Star Wars Outlaws is a game that, not entirely incomprehensibly, has been viewed with considerable scepticism since its announcement. Massive Entertainment came up with the game very quickly after Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and from early gameplay footage it was hard to imagine how it would all play. For many people it mainly raised the question: will this be yet another open world Ubisoft clone where you keep doing the same things, but with a Star Wars-sauce? We’ve been playing the game for the past few days and will tell you all about it in this review-in-progress.
Why not a full review? We only had a few days before the embargo expired today and Star Wars Outlaws is a huge game with a lot to do. We wanted to tell you a little bit about the game and talk about how we hope it will develop as we play more. However, we also felt that we would be selling the experience short if we did a full review now when there is still so much to discover. So the score we give in this review-in-progress is temporary and we will compare it with our full review.
Let’s get straight to the point: Star Wars Outlaws is not a clone of Far Cry of Assassin’s Creed. It definitely borrows elements, but it also does plenty of its own thing. What’s most noticeable is how hard Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment have gone to build in systems that reinforce the “Outlaw” feel. More on that later.
The gameplay has fairly linear sections during main story missions, where you’ll be using stealth a lot, especially if you’re playing on the harder difficulty settings. You’ll sneak around and use Nyx, the little creature and your companion, to do things like steal things from people, open doors, or distract soldiers. The stealth isn’t perfect, and it can feel a little inconsistent when it comes to spotting you, but it’s cool how much the environment plays a role. You can shoot an exploding barrel to cause an explosion, or let Nyx do it while you run off somewhere else to create a distraction. At its worst, the stealth can be a little frustrating, but at its best, it feels like you have a ton of creative freedom as a player to find your own way through a space base or whatever.
The story is also, so far at least, very cool. You really feel like you are in the middle of a great struggle for power between different “gangs”: the Pykes, the Crimson Dawn, the Hutts and Zerek Besh. After about fifteen to twenty hours of playing we still have the feeling that we are at the beginning of a great adventure, which can be a positive or a negative thing depending on your personal preference. We see it as a positive thing, because it is partly because we liked doing optional content so much.
As soon as we could, we took our speeder out to Mirogana, the capital of Toshara, and entered the wide world of the first open planet. There is a lot to experience here, depending on how far into the story you are. You can find a gigantic Imperial base to invade, you can hold speeder races, find treasures, do sidequests, etc., etc.
Although there is a lot of fun to do in the open world of Star Wars Outlawsit is also the aspect of the game that is most questionable. It is where you find the most repetition and the most weird antics. It is not so strange, an open world in which a player can play with everything however he or she wants, that asks for weird bugs, but sometimes it feels a bit sloppy. For example, you sometimes hear information on your radio about something that is going on in the area. A nearby farm is attacked by bandits and you can go and help them! That is cool in itself, but if you ignore it and drive over the same piece again later, you get the same message. Because of this, it contributes less to a living world in the long run and it feels more like the game keeps begging you to go and help. We do not want to be too strict about the open world. We have often had the plan to “just do something for five minutes” and suddenly we were two hours further.
What we definitely want to tell you in this review-in-progress is how well the different systems of Outlaws to really give you that Outlaw feeling. Things aren’t binary right or wrong, but you’re moving between the different rules of different populations. You make a deal for the Pykes, but then do something for the Crimson Dawn. You can do a mission for the Hutts, but decide halfway through to give the information to another gang. In many games, your reputation with one gang would go up and the other would automatically go down, but in Outlaws it all fits together much more realistically and logically.
For example, we had built up a good reputation with the Pyke Syndicate, which gave us access to many of their facilities. We then spent hours abusing this, stealing contracts, hacking their large vault, taking out guards, etc. Our reputation with the Pykes? Still very good, because we were extra careful not to get caught. In any other game with a similar system, you would find that your reputation with the Pykes suddenly dropped to zero. This is not only cool because it feels more real, it also gives you more reason to be careful or not. When you have worked so hard to build up a good reputation with the Pykes, it is much more exciting when you are sabotaging one of their bases, because you really do not want to get caught and lose reputation.
The vibes of the whole game are amazing. It’s so “Outlaw”, it’s so Star WarsThe open plains are fine, but it’s the towns and villages where you really feel like you’ve walked through a piece of Star Wars to walk. The idea of the cantinas is so well captured from the films and the towns and villages feel very alive.
You’ll probably read or see a lot online about how the shooting feels. Does it play away like a Doom or a Call of Duty? No, definitely not. But how cool is it to be holed up in an Imperial hangar, with alarms blaring, waiting for the spaceship in front of you to open and stormtroopers are coming at you and you’re trying to shoot them down with your blaster? It’s also clear that Kay Vess is holding her blaster a little bit like Han Solo always does. It’s a great dream come true for gamers Star Wars-lovers and the game is made with so much love and passion for it Star Wars-universe created.
We still have to see how Star Wars Outlaws is going to develop further. How much variety will there be in the things you can do? Will you have done everything a hundred times by the time you get to the fifth planet and it will be really boring? We’ll see, but the first fifteen to twenty hours are promising.
