Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Scoundrel

A review of Star Wars Outlaws, sexy droids, and how much 'good' Star Wars stuff there is being made these days.

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”

- Han Solo, “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”-

More people should play Star Wars Outlaws, I think.

I thoroughly enjoyed it!

A lot of folks missed out on playing it amidst the late fall release calendar of video games that hit this past year, and I think that’s a shame. While it’s by no means like ‘revolutionary’ or even at all trailblazing in its assemblage of design, I think it is a very good, well ‘put-together’ game.

I think the mark of a good game is: are the parts of it ‘good’ by themselves, regardless of the whole, and how are those parts when they are put together, when it comes to a congruous experience you play?

In this case, I do think that the segments of the game are well made, and I think the stitching together of said parts is more seamless than other Ubisoft fare I have played recently.

Ubisoft has a penchant for ‘kitchen-sink’ design.

Everything they make on a grand scale in their bigger games can be seen as an attempt at workshopping new ideas for other products. Kind of like a gestation pod or incubation station for new ideas.

Like, for instance, they will implement new systems in their open-world Assassin’s Creed games to test out their functionality, even if it doesn’t always work when you throw it in just any game. The new Assassin’s Creed game, AC Shadows does this same thing with the ‘dark/light meter’ on the heads-up display, a callback to their classic series of stealth games, “Splinter Cell”, where your visibility to enemies or cameras in a level is governed by a meter of how much you can be seen by everyone.

With rumors of another Splinter Cell being worked on in the bowels of Ubisoft as of the time of this writing, it’s interesting at the very least to see a mechanic normally used for that other series of stealth games be re-implemented and ‘re-jiggered’ for a new game while the original series is on the back burner.

It’s this example, along with many other instances in Ubisoft games, where they work on specific mechanics in their other games and share them with various titles being worked on internally.

Star Wars Outlaws uses this philosophy while also tinkering with different ‘social’ mechanics amongst quest givers and NPCS to bring about a mix of both the familiar and the new.

Faction and reputation systems are not a new concept in games.

Especially in Ubisoft games. “Far Cry 4”, another open-world Ubisoft game in the long-running “Far Cry” series of first-person open-world shooters, has you making story decisions between two story-critical NPCs, and leads you down somewhat different paths of narrative in the campaign, before ultimately circling back for a normal ‘golden path ending.

(There is also a secret hidden ending you can get at the very beginning of Far Cry 4 that is very funny. It’s a humorous thing when games add these sorts of joke endings to long games for the heck of it.)

So, Ubisoft is no stranger to these systems and ideas of social reputation being added to their games. The difference here is that it’s a bit more core to the gameplay loop than a gimmicky alternate version of a normal campaign.

A big addition to Star Wars Outlaws’ gameplay is the inclusion of “Reputation”.

You are a Bounty Hunter, after all. Your loyalty is to the almighty ‘credit’, and you’ll be damned if anyone can be quick enough to double-cross you before you scoop up a score.

This system plays out specifically with the various crime syndicates that play a role in the goings-on of the story.

There are (in no particular order) the following crime syndicates you will be taking jobs for while you make your bones in The Outer Rim.

The Hutt Cartel, helmed by the notorious gangster, Jabba the Hutt, the iconic slug-like alien villain from the film series; The Pyke Syndicate, a race of fish-like humanoids relatively new to the Star Wars franchise, (with most of their recent appearances coming from the Disney+ slate of shows); Crimson Dawn, a dangerous underground crime ring run by Qi’ra, (as seen in the underrated spinoff film “Solo: A Star Wars Story”); The Ashiga Clan, a group of destabalized criminals running operations out of Kijimi, (last seen in the afore-mentioned “Rise of Skywalker”); and finally the new players in the galaxy and the main antagonists of the game Zerek Besh, led by the slimy and gutless Sliro Barsha, a rich financier from Corellia who is the main villain of Outlaws.

Besides Zerek Besh, you will be taking many odd jobs from these factions, building up your ‘cred’ as you do so. The more jobs you run, the more respected you will be with a given faction. There isn’t a ton of nuance to this system besides screwing over a faction for another at the cost of loyalty with them.

You are sometimes given a choice to choose something that will either raise or lower your reputation with a syndicate, but that’s about it. While it isn’t the deepest system in the world, it’s fun to have a sort of rapport with virtual social hierarchies, even if it can be gamefied to earn back that hard-fought reputation.

If you lose standing with a faction, it’s only a matter of running more quests with the faction affected, so you can raise that level for different rewards, displayed in a sort of tiered, ‘battle-pass’ sort of way. Most of the rewards here are clothes and item appearance options for your main character, Kay Vess, so I didn’t feel quite led to engage with it all.

