Have you ever seen a project destroyed simply because it existed? Not because of its shortcomings, not because it was technically bad or toothless in itself – but simply because it was born at all? After completing Star Wars Outlaws, it seems that this is exactly what happened to the project. And it’s sad, because the players who screamed that Ubisoft was boring with its conveyor belt trampled one of the best games in the Star Wars universe and the publisher’s freshest game in many years. Why is this so? We will tell you in detail in this review.
Apparently, it’s my destiny to defend good projects that have fallen into disfavor due to the blind hatred that opinion leaders have foisted on players online. Last year, I tried to tell you why Starfield is a good game on the pages of the IXBT Games website , and today the same fate awaits another space saga.
Because “gamers” online don’t criticize the game itself, which they haven’t even played and will never play – they criticize everything that happens around it. They don’t like Ubisoft, they don’t like Disney’s “Star Wars” – I can understand them. But for some reason, the problems of the company and the franchise are attributed to a product that is a separate unit of art in the media space. And what’s even sadder is that this is the most faithful game to George Lucas’s ideas in the last… I can’t even count how many years.
Return to childhood
Do you remember the original Star Wars trilogy? With its naivety, but at the same time multifaceted narrative, characters, ideas and events – after all, that same “far, far away galaxy” captured billions of minds all over the Earth precisely at the time of the release of the fourth, fifth and sixth episodes. It was a children’s fairy tale that could captivate adults, because it touched upon the criminal world of syndicates and the fight against the tyranny of evil in every possible way.
Star Wars Outlaws is a follower of these ideas. Ideologically, it is true and in every way cites the original episodes of “Star Wars”, relies on their lore, approach to narration and character types. At the same time, Massive Entertainment was not afraid to “play the boss” a little – in the good sense of the word.
Here, the rebels are the same criminal syndicate as the others, and the heroine openly says this to the Resistance representatives’ faces many times during the game. The Empire is essentially a state apparatus that maintains peace and order in the Galaxy by any means possible. And the real inhabitants of the criminal world are real bastards, creatures, and are ready to betray both close comrades and Kay Vess. If the price is high enough for them to defect.
And yet, it is a naive tale about a dreamer who wants to live freely and will do anything to hit the biggest score in her life. Kay is an unsuccessful thief who was abandoned by her mother as a child. She keeps trying to find a case from which she can “raise some dough so that things will change,” but in the end she only finds problems – a “death mark” in all corners of the galaxy and a reward of 400,000 credits for her head.
And all because the rebels, damn them, set up Kay Vess in front of Sliro, the head of the Zerek Bash syndicate, whose vault Vess wanted to clean out hand in hand with the Resistance. True, she did not know who Sliro was, nor that her accomplices were rebels, and they came, in fact, not to rob the hereditary “foolish nobleman”, but to pull their agent out of captivity.
If it weren’t for Nyx, the eighth wonder of planet Earth and simply the best boy in video games, Kay Vess would still be lying dead in the Sliro vault, where the rebels abandoned her. The wise, strong and brave little animal has been helping Kay all her life and will have to save his owner more than once. Spoiler: she will also have to go to the aid of a friend, where we are shown how warm and kindred the relationship between the girl and the little animal is.
Will she be helped to escape from the “mark of death” by Ceylan, a shady bandit who offers a deal: to assemble a team of notorious thugs of the galaxy to break into the Sliro vault again, but not for the sake of another “rebel scam”, but for 157 million in cash!
The motley crew that assembles as you progress is one of the strongest points of Star Wars Outlaws. After all, the plot consists of missions to recruit and rescue them from various scrapes. What’s interesting is that all the characters are written, have a character arc, a backstory, and you can’t help but get attached to them. The ND-5 droid, which was featured on all the advertising posters, is especially good. Even a piece of iron that should be soulless, Massive’s writers were able to bring to life and attach the player to it.
The story of Star Wars Outlaws is an example of how Ubisoft should write scripts. I myself am already tired of the eternal plots about revenge or revolution – these are standard tropes in the games of the French studio. Here you are placed in the criminal world, given a bunch of characters, introduced and tied to them – this makes the adventure personal and memorable.
