Star Wars Outlaws – PS5 Review 1

Star Wars Outlaws then. It comes to us from Swedish Ubisoft subsidiary Massive Entertainment, they of the Division games and more recently, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora; representing the first Star Wars game from Ubi since 2006’s Star Wars: Lethal Alliance for PSP and DS.

For nerds like us for who this sort of thing matters, Outlaws is set in the period between the end of The Empire Strikes Back and the start of The Return of the Jedi. While it features a few characters you’ll likely be familiar with, you’ve only been given so much rope to play with in terms of setting.

A couple of sequel locations are here, but the only planet from the classic trilogy that shows up is Luke Skywalker’s adoptive home Tatooine. There’s a couple of made up for the game locations, including your first location proper, the moon of Toshara and the first appearance of the previously book-only Akiva.

Yes, the Empire are all present and correct, but due to the setting on the Outer Rim, you don’t have Darth Vader coming in mopping up when you cause a ruckus. He’s probably too busy working out how he can make things up with his estranged lad. Families eh? What actually happens is you’ll end up drawing the ire of local heavies in the planetary system, be it squadrons of TIE fighters in space or lots of stormtrooper squads on land.

You play as Kay Vess, a scoundrel type in the Han Solo mould, only rather than coming from Corellia as he does, she’s from the gambling resort Canto Bight, though moulded in a similar manner by petty thievery. Her constant companion, rather than a giant walking carpet is a cute little agent of chaos called Nix, amusingly voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, more commonly known as the voice of the clones in Star Wars: The Bad Batch. Nix can crawl through conduits where Kay cannot and help you activate switches. They can also attack enemies and more usefully, distract them so you can inflict a takedown out of sight of their allies, hence avoiding setting off any alarms.

The crime syndicates as featured in Solo: A Star Wars Story are present in Crimson Dawn and the Pykes, as also featured in The Book of Boba Fett. The Hutts also show up along with yer man Bib Fortuna (de wanna wanga!) running around after his morbidly obese boss. There’s also the Ashiga Clan, but they’re more of a hivemind than a crime organisation, think matriarchal insectoids in encounter suits, a little like the Vorlons on Babylon 5. Talking of Solo, we’re still gutted that we got Paul Bettany instead of Michael K. Williams as the chief antagonist there.

At the outset your reputation with each of the factions is neutral, though due to events in the storyline, you’ll soon enough find yourself falling into and out of favour with them. Do missions for one faction, usually against the other, and you’ll gain kudos and eventually rewards, with the equivalent of exalted on World of Warcraft yielding some very useful armour sets. Let us just say that you’ll do well to align yourself with one syndicate in the early game rather than the others.

If your rep with a faction is less than optimal, it makes passing through their territory problematic at the very least. If you’re passing by, they will attack you. It’s that simple. Though it does bring our status in the latter stages of the game into stark contrast, as our excellent status with each means we’ll not get shot on sight, more welcomed with open arms.

Your progression through the game is fairly well gated, but you won’t really feel its confines unless you stray off the beaten path too much. We did, but that’s ‘cause we got caught up in all sorts of busywork. Make no mistake, this is as much a game you can get swamped with secondary objectives just as you would in any of the Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed games, it’s done a bit more deftly here. Rather than climbing up on to a tower to find a viewpoint and get overwhelmed by a swathe of new objectives, Outlaws cunningly dripfeeds new minor objectives by way of found objects and overheard conversations. It makes for a far more organic feel than just bombarding you with tons of objectives right away. We were reminded a little of underrated open world effort Biomutant that we reviewed a while back.

The faction specific quests are often reputation based, with some only being available depending on your current standing, these provide you with positive rep gains as well as credits to spend at the many vendors. This is one thing that Outlaws gets a bit wrong. There’s so many bloody vendors. Not to mention the fact that you have specific vendors for specific types of item.

We understand that most are loyal to factions, and hence hold off selling you their absolute best gear until you’ve reached a decent rep. But for there to be so many specific types is overkill. There are tailors. There’s shipwrights who provide you with upgrades for your starship and speeder parts specialists. Plus scavengers. There’s probably others, but our point is that it’s overkill to have so many different shop types. At least they’re shown on the map, but it can be a bit hard to keep track of.

You unlock advanced skills and abilities from carrying out expert quests, these give you sub-objectives such as fifteen headshots landed in conjunction with ten stealth kills for example. These will then let you unlock a new ability such as extra grenades or the ability to pick up heavy weapons from fallen enemies.

Traversal through most of the terrain is via a handy speeder, not unlike those used by scout troopers on Endor in ROTJ, though at the outset not particularly durable or manoeuvrable, thankfully you’re gently encouraged to upgrade it sooner rather than later. In the city hubs you’re obliged to walk, though the tight alleyways and ginnels you’ll explore would make even a bicycle seem like a stupid option.

You can get away with running around on foot a fair bit on Toshara, but once you get to the other planets, especially Tatooine, you’ll be glad of the speeder or the fast travel points you can use in areas where you’re in good standing. Running back and forth can get a bit tedious, especially in the early stages when it feels like you’re forever on a series of fetch quests for the same people out of the same couple of locations. It’s alleviated somewhat by missions that take in multiple planets, but these only become available once you’ve finished the first act proper.

Then you’ll get pulled into what becomes a heist movie of sorts, with your main objective being to get crew members on board to carry off one big job. It’s a bit hackneyed if we’re perfectly honest, and somehow feels entirely secondary to the fun of running around as you play one faction off against another, as well as taking on bandits and imperial entanglements.