It’s a novel system that I would like to see expounded upon in future Ubisoft games. It fits very well here with the IP and the story. The functionality of the reputation feature works well, while not being the most innovative thing about the game. It’s the core of the mission loop that the entire game is centered around, so its inclusion is very much welcome to the normal mission structure of: “walk up to a terminal/npc/thing, interact with thing, and be on your way”. Gussying up the presentation here goes a long way to making this system work, in my opinion.

While the rep system is the impetus for your excursions throughout the galaxy, it’s the open world hubs that allow you to engage with the setting, and worlds of Star Wars, and what it means to carve your little niche in the galaxy.

You play as Kay Vess, a bounty hunter on the run, who, with her sidekick, pet merqaal companion Nix, is on the run from the crime syndicate Zerek Besh, after a heist gone wrong.

You know the drill by now, with these stories.

As the story progresses, you are getting together a team to go crack open Sliro’s vault on Canto Bight (since it went so well the first time), and that goal takes you to every corner of the galaxy to accomplish that. You see lots of beautiful locales, like lush forests, frigid mountains, and rolling prairies, as you take in the sights of the places you visit.

That’s one thing that Ubisoft has always done very well with their games, I will say.

The art design and attention to detail of all the worlds and the towns that dot the landscape are fantastic. In the Assassin’s Creed series, that is the one constant, even if the games that take place in these settings aren’t always the best.

The worlds they create are well-realized and busy with detail, and I think Outlaws might be as expertly crafted a game on the visual front as I have seen from Ubisoft.

You can tell that it was a labor of love to get all the small details just right.

The denizens that populate the small towns, markets, and cantinas of Outlaws also have a lot of attention paid to them. If they make a Star Wars film, chances are they have a cantina scene in it. It’s an iconic piece of Star Wars filmmaking that carries on to now.

Getting that feeling of walking into a bar while an alien band plays ‘jizz’ (you heard me) on a strange set of instruments is captured perfectly in Outlaws. There is always a cantina or bar on every planet, and walking into one and just witnessing the ‘club lifestyle’ of Star Wars never grew old on me.

They struck a perfect tone with these scenes and captured that feeling of walking into a strange place, filled with odd people, doing normal things. It’s maybe my favorite part of the game.

Cantinas are the social centers, the places you visit in Star Wars Outlaws. Quest givers, rumor mills, racing bets, and even Sabaac matches can be found in places like these. It all adds to the impeccable flavor of the game, and it’s really what makes it so Star Wars. It is the best encapsulation of what it looks like to be a normal person with a life in a fantastical, off-kilter place, in Star Wars.

I loved the little touches that Ubisoft included in the cantinas, especially. It’s a visual feast for those who love the series, and even for those who don’t. They knocked this aspect of the game out of the park.

One aspect of the game Ubisoft does not knock out of the park, however, has to be the stealth portion of the combat.

The issues I have with Outlaws primarily lie with the stealth you have to partake in at some points in the story.

In the open world bits of the game, you can attack a situation however you would like, either by going loud and blasting your problems away, or by becoming a phantom menace (see what I did there) by creeping up on unsuspecting baddies and murdering them in cold blood.

As a rule, you never should be blasting your way through the levels in Outlaws, because Kay Vess can go down very easily if put under too much duress. She seems specifically tuned for being a bit weak in terms of her health when it comes to combat.

One to three hits is all it takes for her to go down, and bacta tanks you consume as health potions don’t seem to alleviate the damage you take, unless you carry the maximum amount of them at any time.

Because of this fact, you rely more on ‘stealthing’ your way across a level rather than shooting up fools with your trusty blaster.

Since you engage in stealth more often, the mechanics should be at least serviceable to get the job done. I hate to say that not only is the stealth not good or well implemented, but it is straight up annoying to sneak around when there are so many factors against you doing so effectively.

It just feels slightly broken, still. It’s never a matter of whether you get seen– it’s when. It happens constantly, even when you are hidden behind cover and there is no way you could’ve been seen. Far worse is the enemy AI, which is dumb as rocks. Sometimes they have eagle eyes, and sometimes they see you dead in the face and don’t even react to you being directly in front of them.

The whole exercise feels inconsistent at best, and painfully bad at worst. Not to mention the mission-critical junctures where you are required as a mission constraint not to get caught. Which, if you are (inevitably caught), it will send you back to your nearest checkpoint before it happened.

It’s tedious, underdeveloped, and all around shoddily assembled, which is ironic given how I feel about the game as a whole.