You don’t have to be kind – you have to be cunning
And since I’m talking about criminals and thugs, here’s another “breakthrough” for Ubisoft compared to its other projects. Star Wars Outlaws is a non-linear open world that works depending on the decisions made by the player.
As the game progresses, Kay Wess and her companions will interact with four criminal syndicates from the Star Wars universe: the Pykes, the Hutts, the Crimson Dawn, and the Ashiga clan. Each organization is at odds with the rest of the criminal underworld and has its own goals. What are those goals? The balance of power and objectives are always different on the different planets that Wess visits.
Toshara, a windy planet created specifically for Star Wars Outlaws, is ruled by the Pykes. I had a huge falling out with them, and the leader of the syndicate even sent assassins after me across the galaxy. Throughout the game, I managed to lower my reputation with them to the minimum level and unleash a feud. Until relations with the syndicate are improved to an acceptable level, Kay Wess will always be the Pykes’ number one target, wherever she is. But it was even more interesting that way, so even in the final game I was their main thorn.
My favorite was Qi’Ra and her “Crimson Dawn”. For example, on Kijimi, a snow planet and homeworld of the Ashiga clan (a race of blind cockroaches in futuristic armor), the “Crimson Dawn” will do everything to seize power over the clan’s queen. Simply put, they will try to stage a palace coup and promote their candidate to the post of head. And only the player, as the game progresses, decides into whose hands the power will go – and takes direct part in the coup. Whether the clan will remain independent or will dance to the tune of the “Crimson Dawn” – the choice is up to the player. And depending on it, the relationship with the clan will change.
Tatooine, the most famous planet in the Star Wars universe, is ruled by the Hutts, and everyone is digging for them, little by little, except for Ashig. Because it is very hard for cockroaches to live in dust and sand, and they don’t even go there. But Jabba the Hutt, who rules this whole seedy desert planet, doesn’t give anyone a break — and of course, you can quarrel with him on his territory, but I didn’t do it. Because at our first meeting, we are immediately shown what happens to those who disagree — one of them is hanging on the wall to the right of Jabba, locked in stasis.
Good or excellent relations with the syndicate open access to high-class equipment, profitable contract missions of several types – infiltration, smuggling, theft, combat – and the opportunity to walk around the syndicate’s territory without embarrassment. Well, except for the forbidden zones, of course, where the most delicious prey is. You will have to sneak in there secretly, without attracting attention and without being caught by the guards – otherwise you will be thrown out of the area and the relations that have been built for so long will be shaken.
Depending on your relations with the syndicates, certain story missions will be harder or easier to complete. If you have access to the rations territory, you will be able to reach some penetration point to a restricted facility without any problems. But if they are disgusting, you will not even be allowed “into the area” and you will have to look for ways to get in by roundabout routes.
An attempt at a mass immersive sim…
The number of these paths along the way would make Deus Ex and Dishonored envious. The designers of the world and levels of Star Wars Outlaws did a great job – so many opportunities to enter the territory, distract or sabotage patrols, bypass the overwhelming majority of opponents, sneak behind their backs and not attract attention – I haven’t seen since the release of, I think, Mankind Divided. And this is logical – Kay is not a hired killer, but a thief, although she can stand up for herself when necessary.
Helping her keep her hands clean is her loyal partner Nix – the little animal can detonate barrels standing everywhere, which burst into flames or blinding smoke; steal key cards from officers and higher-ranking criminal elements so that Kay can go through the right door without hurting anyone; sneak behind locked doors; jump on an enemy and start biting off his face while Wess deals with the enemy standing nearby; drag grenades, first aid kits or weapons; highlight nearby patrols, wires with electricity, or loot. And this is only the basic configuration.
As you level up, Nix gains the ability to detonate grenades hanging on enemies’ belts, the animal’s scent radius increases, and if you feed him a special dish on the ship, after playing a cute QTE game, he will be able to throw away grenades from Kay, and make enemies shoot their dangerous business colleagues standing nearby out of pain, or distract several opponents at once – so that Kay can pass behind their backs.
