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First ever open world Star Wars game

Indeed, Star Wars Outlaws the first open world Star Wars game has arrived. I’m not immediately go for open world games, but this is Star Wars we’re talking about. I really wanted to experience the vast worlds, alien characters, fly with spaceships and of course; feel the adventure. The game is developed by Massive Entertainment with very close collaboration with Lucasfilm Games.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Star Wars Outlaws happens between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Which are movies from 1980 and 1983. The story of the game is about Kay Vess who is a scoundrel, living by stealing. She does odd jobs and ends up working with galaxy’s crime syndicates and finally ends up to the most wanted list. She gets a death mark, meaning she can be killed on sight. All alone Kay is not; she has a little creature Nix with her. Nix can be command to do various tasks to help Kay on her missions.

Overall the plot was intriguing and very movie-like, but to be honest it was little bit hard to follow sometimes as there were so many characters and syndicates and so on. Everyone seemed to have their own agenda and Kay got double-crossed so many times that it made me super paranoid about everyone.

Gameplay, controls, audio and visuals

The gameplay in Star Wars Outlaws was a quintessential open world game. Kay has to do odd jobs and deals to survive in the rough life. There are the main quests, but also side quests. I played the game in an order of first going through the main story then I took my time and went back to do the side missions. Not all of them, but some of them. What helps going quickly between settlemens and cities was the speeder vehicle, and sometimes you’ll get attacked by enemies on your way through vast plains and roads. The other vehicle is a spaceship that’ll take you to other planets and there are also some space battles which were gripping, but short-lived experiences.

Kay got one gun with her, Blaster, and she can use other guns in certain areas only (after killed enemy had dropped it), but those guns cannot be carried out of the area. She also has other things like grenades and after upgrading the Blaster it gets more powerful. Some enemies could be killed easily, some needed much bigger impact. I found the gun to be somewhat inaccurate, like Stormtroopers in the movies. Also Nix can be used in battle to do certain little tasks like distract, attack and steal. Kay also does a lot of plaforming to get to places.

Star Wars Outlaws have a lots of sneaking sequences which I didn’t like that much. It would’ve been nice, but there always was one specific way it can be sneaked through and sometimes it took over 20 tries until I found it. So, it kinda breaks the flow of the gameplay, also the places were somewhat disorienting with their layouts.

The game also have a big reputation system that is crucial to the gameplay, it depends how easily you can go though some places (Syndicate areas) because if your reputation is bad, the enemies will attack you. By taking certain jobs your reputation grows with said Syndicates, but mostly you have to choose between which Syndicate you’re working and which one betray. I tried to please everyone to make my gameplay more easy, but it felt like it was impossible to do so. So, choose your poison carefully.

Difficulty settings are very versatile in Star Wars Outlaws. There are four main difficulty settings: Explorer, Adventurer, Outlaw and Scoundrel. But then you can also individually set things like “enemy difficulty”, “player health”, “wanted difficulty” all the way to the puzzles and so on.

Talking about settings, there are also big selection of accessibility features, which I didn’t use, but for audio and visual impaired players those can help the gameplay.

There was only two kinds of puzzles in the game. One is to open doors and locked boxes with using a tool, which was like a rhythm based puzzle. The other one was pattern-based (which can be changed to numbers to ease it up). I found the puzzles to be OK, nothing overly fancy.

With all the sneaking, stealing, dealing and fighting, there are some down time and you can use it to gamble, trade, change your outfit, upgrade your gear and even the speeder… so there are a ton to do beside the main game.

The sound design was very good. I can compare the music to the movies and even the voice acting was on point. Not everyone talked English, so there are some alien languages there, but with subtitles on you can understand it.

Visually the game looks amazing. All from the character models to the environment were beautiful and nearly looked like a movie. There are three graphical settings: Quality (30fps), Favour Quality (40fps) and Performance (60fps). I tried all three, but I settled with Performance, as it gives the most fluid experience with 60fps. I did see some difference with the graphics, of course, the game looks the best with Quality mode. There are also two settings for the aspect ratio, which was 21:9 (if you don’t have 21:9 monitor there are black bars) and the other is full screen. I played the game with 21:9 aspect ratio, as it gave the most movie-esque feeling.

May the Force be with you

Star Wars Outlaws was rather enjoyable experience overall, but it does stumble on some aspects such as the sneaking sequences and also the game quickly becomes kinda repetitive. The game is huge, don’t get me wrong, and there is so much to do and countless of side missions and leisure things. Technically the game ran well, but it had little basic open world game issues, which wasn’t a big deal, and some bad game-design issues here and there. I played this through in about 15 hours.

I do recommend Star Wars Outlaws, not just for the fans, but anyone who enjoys adventure games.

Star Wars Outlaws is available on PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S and Windows.

(Review copy kindly provided by the publisher)

SCORE:

4/5

“Everyone seemed to have their own agenda and Kay got double-crossed so many times that it made me super paranoid about everyone”

RELEASE DATE: August 30, 2024
GENRE: Adventure
DEVELOPER: Massive Entertainment
PUBLISHER: Ubisoft
PLATFORMS: PS5 (reviewed)
Xbox Series X|S
Windows

 

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