Before I dived into Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s trademark open world take on perhaps the most enduring and beloved media franchise to ever exist, I was playing a different game set in galaxies far, far away. Fairly deep into my first playthrough of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, I couldn’t help but be charmed by its rustic delights. That’s not to say that Respawn’s action-adventure Jedi simulator is unsophisticated. On the contrary, it’s packed with sophistications and systems — some of which add necessary depth to the game, while others underscore its flaws. But for me, the joys of the game came from simpler origins.

Jedi Survivor endeared me with its faithful and adoring commitment to the essence of Star Wars. I kept going back for its specific reimagination of those worlds and for its moving retelling of Star Wars mythos. Through its forlorn landscapes, incredible music, and a protagonist who balanced the tragedy and hope of Star Wars, Jedi Survivor captured intangible pleasures. After all, more than its worlds and its people and their conflicts, Star Wars is an evocation. It is John Williams’ incredible score. It is Yoda’s warm and infinite wisdom. It is Luke looking at two crimson suns setting on a desolate horizon.

And that was what I was looking for in Star Wars Outlaws: an evocation. I didn’t need it to have fleshed out gameplay systems, or bring mechanical depth to its action. I simply wanted it to feel like Star Wars. But Ubisoft’s newest game often struggles to do that. On its surface, it’s an incredibly faithful and visually beautiful recreation of familiar and beloved worlds. Walking around in bustling cantinas full of scoundrels and fixers, ripping through the deserts of Tatooine on your Speeder, and getting into dogfights in the Outer Rim — these moments are as Star Wars as it can get. When it is showing off, Outlaws can leave you wide-eyed and smiling, enthralled by its tangible delights. But when it comes to things that you can’t quite put your finger on, the game leaves you wanting for more.

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Star Wars Outlaws follows the story of Kay Vess, a scrappy scoundrel desperate to leave behind her small-time existence in Canto Bight in search of something more. Her outsized ambitions go beyond the bit-part jobs she takes on, and she can’t wait to live a different life in the Core Worlds. Kay doesn’t have much, not even a ship. Her only friend is Nix, a small creature — a merqaal to be exact — who accompanies her everywhere and helps her out on jobs. Separated from her mother at a young age, Kay shares a familial bond with Nix. In a desperate bid to escape Cantonica, Kay signs up for a high-risk heist that puts her in the crosshair of Sliro, the dangerous leader of up-and-coming criminal syndicate Zerek Besh.

Kay learns that the crew behind the heist on Sliro’s heavily guarded vault was part of the Rebel Alliance, who had their own ulterior motives behind the break-in. Caught between a rock and a hard place, she slips past Sliro’s guards in the ensuing chaos, steals one of his ships — the Trailblazer, jets off the planet with Nix, and crash lands on Toshara. With the ship damaged and a death mark on head, Kay then must navigate the underworld as she works for local syndicates, forges allies and finds new enemies. The four criminal syndicates of the galaxy — the Pikes, the Crimson Dawn, the Hutt Cartel and the Ashiga Clan — are locked in a complex dance of power and opportunity and Kay finds herself stuck in the middle of it all.

Kay and Nix are inseparable companions
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

She must now walk the perilous tightrope between loyalty and betrayal, juggling the interests of each syndicate as her decisions and actions swing the favour of one and attract the wrath of another. All the while, she also must look out for herself and Nix, fix the ship, lose the death mark, and find her calling. It is an intriguing setup and Star Wars Outlaws wastes no time getting you neck deep into smugglers and scoundrels. It can be a little overwhelming at first, juggling the syndicate opportunities and side jobs as you figure out the best way forward. And as you explore Toshara, the first major open-world planet in the game, you run into brokers and bartenders, delinquents and double agents — each of them looking for their own slice of the pie. As Kay wanders around in shady cantinas, rusty hangars and crowded cities, she picks up intel on jobs to do and treasures to find. Sometimes, it’s the bartender who hands out the information to Kay, and other she picks up clues by casually eavesdropping into sensitive NPC conversations.

