Star Wars Outlaws

PS5 Review

Star Wars Outlaws is an action-adventure game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft.

The game follows Kay Vess as she escapes from a heist gone wrong and flees across the galaxy as she tries to finish the job and get enough money to clear her name. To achieve this goal the player journeys across four planets to assemble a team to finish the heist and along the way manage the four criminal factions, so that Kay remains on their good side and allows the player into their territory but keeping them in balance with each other.

Pro’s.

Nix.

The player’s main companion is Nix the Merqaal, who not only serves as Kay’s best friend but also has a lot of utility in and out of combat and is the main standout of the game.

In combat the player can command Nix to interact with enemies by distracting enemies to sneak past, blinding them for an instant kill melee attack or detonating thermal grenades when that skill is unlocked later in the game to kill a crowd of enemies, but also being able to fetch Heavy Weapons for the player to use to turn the tide of battle instantly.

Nix is also used outside of combat by pressing distant buttons to trigger doors or to expose nodes to charge with electricity to progress, but Nix can also be used for various side quests through digging for multiple treasures in the environment.

Nix can also have their abilities upgraded by eating various meals with them at each planet and each meal gives Nix a new ability, like being able to distract 2 guards at once or kick away grenades. So, the player is rewarded for spending time with Nix and exploring all the main cities.

Environmental design and art style.

Star Wars Outlaws does an amazing job of bringing the environments to life as the player journeys across 5 different planets and all are true to the films that they feature in.

For the old fans Tatooine is just like it was featured in a New Hope, with the players exploring Mos Eisley and all its memorable landmarks, from the infamous cantina to the crashed Dowager Queen colony ship in the middle of the city. All these small touches along with a packed space port full of dozens of aliens all going about their daily lives makes you feel part of the world. Then outside the main city the player can explore the vast Dune Sea and even visit Jabba’s Palace for more main story missions and has one of the best stealth missions that really helped flesh out Kay’s characters.

The other well-known planets Canto Bight and Kijimi, from the controversial Sequel Trilogy, are unfortunately the two planets that see the least amount of exploration. As Canto Bight is only used for the tutorial mission and one late game mission, while Kijimi is only one city, with no explorable open world making it feel very cramped and claustrophobic.

Akiva is from the Aftermath series of novels and is a jungle themed planet, with the Hutts against the Pikes, with an Imperial base in the top corner. Akiva is the most heavily dense planet with environmental and side quest locations as the planet is littered with explorable ruins with collectibles and also a great throwback area underground that the player explored later.

Toshara, to my knowledge, is a new location and moon to the Star Wars Universe with it predominantly being a moon shaped by harsh winds carving paths through mountains and valleys, allowing the player to do big jumps on their speeder bike to more so quickly traverse the map. Otherwise, the player is mostly doing side quests in the main city, with its large indoor market that serves as the tutorial planet for the player to get used to Kay and Nix’s abilities.

Alien art style.

All the alien species are recreated very accurately onscreen to their film or comic appearances and look great on the PS5, and they all look a lot better than the human characters that appear in the game.

So, seeing packed canteens and cities with the dozens of alien NPCs walking round really helps the player feel immersed in the world and just like being part of a Star Wars TV show.

Blaster upgrades.

During the course of the game Kay will be given new components to unlock new types of blaster bolts and also new firing modes.

Kay starts the game with the standard plasma bolt to deal usual damage and shoot enough times and it’ll kill the standard enemies, but will be ineffective against shields and droids, that’s where the new firing modes come into play.

As shortly into the story mode, when the player gets the option to go to all 4 planets, the player will get the option to use Ion bolts, this is used to disable shields and droids but cannot be used to kill enemies, only stun them. 

The Ion shot is also used during exploration, as it will power up certain nodes to unlock various electronic locks or terminals, so it has gameplay uses outside of combat where it is a lot more situational.

The final upgrade is the Power shot that will do more damage the longer the trigger is held for. This last upgrade has no major use outside of combat and felt very underutilised, as players are never forced to use it aside from breaking a couple of rocks that normally only pop up in side quests or gathering collectibles.

Con’s.

Predictable Story.

Anyone with a primary school level of intelligence can instantly tell where the story is going and the “big twist” that is obvious to everyone a mile away, and felt like the story was dragging out, making it a relief when they finally revealed the twist in the final 20 minutes of the game.

The majority of the game is also very repetitive as the player has to recruit 4 members for their heist crew and the format of recruiting them by arriving at the planet and engaging in some basic dogfighting, then going down to the surface seeing two criminal factions fighting over the planet and choosing to help one over the other more and then liberating the teammate before moving on to the next planet to repeat the same steps until the end of the game.

Lock picking.

