay that leads you to some proper skullduggery as you play the various crime syndicates against one another, all while building up your name as a reliable hand who can get jobs done.

I haven’t finished the game yet, I’m slow-playing it a bit because I find myself spending entire sessions chasing after weird and sometimes-exciting side stuff or just poking at the systems to see how well they’re made. But there’s one real thing I want to talk about here that is sort of blowing my mind: The controls.

In Star Wars Outlaws you use the R3 button (that’s clicking in the right stick) to initiate actions like talking to someone or opening a container or pushing the button on a door or whatever. It’s your standard action button, replacing X (or A if we’re talking Xbox buttons) as the button that gets things going. You also have a tiny pet that you can send out to push buttons or pick up items for you—something that comes in handy quite a lot since this is a stealth game. Interacting with your little buddy is all done with the L1 button. Most of your out-of-combat activities will revolve around those two buttons and they’re both in positions that you can hit without taking your thumbs off of either analog stick. It’s a small thing, but a thing that makes this entire game flow just a little bit better. It’s the kind of cool little tweak that I’d love to see more third-person action adventure games try out.

You play as Kay Vess. She’s a budding young scoundrel, desperate to commit some crimes. After that desperation gets her into trouble on her home planet, she ends up fleeing, getting marked for death by a powerful syndicate head in the process. So you’ll start over in a new place, meeting the power players, taking on jobs, and watching faction rep meters go up and down as you steal from one for one of the others, and so on. I get the impression that, for most of the game at least, you’re never truly locked out of those syndicates you’re angering because there’s a steady flow of jobs that have you just robbing random, faction-less individuals, making them effective at getting your numbers up, when needed.

This is one of those games where you try to be quiet until things do wrong, then shoot your way out of trouble. Out of the gate, the stealth is fine… but Kay gets sent on some ridiculous missions very early on that make the stealth system seem a little silly. Crouch-walking across the floor of an Imperial space station’s hangar bay becomes an exercise in realizing just how blind Stormtroopers really are. You can toy around with your enemies a bit, hiding behind objects and whistling to get them to come over or getting your friendly little pet to distract or attack an enemy so you can run up and quietly finish the job. While faction enemies will give you trouble if you get spotted, the Imperials are the only ones that come with a GTA-like wanted meter. You can clear the meter by sneaking into one of their outposts and hacking a terminal, but if you manage to fill the wanted meter you’ll have to make your way out to find the Imperial death squad that’s after you. This mostly just means you need to steal a keycard off an officer before you can hack a terminal, but also the death squad doesn’t fall for quite as many of your low level tricks. So… you’ll need higher level tricks.

Part of the upgrades in Outlaws involve experts. You’ll meet people along the way who more or less unlock a set of potential upgrades in a new category, like terminal hacking (”slicing”) or upgrades for your speederbike. Sometimes these upgrades—smoke bombs, for example—will require you to fetch a batch of items. Sometimes they’ll have little achievements attached, like you’ll need to jump 60 meters on your speeder to unlock one of those upgrades. Or you’ll need to meet eight merchants. And so on. It’s a fine system that gives you some more powerful tools, and if you find you’re out of ideas or need some more things to play with as you’re trying to sneak into outposts, you can always try to go work on some of those upgrades.

I think the only thing that’s rubbed me the wrong way so far is some of Kay’s reactions and dialogue. While she’s new to the game, she also isn’t a convincing liar. Dialogue options never tell you the exact verbiage, instead opting for simple things like “keep stolen ring” or “return stolen ring.” When I gave the crime boss back his ring after stealing it during our first meeting, I wanted Kay to sound triumphant cocky about it… but too often she comes off as timid, stammering her way through things all the while. That makes a ton of sense, she’s still pretty new to all this. But I’d like to think that she got into this line of work because she had some sort of skills at manipulating people? This is something that I hope fades away as the game progresses, it’d be cool to see her settle into this life more comfortably and become a stronger voice, but even in the early game stuff I’ve done it still sometimes feels out of character.

It’s also worth noting that while this is an open world game from Ubisoft, it isn’t an Ubisoft Open World Game. It doesn’t feel like a Far Cry or an Assassin’s Creed. That said, you can whip out binoculars to mark enemies and it also has an adrenaline ability where you mark and execute targets like you were Sam Fisher. That, however, is a rad inclusion, especially when you’re being chased by bandits on your speeder bike.

Overall, very happy with it so far. I’ll have a bit more to discuss on the podcast this week, but mostly just wanted to let you know how I’m feeling about it after the first eight or so hours.