This is where Outlaws excels — at being a game about petty criminals doing petty criminal things. It asks you to think on your feet, take sides as you please, and double cross your contact for a better payoff. In essence, there is no right or wrong choice — this is not Baldur’s Gate III. Here, your decisions and their consequences aren’t as flexible as your morality. You’re encouraged to become an agent of chaos, the freest of freelancers playing with your reputation within the criminal network. Star Wars Outlaws encouraged me to essentially become a sort of space Joker, without the penchant for evil — I had no plan, and I just did things.

Kay can eavesdrop on NPC conversations to gather intel
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

As you switch loyalties, take on and complete syndicate requests, your reputation rises in the faction that handed you the job and takes a hit in another. Missions could pan out in unpredictable and fluid ways, too. For instance, the Pikes send you to infiltrate a Crimson Dawn base and steal sensitive information, but while sneaking through the compound you find out that Pikes have a Crimson Dawn spy amongst their ranks. Now you could choose to reveal this to the Pike boss and gain favour with the syndicate, or you could keep your mouth shut and find yourself in the good books of Crimson Dawn. These choices regularly present themselves over the course of the game, and while they do not deeply change the fabric of the Outlaws or its ending, they do help drive home the idea of Kay as a Han Solo-type scoundrel deciding her own fate.

As the story progresses, however, Star Wars Outlaws finds itself stuck in a loop of repetitive missions and a narrative that refuses to move forward. At Toshara, as Kay takes on contracts for different Syndicates, she is pursued by a ruthless bounty hunter on Sliro’s orders. Betrayals and new alliances follow as Kay manages to fix her ship and escape from the planet with the help of outlaw Jaylen Vrax and his commando droid ND-5. Vrax asks Kay to join him and break into Sliro’s vault again, steal unfathomable riches and finally find her freedom. With no exits left, Kay takes up his offer, and together with ND-5, sets out on a planet-hopping adventure to assemble an expert crew for the biggest job of her criminal career.

Kay finds a new ally in ND-5
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Lucasfilm

The rest of the game follows Kay as she travels to Tatooine, Kajimi, and Akiva, looking for the right people for the big heist and taking on side quests and contracts as she balances her reputation among the different syndicates. It’s a familiar setup, but Star Wars Outlaws takes its time getting there. By the time the pieces are set up on the board, you’ve already spent a dozen or so hours running around Toshara and interacting with people who do not matter in the grand scheme of things. You encounter NPCs who seem important at the beginning but are later discarded in underwhelming sequences where the treachery and tragedy of the moment doesn’t land with the intended weight. These side characters are dull, and it becomes difficult to distinguish them from one another after a point.

Kay, too, stops short of being a compelling protagonist, despite all the ingredients present. She’s essentially a Han Solo stand-in, and while she’s just as cavalier the Star Wars icon, she lacks his charisma. Kay feels like a participant in her own journey, always going where the river of plot conveniences and coincidences take her, rather than taking charge of her own destiny. The game drip feeds a story about Kay’s past and her separation from her mother through flashbacks, but it’s done so sparingly that that any emotional denouement is thwarted before it even takes shape.

Kay travels to several planets on her ship, the Trailblazer
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Star Wars Outlaws also suffers from a busy narrative backdrop that ends up diminishing the tale unfolding at its front and centre. Star Wars stories usually take place at a grand scale, juxtaposing the inarguable aura of its heroes and villains against interesting but relatively inert settings. There is detailed world building, but not at the expense of the world builders. But in Outlaws, the big picture often gets lost in a sea of granular detail. The game surrounds Kay and Nix with a seemingly interminable cast of inconsequential characters who do little to bring out surprising and unseen sides of our heroine. With little real impact to the game’s story, they end up becoming excess furniture crowding the room.

While the narrative dressing swells out to suffocate the story, the gameplay in Star Wars Outlaws goes the other way, spreading thin over the course of the game. To be clear, I didn’t go into Star Wars Outlaws expecting it to offer mechanical depth and I’m perfectly fine with it being an Uncharted-style action-adventure game, with the emphasis on its story and its characters rather than on its gameplay. But when the narrative falters and you don’t have robust gameplay to keep players engaged, it becomes a problem. The core combat and exploration loop in Outlaws doesn’t really change much beyond what you’ve experienced in the first few hours.

