Star Wars Outlaws review – a wasted open-world adventure

Heist movies are great. Slick, exciting, and full of twists. More of a howdunit than a whodunit, the method of success nearly always outweighs the actual score. Star Wars: Outlaws, sadly, evokes very little of what makes the genre work, though not for the lack of trying.

Outlaws is Massive Entertainment’s shot at a true open-world Star Wars game. It puts you in the shoes of Kay Vess, a fresh-faced scoundrel from Canto Bight, as she attempts a high-risk job to escape her seemingly dead-end life and start fresh off-planet. She and her oldest pal, the cutest creature in the galaxy, Nix, end up stealing the wrong ship from the wrong person and must high-tail it from home. The ship is soon damaged, leading the pair to crashland on Toshara, a planet with high winds and a big crime problem – good news for a budding thief.

Losing a death mark (read: huge bounty) is no mean feat; when a crime boss wants you dead, that’s usually how you’ll end up. Kay must initially take odd jobs to accrue the cash and kit to repair her ship in the hopes of eventually landing ‘The Big One,’ which might pay enough to let her disappear forever, leaving her woes behind.

There are four crime syndicates in play in Star Wars: Outlaws, and each has a unique look, specific areas on every planet, and a big bad boss you’ll have to parlay with. Each of these syndicates has an opinion of you, displayed as a reputation meter, with store discounts, special gear, and unlimited access to their areas of operation for those they like. On the flip side, a bad reputation with a crime syndicate means you’ll be met with lethal force should they spot you.

Trying to balance these reputations is outwardly compelling, and the advantage of having unfettered access to Hutt areas on Tattooine for instance is worth its weight in gold. But once you scratch the surface of this system, it starts to rub a little – these syndicates aren’t expressing trust and this isn’t the narrative focal point it portrays itself as; it’s simply a meter that goes up when you do them a favor and down when you murder their associates.

This disconnect ran through my entire playthrough in one way or another. Nothing seems to stick, everything is convenient, and though the open world is stunning to look at, it has a Disney theme park sheen that creeps in after a while. Walking around Mos Eisley is a sight to behold, and one that Star Wars fans will undoubtedly enjoy, but something felt off as I wandered the dusty streets.

So long as you don’t look too closely, the cities appear to be bustling with people going about their day. Sparks fly as mechanics repair machinery and merchants tend their stalls, touting their produce. After a time, I realized the entire place lacked movement, real energy, and any sort of ambiance. You’ll hear snippets of conversation from locals as you walk by, but there is no cacophony, no clamor of voices that you’d associate with a living, breathing space. I walked into a busy bazaar and was met with near silence. It felt unsettling.

It’s a very Truman Show feeling – nobody appears to exist in these spaces organically; they were obviously placed here or there on purpose, and you’ll occasionally speak to people on the street who offer something jarringly specific to your journey, despite them not knowing who you are. A corrupt officer once asked me if I needed my wanted level removed. Not only did I not have a wanted level, but I feel like that’s a loosey-goosey way of running your shady business, friend.

This level of artificiality takes me out of what is an incredible visual recreation of Star Wars staples. I wanted to be consumed by Mos Eisley’s filthy streets, but I instead felt like a tourist, sitting in my little cart, taking photos to show my friends. The open world itself doesn’t have much to shout about either. The vistas can’t hold my attention for long, and with nearly every mission being ‘go from point A to B’, the travel soon grates. The on-foot traversal is also quite restrictive, with only certain parts of the environment accessible to climbing, forcing you to take the well-trodden road most of the time. It extinguished that feeling of possibility and made me feel like I was simply speeding around a very pretty diorama.

You have a ship, The Trailblazer, and the ability to roam an area of space surrounding each of the four planets. Much like the cities below, the space sections look fantastic, with crumbling derelicts and gargantuan icebergs giving you something to think about while you fight pirates and search through boxes. There isn’t much to do besides fight and loot, but the feeling of taking off from orbit (a nice-looking disguised loading screen) and jumping at lightspeed to wherever the story goes next helps to keep the gameworld connected.

Star Wars: Outlaws started to show promise with the self-contained, linear missions. I found that focusing on the main questline forced some semblance of pace, and while it’s usually just a variation of breaking into X building for Y object, it felt marginally better than the open-world MacGuffin hunt that plagued nearly every side quest.

It isn’t long before even these main missions wear thin, though. A stealth-action game needs to do at least one of those two things right to clear the bar, and Outlaws doesn’t nail either. The shooting is arguably the better of the two, with the occasional laser blast landing with a heavy thud, but you’re often stuck with your sidearm, which remains underwhelming despite the unlockable upgrades. You can pick up weapons from fallen enemies, but once they’re out of ammo, Kay just tosses them.

Stealth is flimsy and inconsistent – not helped by some missions’ instant-fail criteria. A lot of my attempts at staying off the radar resulted in an enemy catching an impossible glimpse of me, with the entire situation devolving into a shooting match. So long as there wasn’t a ‘don’t raise the alarm’ caveat to whatever I was doing, it was nearly always better to shoot my way out of a situation regardless of whatever the story had me doing.

Speaking of the story, it’s the aspect of Outlaws that let me down the most. For a planet-hopping adventure, it doesn’t go places, and its twists fall flat almost instantly. I think Star Wars – modern Star Wars, at any rate – has a real problem with its lore. Everybody has to be somebody, and everything has to tie into the bigger picture. For once, I hoped this heist would just be a heist.

It isn’t long before Outlaws wheels out the Star Wars familiars. I won’t go into specifics for fear of spoilers, but Massive seemingly didn’t trust its game to stand on its own two feet. Those ‘remember this’ moments felt forced, unnecessary, and took a lot of the emphasis away from what should have been a personal story about overcoming your past. I may be alone in this, but I think a small slice of very specific Star Wars – like how to carve out a life for yourself when you come from nothing – is infinitely cooler than huge space battles and the same Big Bad turning up time and time again.

There were points when I was at ease in Star Wars: Outlaws. Walking around Mos Eisley was a nostalgia hug I’ve not felt in many other digital places, and plotting my way around the city from memory alone gave me a real kick. It’s a shame then that the rest of the game is such a surface-level experience – I have a ship and almost free-reign over a section of Star Wars and was still left bored and unengaged. The pains that Massive Entertainment has gone through to make this feel true to the source material are admirable, but while Outlaws succeeds at being an authentic part of the Star Wars universe, it struggles with just about everything else.