Lock picking has to be the least fun mini game I encountered during my play through and features the player pressing the trigger button whenever the icon is highlighted.

But this is extremely frustrating for a player with Dyspraxia and definitely didn’t feel properly play tested, as several times the trigger press wouldn’t count even though it was on time.

So, after getting the achievement for picking 20 locks I used the accessibility option to turn off the mini game for the rest of my play through, and my enjoyment immediately went up after no longer having to suffer with such a tedious mini game that halts the pacing of normal gameplay.

Imperial wanted level.

In a straight copy and paste from Grand Theft Auto this game has a wanted level whenever the player commits an illegal act in front of Stormtroopers or Imperial Officers.

So, when the player kills enough Stormtroopers the wanted level gets maxed at level 6 and the Empire deploys Deathtroopers against the player, but due to their terrible A.I the player can just sneak up next to them and use the Taser for an instant kill.

The same goes for Space maps but the Empire deploys a small ship for the player to take out to wipe their wanted level, but that’s incredibly easy to do and poses no challenge.

The only challenge is walking into cities, since if you are spotted by a Stormtrooper the player is automatically arrested and can’t fire back, since the player can’t use their blaster in a city for some reason.

Limited weapons.

The player is limited to using Kay’s signature blaster pistol and while it eventually gets 3 types of damage it still has the same gameplay mechanic of unlimited ammo but overheats after a couple of shots.

Kay can’t pick up so called “Heavy Weapons” that most enemies drop in combat, or available in weapon racks, but these are all very limited ammo before Kay discards them.

The Heavy Weapon mechanic seems like the perfect workaround for Kay’s weak blaster that falls off damage wise in the endgame, but for some reason Kay drops these weapons regardless of how much ammo they have whenever the player climbs anything or interacts with anything in the open world.

Forced sympathy for crew.

The crux for the finale of the game hinges on the Kay’s and by proxy the players adoration for one party member in particular who turns evil.

The game sets it up like they are your closest friends, and you’ve spent several hours exploring their backstory and character, but the only time you interact with them is during the story mission when you free them from their respective planet and then via radio and cutscenes afterwards.

So the majority of the time you forget about them during usual gameplay as usually it is only ND-5 who appears via radio, but I didn’t feel any attachment to my heist members since the player doesn’t spend any genuine one on one time with each character and instead the rest of the game is just Kay and Nix.

Human art style.

Compared to the Alien designs in this game that are all great looking and true to the films and other depictions, the humans come off looking more like melted plastic when not in a cutscene.

This is especially noticeable in the various NPCs that the player interacts with for side quests across the adventure, with the human models looking more like they come from the PS3 and not the PS5.

An obvious example is comparing Outlaws to Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, which released years ago and have way better human character models by far, and you can tell that more love and care went into even the basic human NPCs than what Ubisoft have churned out.

Frame rate.

The frame rate for Star Wars Outlaws felt very inconsistent. whether playing on Performance (60fps), Quality (30fps) or Quality (40fps).

The game could not hold a stable frame rate even during normal traversal, when walking through cities or on the speeder bike exploring the mostly open worlds.

During combat the frame rate would vary wildly especially if Kay was using a heavy weapon instead of her blaster, as explosions would make the frame rate tank massively and induce bad stuttering.

I chose to play on Performance mode since even when the frame rate would decrease it was still 40fps+ during those moments.

Cover is a broken mechanic.

Cover is merely a dream by the game, since the player will get shot through it during combat constantly and instead it was easier to bob & weave shots rather than getting behind cover.

There was also a bug I encountered frequently in that when the player aims down sights of Kay’s blaster when behind cover the game will just teleport the player several meters away from cover in various directions.

If the player is aiming down sights while using the blaster the game will suck Kay into cover if the player is even remotely close to a chest high wall or pillar. This makes the player’s accuracy vary wildly on top of the already shaky aiming to begin with.

Stealth is broken.

Since 80% of the ground combat is focused on the stealth mechanic the player would think that the stealth gameplay was properly tested.

Instead, the player will be spotted from a distance every time when using the built in stealth places like steam vents and tall grass. As when I was hiding in the syndicate bases or Imperial compounds in the steam vents even if the base wasn’t on alert I would still be spotted when crouched.

Repetitive mission structure.

Main missions and side missions get repetitive very quickly since the majority of them involve Jess being told to infiltrate a base or pirate camp and either steal something or free someone.

There’s so little variation in these missions that it becomes difficult to keep track of them in the journal when multiple are accepted at once, and it sees the players crisscross across the open world repeatedly, that gets tiresome very quickly.

The only side mission I enjoyed and stands out is playing Kessal Sabacc, which is a variation of usual Sabacc from other games and in universe material and was also an easy way to farm credits by repeatedly going to the high roller tables across the 4 worlds.