You can freely explore Mos Eisley on Tatooine
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Here’s how an average mission in the game goes: You go to contract broker for a mission, who sends you to another guy, who directs you to another location, where you usually sneak your way inside a syndicate base, take down some guards quietly, hack a couple of computers, open loot boxes with a rhythm-based audio cue lockpicking mechanic (it’s fun, actually), grab the thingamajig you need to steal and eventually shoot your way out with your blaster. Star Wars Outlaws makes you follow this exact sequence of objectives so many times that you’ll be doing it on autopilot after spending a few hours in the game.

And this loop would work if its individual parts were fun and tactile — but they’re not. Each gameplay aspect is stripped down to its basest, most simplistic iteration. Stealth here is as plain and shallow as we’ve come to expect from modern Ubisoft games. You crouch-walk around conveniently placed boxes and hit square when you reach up behind an enemy. Annoyingly, when you execute a stealth takedown, the animation skips a few frames, as if the enemy forgets what they’re doing for half a second and magnetically attaches to your action like they couldn’t wait to be punched in the head by Kay. The levels also come with environmental distractions and traps that you can trigger by commanding Nix, but these are nowhere near as deep as the ones found in Ubisoft’s very own Watch Dogs series.

Stealth mechanics lack depth in Star Wars Outlaws
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Enemy bases where you sneak around during missions are laid out well though, and there’s always at least a couple of different paths to take to reach your objective. But once you’ve done them a dozen times, the golden path becomes so painfully obvious that there’s barely any challenge left in navigating the level. And it doesn’t help that enemy AI across the entire game is utterly brain-dead. You could shoot someone, lob a couple grenades and then scurry to cover and no one would even remember if you were there.

The shooting is perhaps even more basic. When you’re discovered and enemies inside a base are alerted to your presence, you pop out of cover and go pew-pew with your blaster. That’s about it. That’s all you get — one blasted blaster. There are no additional persistent weapons in the game, except the three different blaster modules that each come with a different firing mode. Kay can pick up certain enemy weapons, but these only last till you empty the clip, or till you perform an interactive action like climbing stairs or entering a vent, at which point she drops the special weapon.

The gunplay also lacks satisfying feedback. It’s never tight and responsive, even when you consider it against the lowered bar for third-person games. Shootouts rarely present any threat or challenge, too. You’ll go down quick if you stay out of cover and fire indiscriminately, but if you stay behind a box and take your shots during the right window, you’ll clear most enemy encounters without sweating. The enemy never adapts different strategies to flush you out or distress you in your position. And when push comes to shove, you can literally just stop shooting, rush the enemy firing at you and punch them in the face a couple of times for a quick dispatch.

Shooting is simplistic in Outlaws, and Kay only gets a single blaster as weapon
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Star Wars Outlaws’ lacklustre combat, however, is balanced by the ways it allows you to explore its worlds. On foot, Kay isn’t particularly nimble, but she packs a grappling hook to aid her in traversal. There’s some basic platforming — climb a particular surface, jump and grab the ledge, shimmy along its edge — but it’s never as fluid or deep as Tomb Raider or Uncharted. Stiff animations and a very on-rails experience make exploration on foot a mostly tedious experience. When traversing open hub-worlds on different planets, you’ll mostly be using your speeder to cover long distances. The speeder is functional and helps root the game in Star Wars mythology, but the controls are finicky in tight spaces. Speeder combat is bafflingly tied to contextual input. You can’t freely aim and fire while riding your vehicle. Instead, you wait to fill up a meter and then mark and execute the enemies chasing you, Splinter Cell-style.