I think it’s the attention to detail in the game that gives it its charm. So, to have such an integral gameplay system like stealth be so poorly implemented while also being a mandatory part of the game to engage with makes the final result more of a mixed bag on the gameplay front than I would like.

So when stealth breaks down, you resort to shooting your way out. As I said before, it’s not the most ideal thing to do given Kay Vess’ physical fortitude, but it is very fun combat to play once shit hits the fan.

You have your handy dandy Star Wars blaster at your side, and by golly, do you use it. Blasting crooks and stormtroopers alike has never been more fun than it is here.

The blaster has a main semi-auto rate of fire that you get as soon as the game puts the gun into your hand. But as you continue, more firing modes become available through upgrades that add to your kit’s functionality.

You can outfit a full auto mode (my favorite of the bunch), a heavy shot, an explosive round mag, and you can even switch the firing mode to stun shots or even energy rounds that can incapacitate droid fodder in more diverse firefights.

All these functions are used for puzzles throughout the adventure, too, and I appreciated how much design and intricacy went into how the blaster interacts with the worlds you visit. It feels like an extension of yourself by the end.

There isn’t ammo per se, but there is a cooldown meter that pops up once you shoot for too long. It’s like the Mass Effect games with their guns, where there isn’t ammo, but they have heat sink cartridges that pop out to cool the weapon down.

It’s a very similar concept, here.

Kay Vess gets into all sorts of trouble during the story proceedings, and she has to shoot her way out of many, many situations. It was always thrilling to see what set-pieces she would run and gun through to make it to the other side of the problems she constantly faced.

You can’t have a heist without a crew, and you spend the majority of the narrative gathering up a motley crew of miscreants and malcontents from across the galaxy.

The first companion you get of course, is Nix, your little pet merqaal, and he is by far the most useful tool in your proverbial locker.

Kay can command him to distract guards, nick creds off of unsuspecting goons, blow breakers for distraction, and much more. Nix is a versatile little fella who just likes to be a people pleaser. He is more than capable of attacking a hapless lone stormtrooper while you sneak up for a finishing strike to the dome, and I found this camaraderie between him and Kay Vess very enjoyable.

It’s a tale full a swashbuckling escapades and you have your trusty first mate Nix to help swing the odds in your favor.

He doesn’t have much of a personality outside of being cute, I guess, but that’s more than enough for me, given that he is so useful in the gameplay.

When events happen in the story that take him away from Vess, you do feel his absence in the mechanics, and I appreciated Nix even more when I was able to rescue him from the ne’er-do-wells that nabbed him.

The last bit of mechanical goings on I want to remark upon is how fucking good your vehicle is in this game.

Your speeder, the Trailblazer, is at your disposal whenever you wanna do some old-fashioned open-world checklist-y stuff that dot the holo-map of Outlaws.

It gets you around in style, controls beautifully, and has a sick jump you can get during the story. As you glide across the various stunning landscapes of Outlaws, there are many rocky ramps, dune drifts, and expanses of water, and the Trailblazer can handle all the terrain you can throw its way.

The latter of those previously mentioned, the water traversal, is SO crisp. I just love how it feels to skim the water with your speeder. It looks and sounds so, so good. I was damn near looking for puddles in the environment to skim through because it felt so good to do.

That’s one of my favorite things about Outlaws, for sure.

I do wish there was a function to shoot while on your speeder though. Sort of like the drive-by shooting mechanic from the “Grand Theft Auto” series. There is a ‘mark and execute’ function when you can hit both sticks in (on console) and tag baddies, though, which almost makes up for it.

That is yet another mechanic taken from their other games, as well, in “Splinter Cell: Conviction”, there is also a mechanic to tag and execute enemies in quick succession.

It’s a novel thing to include forward in their new games when it had been implemented in past titles. It’s like Ubisoft’s gameplay design and DNA are being shared back and forth between its history, and I think that’s pretty cool.

The story is very well-told and acted, with Kay Vess being the highlight of the whole tale.

Humberly Gonzalez does a stellar job making the character unique and different from similar archetypes in the series, and I grew to appreciate the distinct personality she had. She is constantly on the run and always having to figure her way out of problems. She is a character full of verbs, who acts before she thinks, for good and bad. Kay is a very interesting, well-written character with a troubled past, but that stereotypical backstory doesn’t make her feel generic at all, with Gonzalez lending her so much originality and life.

It’s really strength of the property and the material that does the majority of the heavy lifting here, but Kay Vess only makes those two ingredients better with her inclusion. She is a really great protagonist that is elevated by a fantastic acting performance, by Gonzalez.