Lip synching.

For the in-game cutscenes using the character models instead of CG cutscenes had some of the worst lip synching I have ever seen.

It happened the most to human characters because it was easier to hide with the alien species since they had different shaped mouths like the Rodians or masks on all together.

The voice actors all do a great job actually reading their lines, so it’s a real shame that the cutscenes let them down massively, when the cutscenes play like a foreign language dub of a film due to how badly the lip flaps match the dialogue and becomes very distracting when it’s badly out of time.

Stealth takedowns.

Kay’s stealth takedowns really need reworking as she is able to knock out heavily armoured enemies with a single light bonk to the head. That may be slightly more believable for all the enemies without helmets but becomes a parody when done on the Stormtroopers or Deathtroopers, as at least Ewok’s used bludgeoning weapons compared to an unarmoured hand.

This gets remedied later on with an unlockable Taser to use on Elite enemies but in my opinion should of been available at the start with the voltage being too weak for Elite enemies or just be non-electric so Kay still has access to a hard blunt baton at the start of the game along with her blaster to help the game feel more immersive.

Health sponge enemies.

While not an issue for a majority of the game but in the endgame portion of the story and side quests on each planet, enemies just have too much health to be enjoyable to fight.

As even with a fully upgraded blaster it really slows down the pace of the game to a grinding halt, especially when these enemies can 2 shot kill Kay, if the player hasn’t unlocked all the health upgrades in the skill tree from the experts.

Open world.

Three of the four main planets have open worlds to explore aside from their main city with only Kijimi being the city by itself.

The issue with these open worlds is that they are far too open and barren to enjoy exploring as there are rarely any useful fast travel points to expedite to tedious slog, which is either running across the planet or using the underwhelming speeder bike that the player starts the game with.

As most open worlds only have a few spotted locations dotted around for side quests, like imperial bases or pirate camps, but aside from that it will be mostly the player slowly travelling between side quest markers and occasionally returning to the main cities to turn them in.

No checklist for planet collectibles.

When trying to clean up every planet in the post-game I was surprised to find that the planets had no available checklist to keep track of all side quests and collectibles. This is especially since the game has a dozen Nix treasure paths you can explore to find for a bonus collectible, and lore that is required for the platinum trophy, but the game doesn’t tell the player if they have gotten all of them in a particular zone let alone planet.

This makes post-game clean up a lot more tedious as players will have to rely on guides rather than just regular gameplay through checking a simple menu through the map screen.

Limited save slots.

An issue I found was that the game limits the amount of manual saves you can have and instead of allowing the player to save over their final save the player has to manually delete a save slot if they want to manually save again instead of relying on the autosave mechanics.

So, with saving regularly after a main story mission or a long side quest, I found that I ran out of save slots before the large final mission of the game at the point of no return. Meaning that the game offers around 25 save slots due to the main story only having 21 main missions long.

It would be a more effective save system if the game just automatically deleted the players earliest save slot to make sure the player always has room to keep saving on their adventure and not slow down the pace of the game by manually cycling through every save slot and autosave to get to the bottom of the menu.

Auto save auto deletes.

A bizarre choice to make is that when players load an auto save it will automatically get deleted if the player loads another save file.

This happened to me. I hopped between save files after taking a break to remember where I was and ended up losing about an hour of progress on the planet of Akiva due to this.

It reminds me a lot of a similar issue in Dragons Dogma 2 with its autosave mechanic, but at least with Star Wars Outlaws the game has 2 auto saves at a time, so the player won’t lose a ton of progress if they haven’t manually saved in a while, unless they load both autosaves since then they will be deleted.

Cameos.

The game tries to bring back player interest by having the occasional cameo pop up in the main story or the side quests, with the most significant being Lando Calrissian who teaches the player how to cheat at Sabacc using magnetic dice to manipulate the result.

But the most egregious cameo has to be the two times that Darth Vader shows up for only a minute each. He pops up really only just for name recognition and doesn’t further the plot much than any other Imperial high-ranking officer or Moff could have done. It screams that they wanted to include him for brand recognition so people will be more likely to buy the game if he is featured, but he only appears at the end of the game and one of those times is just as a hologram before the big “Plot Twist” that I referenced earlier.

Conclusion.

An unfortunate big miss for both Star Wars and Ubisoft, with such a generic game that doesn’t innovate or leave a lasting impression on the player beyond a week.

The game is carried hard by its main character Kay Vess and her companion Nix the Merqaal, who will undoubtedly outlast the game and last longer as merchandise.

I would not recommend buying this game as it currently is with all its bugs and glitches, instead waiting for a sale in a couple of months and when the developers hopefully patch the game through several title updates.

Score: 5.0