Star Wars Outlaws Review: a tale of thieves that's full of borrowed mechanics

Sabacc cards on the table first, right: Star Wars Outlaws won’t win many Game of the Year awards. There are a lot of reasons for this, not least because there have been other major releases this year which have been bolder, better marketed, or which have advanced the medium in some exciting way. Other major releases where the enemy AI isn't comically thick. Add to that the general drag factor of the Ubisoft Open World Malaise we all have to varying degrees, and its gong prospects seem about as convincing as Anakin and Padme’s chemistry. But you absolutely shouldn’t care about that, because it slaps.

Mechanically, there’s honestly nothing in Outlaws which you haven’t seen before. It’s a big greatest hits package of Open World Things (with “climbing towers to unfog the map” mercifully left off the track listing, like Shiny Happy People but for sadists). It’ll evoke everything from Assassin’s Creed to Red Dead Redemption with its heady mix of urban wheeler-dealing, open world joyriding, tense stealth, and close-quarters combat. It’s got Tomb Raider style dangly climbing and a bewildering array of upgrades to unlock for your vehicles and equipment, all of which require some kind of task to be completed before they become available – most often they’re skill challenges, but many of them are proper sidequests, forays into enemy bases to steal unique parts or investigations as to the whereabouts of Skill Tree Expert No. 8. That sort of thing.

There’s a lot to get on with. As one would expect. And those of us who prefer sneaking around to a straight fight are well catered for, as it’s possible to complete almost any objective without raising any alarms. Most of the time you can go in blasting as well, if you like. The game will rarely penalise you for being loud, and most Situations are possible to get out of with a bit of quick thinking. Most actions will, though, have some kind of effect on the reputation system, particularly when you’re doing contract work, which is a constant procedurally-generated job system that you’ll earn most of your cash from, and is also the means via which you will ingratiate yourself to the worst people on whichever planet you’re on.

There are four major crime syndicates whose good graces you must juggle: Hutts (Sicilian Mafia but with Pablo Escobar menagerie), Pykes (guys who sell pirate DVDs in pubs), Ashiga Clan (Yakuza but from Morrowind), and Crimson Dawn (BRIT School goths). Obviously, their goals are generally in conflict. Obviously, a job you do for one might annoy another. You’ll find yourself juggling these contracts in order to maintain a good rep with everyone, because it just makes good business sense to be everyone’s friend. And here’s one of the places where suspension of disbelief is stretched to breaking point: it’s very possible, through grunt work, to find yourself in a situation where you’ve just got caught burgling a syndicate hideout, murdered half their staff in the escape, undermined their operations against a rival, only to have them angrily downgrade your reputation to “Good” from “Excellent”.

An explanation for this is given as an aside in dialogue – something about how if criminals bore grudges, none of the work of organised crime would ever get done. And it’s funny enough that it works. It’s genuinely quite a funny game, actually – the dialogue often skews deadpan. There’s a knowing sarcasm in a lot of Kay’s interactions with NPCs, but not in a quippy Joss Whedon sort of way. Kay’s relationship with her companion Nix, a sort of dog monkey thing whom she has taught the art of petty thievery, is a real highlight. Nix is endearingly silly and loyal, but also highly capable as a proxy for the sort of player-aids that Ubisoft fill their other games with. The remote manipulation of doors and switches one might do in Watch_Dogs, for example – Nix can be sent on little errands of opportunity. He also has a form of detective vision that he telepathically shares with Kay, giving her the power of seeing guys through walls as coloured blobs, suspiciously like how the assassins in Assassin’s Creed can.

Base infiltration, a tried and tested Ubisoft staple, arrives in Outlaws mostly intact from the likes of yer Far Crys and yer Assassin’s Creed Odysseys. Sneak around, meticulously knock out all the guards, steal the treasure (or hack the terminal for data to sell), scarper. You can even set traps in alarm boxes to protect you from reinforcements arriving.

Look, you know what this game is. You don’t really need me to describe every single feature that it cribs from elsewhere, and you can pretty much decide whether or not it’s for you by your own pre-existing attitude to Ubisoft Open World Games.