In general, leveling up is one of the advantages of Star Wars Outlaws. I will quote my good friend with whom we discussed the game during the playthrough: “It’s as if Massive played the first Gothic and decided to make the mechanics of this game for the mass player.” And I can’t help but agree with him, because the leveling up here is very similar to the creation of the German studio PiranhaBytes.
Kay Wess is a young thief who doesn’t know much at the beginning of the game. But by becoming a cool specialist in one or another type of activity – shooting, mechanics, fighting, cheating – she can become better. And to do this, she will not have to earn another level and invest a skill point, but fulfill specific conditions.
For example, a famous black sabacc player in a purple trench coat will teach Kay to adapt to the situation. Let’s say, to deftly grab a pistol from a holster and deal increased damage when shooting from the hip. What do you need to do to do this? You won’t believe it, but kill a certain number of enemies shooting from the hip! Or, to make Nix’s feelings more intense, you’ll have to make him jealous of Kay! How? And the game doesn’t tell you – you have to figure it out yourself. But when you do, you sit there smiling and realize that you’ve received a reward for racking your brains.
I would also like to praise the developers’ approach to the world of Star Wars Outlaws. They did not inflate the five planets to unimaginable sizes, but approached each one with imagination. Tatooine will take you through iconic areas known from the films and other media in the franchise; the moon of Toshar will show unusual steppes, in the middle of which mountains of amber grow; Kijimi is a snowy city living by the rules of the local clan-swarm of cockroaches, where several syndicates fight for power at once. Only Akiva did not impress me at all, but more on that later.
Each world is compact, thoughtful and complex, and you never get tired of exploring it. Recreating Tatooine as it is presented in Star Wars Outlaws is one of the main achievements of Massive Entertainment. In no other single-player game in the franchise will you find such attention to detail and elaboration of the atmosphere of the sand planet. The spirit of the Tuskens, the crime of Mos Eisley, the loneliness of the desert and the scorching two suns is felt immediately and does not let go – it was on Tatooine that I spent the most time, and explored it almost along and across. This is the best part of the whole Outlaws, in my opinion.
By the way, you can move around the world not only on foot, but also on a speeder – a small flying motorcycle that deftly accelerates, jumps and turns between trees, rocks and other obstacles. And yes, to achieve something like this, you will have to upgrade your ship not only with the help of parts and garbage lying around, but also by completing tasks for mechanics in the “Abilities” section.
The same goes for the flying ship “Pathfinder” – Kay Vess’s personal vessel. Massive, in my opinion, did the right thing by not overloading the flights – a little more simulation and they would start to cause irritation, because you already have to keep track of many things, especially during the battle. However, the sounds, controls, visuals – I can’t find fault with anything, the “Pathfinder” completely satisfied me.
By the way, I played on the maximum difficulty level called “Adventurer,” when you need to act tactically not only when playing stealthily, where enemies notice you or hear the cries of your teammates from afar.
In combat on the ground, you will often have to adapt to what is happening: look at how many enemies are around; knock out battle droids in a certain way to cause explosions; ask Nix to bring new weapons because the old one is out of ammo, and the blaster rifle, oddly enough, kills stormtroopers and other representatives of the galaxy with a couple of charges, and not with 5-10 shots of a low-power blaster!
In space, you will need to be cunning, dodge missiles flying at you, not get close to flagship vessels with powerful guns, hide behind asteroids or in space debris in time, maneuver between opponents and use the entire arsenal. And upgrading the ship will not just be a checklist, but an investment in successfully completing tasks in planetary orbits.
…but not without problems
However, questions arise about Massive throughout the entire playthrough. The game is full of interesting game design decisions, it is not similar to previous games of the studio or the publisher Ubisoft in general – they have common features, but nothing more. But there are enough rough edges.