I’d like to see Kay is more Star Wars stuff.

Perhaps a sequel, or a show on Disney+? I would watch a lot more of her story given that she is such an interesting, well-established, and well-written character.

The last character I want to highlight is the assassin droid ND5, and he was by far my favorite party member in the game.

He’s just so damn cool. He’s got a sick-ass trench coat. Enough said.

No, but seriously, he plays a larger part in the story than I thought he would. Once the main antagonist threat has been taken care of, ND5 takes center stage at the very end in a way I didn’t expect.

I think he is one of the best Star Wars guys I have seen in any part of the franchise. Just a cool ass dude making his way in the galaxy.

ND5 is quick-witted, has an amazing voice, is dangerously capable when needed, and has a sick-ass trench coat. AGAIN, THE ROBOT MAN HAS A COOL COAT. Sign me the hell up!

Some folks have asked, and yes: droids can be sexy.

ND5 is a sex symbol, and I don’t care who knows it. Who needs a Twi’Lek stripper when you have a bad motherfuckin’ droid with a cool outfit and a restraining bolt?

His story is one of the best parts of Outlaws’ main narrative, and once he was part of my team, it felt like we had a complete crew.

I want there to be a sequel to this game, because I need more ND5 in my life. Hell, let me play as him next!

Say what you will about Star Wars, because there has been a lot of it lately– but I think there is more ‘Good’ Star Wars than there is ‘Bad’ Star Wars. What do I mean by this?

I think at the very least, the quality of Star Wars has been at a consistent level of at least ‘good’ recently, with the extreme exception being “Rise of Skywalker” (woof), which is by all measures agreed upon as being a hilariously bad movie, if not misguided at the very least.

From the recent canon books I have read, I can tell they’re serviceable to good, while the shows have varied in quality for years.

“The Mandalorian” show started well but has sorta petered out in its most recent season. I’m hoping that the movie spinoff “The Mandalorian and Grogu” will end that series satisfyingly and completely. (It’ll probably be good.)

Andor has been a complete revelation, with Tony Gilroy (famed writer/director of the legal thriller classic, “Michael Clayton”) masterfully writing and directing some of the very best Star Wars epics of the last quarter century. The trials and tribulations of Cassian Andor, who first appeared in the spinoff flick “Rogue One”, is a brilliant and fantastically crafted look into what it looks like to be under the thumb of the Empire, at its peak powers. It’s insane how fucking good that show is.

The Star Wars video games in recent years have been stellar. After the license exclusivity wasn’t renewed with Electronic Arts after the “Star Wars Battlefront” reboots, and “Star Wars Squadrons” from EA Motive, the property rights were divvied up more generously with different developers, to cultivate new and exciting experiences from other places.

Respawn, the makers of the “Titanfall”, and “Apex Legends” games, took the property and made a pair of brilliant 3rd-person action games in the vein of “Dark Souls”, and “Uncharted”, called “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order”, and “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor”. So far, there have been two of those, and they have been excellent. (The first one in particular is a favorite of mine.)

Ubisoft also struck a deal to have their team, Ubisoft Massive, developers of the popular 3rd-person narrative multiplayer shooter, “The Division”, make this game, Star Wars Outlaws.

They knocked about 80 percent of the game out of the park in my opinion. I liked this game.

Star Wars has been good for a long time is my point, and most of the stuff we are getting now has been better than ever, (except don’t watch “Obi-Wan”... It’s pretty bad).

I guess this is how I feel: Star Wars is like pizza, for me. It’s hard to fuck it up.

If the pizza is bad, then oh well. Pizza is pizza. I like pizza.

This may be an unpopular take for a Star Wars fan, but I just like seeing different stories take place in my favorite universe.

Star Wars Outlaws is just one of the many stories I have experienced in the Star Wars universe, but I think it’s well worth a playthrough.

Again, it’s a shame it got missed last year because if I had finished it last fall, it would most definitely be in the top 10 of my favorite things of 2024.

It’s solid in its mechanics (mostly), competent in its design, and enthralling in its details.

The setting is beautifully rendered and remarkably assembled. The music is that good ol’ Star Wars sound you love and appreciate, and the menus and logos hearken back to a simpler time with a more analog look and feel to it.

I think, if you see it on sale at your retailer or storefront of choice, just buy it. You will be happy you did so!

I recommend this game, and if you can get past the bad stealth and quirky technical hiccups that crop up from time to time, you will have more than a good time with it.

I appreciate your time, “May the Force be with You”, and keep gaming!