The crucial point is that it’s extraordinarily well executed. Massive Entertainment clearly benefits from all those years of iteration across the various Open World Action Adventure series that its parent company is responsible for, and the result is an extremely refined game that is just a joyous thing to mess around in. The box of tricks it hands you for stealth, for example, is perfectly balanced in such a way that there is always genuine challenge if you want to stay undetected, and so successfully traversing a level without being clocked is positively euphoric. Similarly, there’s little more satisfying than distracting a guard away from his patrol buddy and leathering him behind a cargo crate.

Slicing an important data terminal in just about the exact time window you need to before the roaming enforcers spot you. Yes, lock and terminal minigames happen in real time with the rest of the world. You can even look around with a quick flick of the thumbstick, and you absolutely can get caught and escorted off the base.

Everything just feels so good. The lockpicking minigame that’s essentially one-bit Guitar Hero? Exquisite, miles better than fudding around with a bobby pin. Getting caught sneaking, clicking the right stick to initiate “talk yourself out of trouble” mode, and blasting them with the stun setting before they’ve quite figured out what to do with you? Bellissimo. That’s Star Wars, baby.

Open world traversal is also, in a word, joyous. Your speeder bike, which you start upgrading very early on, very quickly becomes the fastest one on whichever planet you happen to be. Skidding around these vast Star Warsy landscapes on a frictionless cushion of nothing, taking out any chasing enemies with your bullet time assault mode from Red Dead Redemption. Space travel, which is very Space Game Lite and occurs in small pockets of explorable space above the smattering of planetary regions you’re able to visit, is deftly executed with unapologetic simplicity.

Essentially, space combat controls like a first person shooter. There is no micromanagement of ship systems to worry about a la Elite Dangerous, or indeed Star Wars: Squadrons. It boils those things down to their essentials, and makes them appeal directly to your 10 year-old self. Which is exactly what Star Wars should always be doing wherever possible.

And that, ultimately, is how Outlaws triumphs. It doesn’t just understand Star Wars in terms of its lore and trivia, it understands that Star Wars at its best makes you feel young. Young enough to look out at a horizon and relish at the prospect of what you might find beyond it. Young enough to think danger is exciting. Young enough to not be burdened with knowing how Newtonian motion works.

It’s not the best game I’ve played this year, but it’s certainly the best I’ve felt playing one in a long time. It’s got a just-one-more-mission moreishness that made it very difficult to file this copy on time and is such a liability for sleeping habits that it should come with a health warning.

It’s quite the looker too. Video game Star Wars has never been quite so well realised as this. It’s simultaneously beautiful and ugly: the verdant plains of Toshara, an Earth-like moon, all sun-kissed and edge lit with raytraced sublimity but visible from a dense urban megastructure full of brushed gunmetal walls covered in flaking paint, grime, and ick. The vastness of Tatooine, where a cruel desert stretches endlessly into the horizon while the moisture farmers stay cool in their terracotta Hobbit homes.

Everything feels suitably lived in, authentic and true to the original film in a way many of Star Wars’ recent TV shows simply don’t get right. You might expect video game graphics to look too clean, but much labour and careful artistry has gone into grubbing it all up. Dust patches on your ship’s hull have visible finger pulls in them, presumably from some bored space mechanic. Every surface, device, and control panel feels clunk-click tactile befitting the aesthetic of a world designed in the latter 1970s. CRT screens hum, flicker and whine while in use with the kind of realism that betrays many hours spent tweaking shaders until they were Just So.

Ubisoft’s USP is location. Sense of place. Beautiful recreations and restorations of ancient cities, buildings, temples, vibes. The Star Wars galaxy absolutely evokes the same sense of wonder, and has been recreated with just as much love and care here. Mos Eisley is no less real in the public consciousness than Rome in the time of the Caesars. At once familiar, but widely open to interpretation. And probably just as dangerous.

Star Wars Outlaws won’t win any GOTY awards. But it’ll definitely win a lot of hearts.