It is a period of unrest in the Star Wars franchise — and that makes it an interesting time for a game like Star Wars Outlaws to launch.
Disney’s fortunes with the property have seen better days. The newest streaming series, The Acolyte, launched to mixed reviews and was not renewed after its first season. At Walt Disney World, the Galactic Starcruiser hotel closed in 2023 after only 18 months in operation.
The fortunes of Star Wars games these days are similarly mixed. Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor were well reviewed. But several recent projects have been stalled with no release date in sight or have been cancelled altogether — including what would have been a first-person shooter based on the hit Mandalorian series.
Outlaws‘s focus on bounty hunters and gunslingers rather than jedi and sith makes it nearly unbelievable that development — led by Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment studio in Sweden, with key support from Toronto and Montreal — made it past the finish line.
In it, we meet Kay Vess (played by Latina Canadian actor Humberly González), down on her luck doing odd black-market jobs on Canto, home to the gambling megacity Canto Bight, seen in The Last Jedi. After a major job goes wrong, she’s given a so-called death mark, making her one of the most-hunted people in the galaxy.
It’s up to Kay — and the player — to navigate her rep among the leading criminal syndicates and build a team to pull off one last heist to ride off into hyperspace rich and free.
Kay, to her credit, is far more likeable than the scoundrel label that Ubisoft has pummelled gamers with in their marketing. You’ll get moments when Kay’s pushed to the limit and is ready to get her hands bloody, but she leans more on the charming side than the arrogant, sus Han Solo we meet at the outset of A New Hope.
González told CBC that, when we meet Kay, she’s only begun her “hero’s journey” toward becoming a legendary figure in the underworld.
“You do get to see that vulnerable side to her that comes out … because there’s still so much growing for her to do,” she said.
“She is going to have these experiences that are going to shape her, toughen her up, kind of give her a reality check. And where she needs to protect herself, how she comes off — she doesn’t always learn the easy way.”
Familiar 3rd-person gameplay
If you’ve played a third-person action game in the last decade and a half, chances are most of Outlaws will feel familiar. You’ll be sneaking around enemy compounds, taking out guards silently from behind and breaking out your blaster if or when you are spotted.
Most of the mechanics feel like they’ve been done better in other games. Kay often has to depend on stealth as she infiltrates criminal lounges or Imperial stations, but it’s not as finely tuned as in an Assassin’s Creed game, for example.
Often while playing, I accidentally alerted a guard when trying to attack them from behind when button prompts suggested I should be out of sight. Sometimes the camera angles hide patrolling enemies from your line of vision, putting you in immediate danger.
In between encounters, you’ll do some light platforming. Leaping across gaps with Kay’s grappling hook gives you a momentary rush. But climbing ledges and fences ad nauseum hasn’t been fun for years, so it’s puzzling that Outlaws relies on it so much.
WATCH | Star Wars Outlaws launch trailer:
The worst is ship combat, as Kay’s clunky freighter is constantly harassed by squads of faster bandit starfighters. Fending them off is an exercise in frustration when you’re likely just trying to get from one planet to another.
Where Outlaws‘s mechanics shine is in the interplay between the major criminal underworlds. By completing missions big and small, you’ll earn and lose favour between the gangs. If you’re on a particular clan’s good side, you can walk through most of their territory without trouble.
Get on their bad side, and the opposite happens, and in the worst-case scenario they’ll even send squads to hunt you anywhere in the game world.
It’s a great encapsulation of Kay’s need to work all angles — even though her scripted scenes rarely portray her as the cutthroat who would do this sort of thing.
Outlaws‘s best mechanic comes in the form of your muppet-like buddy Nix — which, as the Washington Post’s Gene Park first noted, seems lifted from Ubisoft’s hacking game series Watch Dogs.
You can send Nix out to do all sorts of things, from distracting enemy guards to setting off explosive canisters, and unlocking doors when it’s out of Kay’s reach. While Kay’s stealth options are limited, Nix opens up possibilities and gives you reason to be aware of your surroundings.
Kay can also hack computers with a “slicing” mini-game that plays more or less like Wordle with Imperial symbols, or unlock doors with a data spike that resembles R2-D2’s tool in the movies, making satisfying whirring and clicking noises along the way.
Immaculate Star Wars immersion
While the moment-to-moment action is often just OK, the presentation nails the feeling of being dropped into the Star Wars universe better than arguably any game has done before.
Every detail feels plucked from the set of a movie — like Tatooine’s twin suns bathing the desert and canyons in red evening light, as you walk through musty, low-ceilinged cantinas in Mos Eisley.
The Empire’s cold, gunmetal outposts make a sharp contrast to the wild landscapes around them. Blasters make exactly the sound effects you think they would, and important upgrade materials are kept in containers that look like painted-over beer coolers.
The mix of familiar and newer locations keeps it from feeling like a rehash of the franchise’s greatest hits — so that when you do find yourself skulking around Jabba the Hutt’s palace, for example, it feels novel rather than tired.
When these elements work together, you’ve got yourself a stew going of the best experiences Star Wars has to offer.
In one mission on Tatooine, Kay is forced to scavenge a Sarlacc tooth to trade with the local Jawas, who can help repair her ship.
The sand monster’s gaping maw is just as imposing as it was in Return of the Jedi. But that’s just the beginning for Kay, who dives into the monster’s corpse, spelunking through the cave system made out of its calcified flesh and bone.
Once she retrieves the tooth and evades a mob of gangsters who give chase on their speeder bikes, she brings her prize back to the Jawa scavenger.
The Jawa nods, takes the tooth — and then tosses it onto a pile of others just like it. The severed head of a C3PO-like protocol droid laying in a nearby tool box politely congratulates you.
It’s a wild swing between tones — subtle suspense, blood-pumping action and slapstick humour — and utterly faithful to the spirit of Star Wars.