Even with the grappling hook, on-foot traversal is tedious
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Space exploration and combat, however, is a highlight. Flying around and engaging in dogfights on the Trailblazer isn’t mechanically complex at all, but it’s a great example of how simple game mechanics can engender fun gameplay. When you leave a planet, your ship enters the planet’s orbit, a smaller open hub area where you can fly around and explore. Here, you can find diverse environments, ranging from a debris field to an asteroid cluster, depending upon the planet. You can hunt down treasures and lost cargo, defend friendly syndicated ships from space pirates, and engage in ship combat. Flying around and shooting other ships is perhaps the most consistently reliable mechanic in the game. It’s fun and it provides a necessary change of pace for the gameplay, breaking the monotony of doing repetitive missions on planet surface.

Most importantly, the ship combat evokes Star Wars ethos more than any other part of the game. The visually stimulating space environments, the authentic and familiar ship designs, the way TIE fighters sound — it all just feels like Star Wars. It grounds you in the world George Lucas created and makes you an active participant of its ongoing lore. This is what Respawn’s Jedi Survivor consistently excelled at. It’s impossible to understand the soul of a story and the world it takes place in by the numbers. You can’t push proven buttons to make your game an authentic Star Wars experience. To do that, the developer must have a deeper grasp of the material that goes beyond reverence and reproduction. Because to simply copy assets and elements from Star Wars would result in an imitation rather than an evocation.

Ship exploration and combat is a highlight
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

To developer Massive Entertainment’s credit, Star Wars Outlaws swings for the fences in its attempt to bottle the essence of the franchise. You can see it when you’re flying the Trailblazer, locked onto an enemy spacecraft; you can feel it in the neon glow of dimly lit cantinas swarming with degenerates; and you can soak in it when you’re zipping across desolate landscapes on your speeder. Star Wars Outlaws is often a stunner. In certain moments, it can be a visual showcase, a perfect example of how to tell a story with images. But the game’s graphical fidelity slides down the scale when you narrow down the scope. The flat deserts of Tatooine, the cold and dark alleys of Kijimi and the rolling grasslands of Toshara are rendered in incredible detail. But facial animations of both Kay and NPCs retain the trademark Ubisoft uncanny-valley coat. It’s criminal for a game that can look so good to the naked eye to drop the quality so drastically when you put it under the microscope. And while voice acting is great across the board, the stiff facial animations drain story cutscenes of any life.

The two suns of Tatooine set on the horizon
Photo Credit: Ubisoft/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Ubisoft’s games tend to inhabit each other’s skins, like a shared DNA that connects different games in perceptible ways. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was clearly just Far Cry with blue skin. And you can see bits of Assassin’s Creed in Watch Dogs. These games also have the familiar and maligned Ubisoft open-world formula in common, an approach that has left its popular IPs stale. But it’s difficult to place Star Wars Outlaws in a borrowed groove. You’re not exactly trying to fit a square peg in a round hole — it still owes a lot to other Ubisoft titles — but you also can’t quite pinpoint another game from the publisher that inarguably sits inside the Star Wars skin in Outlaws.

The game does make an effort to strip away borrowed limbs, but then it’s left with hollowed-out interiors of Ubisoft gameplay we’ve come to expect and bemoan over the last few years. It’s as if Star Wars Outlaws occupies the negative space of other Ubisoft games. And while Outlaws sheds some of the flaws of its kin with that approach, it also brings issues that are entirely its own. It is marred by inconsistency, saved by its authenticity, and ultimately defeated by its mediocrity. Is Star Wars Outlaws a good Star Wars game? At times, absolutely yes. There are moments where it inarguably soars. But is it a good game? Outlaws inevitably stumbles on that question.

Pros

• Excellent visuals
• Ship exploration and combat
• Immersive environments
• Intriguing story
• Nix!

Cons

• Shallow combat and stealth
• Poor facial animations
• Repetitive missions
• Stiff platforming
• Dreadful enemy AI

Rating (out of 10): 7

Star Wars Outlaws released August 30 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.

Pricing starts at Rs. 4,899 for the Standard Edition on Ubisoft Connect and Epic Games Store for PC, and Rs. 5,599 on PlayStation Store for PS5 and Xbox Store for Xbox Series S/X.