Take the same enemy weapons – why couldn’t Kay Vess be given at least one rifle on her back? Yes, she would have to find it in the world, buy resources for it or collect them from enemies, upgrade it, put it on the speeder during trips – but that would be the player’s choice. Now you have to throw away the weapon you like even during parkour, because you can’t put it in your inventory and use it whenever you want. Yes, I understand the logic: blasters are lethal even on the highest difficulty level and upgrading Kay’s personal weapon would lose its meaning with them, but it was still worth thinking about an organic change of weapons.
But it was hard for me to think that I wouldn’t be able to love an entire planet – yes, I promised to return to Akiva. I didn’t talk about it in detail before, because in contrast to the other locations of Star Wars Outlaws, this is the most boring, uninteresting and ill-conceived world in the game. These are ordinary earthly jungles with quite ordinary ruins of ancient civilizations – in some places there are just pressure doors from the future and droids are riding back and forth. There is no atmosphere of “Star Wars” here, no unusualness of the planet, it does not catch the local population, nor flora, nor fauna – these are very linear and boring tropics without interesting content in the open world.
I played Akiva as the last planet and was frankly bored with the local plot, except for maybe three or four missions at the very end and a couple of side quests. But what prevented them from placing them on the gorgeously made Canto Bight, Toshara, Kijimi or Tatooine, and not making Akiva at all or cutting it out completely? It’s a mystery to me.
I have only one complaint about the technical part – water. Even in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora it was clear that ray tracing lighting did not give the desired result on the Snowdrop engine. Massive thought that the rippling, eye-catching water on the planet Akiva (thank God that it is the only one, there are almost no bodies of water on the other planets) is cool. Otherwise, ray tracing lighting (not Nvidia RTX, but built into the game engine) did not particularly affect performance even on the RX 6800 video card and looked cool.
The optimization and polishing of the PC version, by the way, is excellent. The frame rate dropped to 45-50, on ultra graphics settings in FullHD resolution with FSR3 enabled in the “ultra quality” mode on the following hardware: AMD Ryzen 5 7500F, RX 6800 16GB, 32GB RAM 6800 Ghz EXPO. At the same time, ghosting trails, when a moving object drags its previous frame, I saw only on the fans in one dungeon on Akiva.
The same goes for bugs – once the game flickered textures in a cutscene, at the very beginning of the game. Otherwise, the only rough edges encountered were the character and world collisions when you try to get into places where the developers don’t want you to get into. If you don’t intentionally break the game, trying to prove that it’s buggy to death, as some guys do on the Internet in “funny” videos – then the game will work fine.
Diagnosis
Although not perfect, a good game was destroyed by the media – for the mere fact of its existence. Few, behind the veil of hatred, saw that Massive had taken a step forward compared to other Ubisoft games. And they won’t, because Star Wars Outlaws is now truly an “outcast” and “outlaw”.
This is the closest thing you can get to George Lucas’s original trilogy, from the visuals and atmosphere to the superb soundtrack and soundtrack. But it’s unlikely to appeal to those who hate Star Wars and still call themselves “fans.”
During the 30 hours of Star Wars Outlaws, I experienced different feelings, but every day I returned to it and happily sat with the game deep into the night. Because I understood that I would never have another Outlaws like this. Modern players and “fans” of the franchise do not need new mechanics, an interesting plot, written characters, complex open worlds filled with the atmosphere of “Far, Far Away”. What do they need? Hatred. Blind and toothless.
It’s all sad…
Pro
- A plot in the style of the original Star Wars trilogy
- Well-written characters that you remember
- A complex, thoughtful and detailed open world
- The reputation system and its impact on the passage
- Gameplay – an attempt at immersive sim for the mass player
- Mechanics of pumping the heroine and Nyx
- Nix is the best playing partner in 2024
- In places, the lighting and picture quality are cinematic
- Great optimization for AMD hardware
- Unburdened Space Flights
- Great soundtrack and sound work
- There is no “agenda” anywhere in the game, except for one additional task
Contra
- Planet Akiva is boring and slows down the narrative
- Sometimes there are problems with collision between the character and the environment
- Reflections on the water are eye-searing
- I would like to carry large weapons with me
- We will never have a second part.
***
All images in this material are copyrighted by Ubisoft Entertainment SA