Combat isn’t massively nuanced, but you’ll do a lot better if you take a stealthy approach and outflank enemies where possible. A frontal assault isn’t the best plan, especially when it comes to imperial bases. Most areas have an obvious side entrance or a handy ventilation shaft you can use to get round the back. Take out sentries as you go and you’ll avoid the worst, though sometimes try as you might you’ll end up in a proper firefight.

It’s at this point you’ll generally realise that, in the words of Han Solo, there’s no match for a good blaster. The blaster rifles and other items you pick up have a limited ammunition capacity, but your upgradeable blaster is the real star of the show. There’s three modes: standard blaster, ion that’s good against droids and shields and, finally the power mode AKA explosive shot. This last one doesn’t become available to you until after a little way into the storyline, partly to gate other upgrades in the world.

As you take fire from enemies, whether on your speeder or on foot, you’ll fill an adrenaline meter. This is also filled by nailing tricky manoeuvres on your speeder, but you’ll most likely have it happen during gunfights. At any rate, you’ll activate what’s penned Adrenaline Rush after a while.

Clicking both thumbsticks gives you a limited time to highlight several enemies and upon this time elapsing, you’ll nail a perfect shot taking each out in turn. We’re led to believe that it’s like a similar mechanic in Red Dead Redemption, but we confess, we didn’t play much beyond the snowy prologue before sacking it off. It’s a nice way to relieve pressure and tip the balance of firefights back in your favour. You can also use it get rid of any speeders that are trying to chase you down too.

There’s loot a plenty to pick up, much of it being vendor trash, but there’s also resources that you’ll do well to keep hold of, either as a raw material for upgrades or to trade with vendors on occasion. To get into some secure areas you’ll need to resort to two security hacking games, one being using a data spike to do a rudimentary rhythm test and the other being slicing aka hacking. That you just have to choose glyphs in the right order. Do it quickly enough and you’ll get a cash bonus, but that’s the only penalty you face for not doing it efficiently. If you’re arrested or subdued during a fight with the Empire, you’ll lose a chunk of your credits, but handily if you go to lightly guarded imperial outposts you can hack terminals to recoup your losses.

Similarly, if your wanted level is elevated, you can wipe that out too, meaning the until then annoyed troops suddenly forget where and who you are. The same applies with space combat, if you draw enough heat you’ll get TIE fighters converging on you. As long as you’re not at the maximum rating, you can find a beacon that will conveniently wipe your wanted level.

In a similar fashion to any number of games with a stealth element, such as Horizon: Zero Dawn, enemies won’t think something’s amiss when their colleagues suddenly decide to take a spontaneous nap next to a particular patch of grass, allowing you to stack up the bodies with amusing regularity. You’ll only raise the alarm if you’re in range of their attention radius and line of sight while knocking out their buddy.

The platforming brings to mind latter day Tomb Raider and the Uncharted games and didn’t really tax us, though it is designed to be accessible rather than an impediment to progress. The weapon upgrade modules you’ll feel compelled to collect are subject to some of the lengthier platform challenges, if not massively challenging. It doesn’t help that Outlaws feels it necessary to almost telegraph your path. Yes, we get it’s supposed to be accessible, but it does rather negate the challenge. It’s exacerbated by the fact that there’s often just the one path to your destination, so while this is an open world sandbox of sorts, it’s a carefully curated one.

You can engage in what starts out as some initially boring missions in the four planetary systems, but after a while you’ll start to get a feel for the flight model and the combat. It’s not got the depth of X-Wing or Star Wars Squadrons admittedly, but things improve once you switch on invert Y-axis and get stuck into seeing off pirates and annoying the Empire. Yes, the missions don’t really evolve beyond fetch quests here either, but they’re fun enough.

Massive; along with the myriad other global Ubisoft studios, chiefly in Bucharest; do a good job nailing the look and feel the Star Wars universe, but that only goes so far. The orchestral music is similar to that found in the non-mainline Star Wars films in that it isn’t composed by John Williams, but rather made to sound a bit like it. There are very occasional glimpses of the all too familiar leitmotif and themes, but they’re fleeting, even moreso than those in Solo. At least that wasn’t shy in terms of using familiar musical cues when the moment suited.

For example, when you first set eyes on Mos Eisley you could be treated with a familiar theme, or at the very least, hints of it. Or when the binary sunset as seen by Luke in the first film shows up, you could have had a little musical fillip to complement what is an iconic scene. For a game that is happy for obvious chunks of larger universe fanservice, it seems odd that Outlaws is reticent to resort to musical nods too.

For a game as big as this, it’s inevitable that some glitches will slip through, for example, NPCs will simply fail to load. Or you’ll find scripted sequences simply won’t progress due to your escorted character not reaching the point they were meant to, one that made us laugh was a character on a speeder that we had to accompany to our ship. Only upon avoiding a roadblock, they jumped but snagged on a bit of scenery. The only way we could move things along was to get on our speeder and bump them off the rock so they could continue on their way. Thankfully these sorts of glitches are infrequent, but no doubt some enterprising YouTuber has already compiled a clickbait video griping about it.

In conclusion, Star Wars Outlaws is the open world Star Wars game we didn’t realise we needed in our life. It does away with the schwartz and lightsaber frippery, instead resorting to a nice dive into the world of the criminal underbelly that lurks in the shadows. Yes, it does suffer a bit from the vendor overload and the fact that you can get caught up in doing anything but progressing the main storyline, but when a game stops us from playing our beloved Balatro for an extended period, you know it has to be doing something right. It’s also given us a good reason to watch Solo again.

Finally, as we were finishing off this review, the news reached us of James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, dying at 93. Rest in piece big man, rest in peace.