Star Wars Outlaws certainly has the weight of expectation behind it. The first truly open-world single player Star Wars game, it’s been shorn of the Skywalkers and Palpatines, and instead aims to give us a story that focuses on the criminal underworld of the galaxy far far away. I didn’t even see one lightsaber during my four hours with Outlaws, and it’s much more interesting to discover what this game is, rather than what it isn’t.
Star Wars Outlaws is set after Empire Strikes Back, which, as anyone knows, is peak Star Wars. The Empire still has a Force stranglehold on the galaxy, but inbetween the cracks, criminal syndicates are rising to power. Our hero Kay Vess, and her adorable companion Nix, dream of a life of freedom, and they’re convinced into taking part in a heist. It does not go well.
We hopped in early to Kay’s story, where she’s just crashed a very important and rare spaceship that she has… acquired. You’re now stuck on the planet of Toshara, an all-new creation designed collaboratively by Massive and Lucasfilm, adding to the Star Wars canon. Mirogana City is the capital of this attractive, Mediterranean-esque landscape, and it’s where you’ll run into plenty of new characters to run jobs for and stab in the back.
At the start of our demo we meet Waka, a worryingly helpful Rodeon who offers to fix up your newly trashed ship, sending us out to get parts from in and around Mirogana City, which just so happens to be the hub for the three major crime syndicates who’ve set up shop here. There’s the Empire knocking around too, and given that this is when they’re at the height of their power, it’s probably best to avoid them.
Mirogana City is a classic Star Wars dive of a place, a city built beneath, and within a mountain, leaving only the mountain’s peak and a core to hold it up. Beneath it is a grimy, deeply insalubrious place, filled with unsavoury characters, and just as George Lucas intended, it feels realistic and lived in. You’ll believe that you could turn a corner and run into Han Solo – and perhaps you will, as you can take on tasks from Jabba the Hutt – and that’s about as good as it could get.
Your first task is to make your way into Pyke underboss Gorak’s antechamber, and while there appear to be different ways you could do this in the main game, from buying your way in with a broker to bribing a technician to let you through an access hatch, here we snuck out way in utilising your Data Spike. Once there, it’s a short stay, as it turns out crime bosses don’t really like you sneaking into their back rooms…
The Data Spike, like every good unlocking device, utilises a mini game, with you having to listen to the rhythmic audio pattern and pressing the trigger in sync with it. If your rhythm sucks there’s a visual overlay you can add to help you out. It isn’t the cleanest of mechanisms, and four hours in I was still struggling to nail the timing. Still, it made it all the sweeter when I did. Kay also boasts a grappling hook for, well, grappling to things and a blaster for shooting stuff. The blaster has multiple mode types, with our demo allowing you access to both a destructive blaster or one that’s capable of stunning enemies. Nix, your constant companion, also offers some useful skills that every slightly shady bounty hunter will find useful, being capable of distracting or attacking guards, or accessing switches and devices that are out of Kay’s reach.
That’s far from Kay’s only skill, as she’s a pretty dab hand at slicing data from computers, with another mini game letting you feel fairly clever about yourself, by choosing from the correct combination of glyphs – or numbers if you prefer.
With a focus on lawlessness, reputation looks to be everything. Whether it’s the Pykes, Crimson Dawn, The Ashiga Clan or the Hutt Cartel you choose to work for, you’re going to have to balance out the jobs you do, and the way you do them. It’s fair to say that Outlaws will see you regularly switching sides, or angering another, and Kay has the Han Solo-esque moxy to get away with it. Or end up in carbonite. It’s hard to tell right now.
It’s not just the syndicates either, your reputation plays into how everyone else perceives you, including the different merchants you’ll find in the world. Depending on their affiliation you might get a better price if you’re on the up with their chosen group, or they might fleece you if you’re on the wrong side of things. If you sell them the right things, you just might improve how they think about you either way.
There’s so much to get involved in here, from the steadily growing number of places you can visit, areas to explore on the map, and then a host of different systems and bits of equipment to upgrade, including your ship.
Once you’ve repaired the Trailblazer – the opening of our demo saw it stuck firmly in the ground – you can shoot off into space, leaving the atmosphere and engaging in some space combat. The Trailblazer is certainly nippy enough, but there’s a lock-on here that makes shooting Tie Fighters out of the sky feel a little too easy. Hopefully, it’s something that can be tweaked before release, or that there’s difficulty levels let you customise the challenge.
The close of our time with Outlaws saw us hop a little way forward in the story, and a little further into that far, far away galaxy to arrive at Kijimi, in search of a safecracker. For anyone that’s seen The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, some of this may be sounding mildly familiar, but this is safecracking not codebreaking, so it’s absolutely different. Similarities aside, visiting a location we’ve seen in feature films just cements Outlaws’ place in the Star Wars universe, but ties it to the criminal underworld and shady dealings we’ve seen in The Mandalorian and Andor. Arguably, they’ve been the most interesting things out of Disney’s fairly scattershot approach to Star Wars, so, it’s a good thing.
Star Wars Outlaws pulls together a host of different inspirations when it comes to gameplay, with aspects of Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed series nuzzling up to some Uncharted-style exploration and gunplay. These don’t feel disparate elements though, and I’m totally sold on Kay Vess as a central character, her array of rogueish skills, and the way the Star Wars universe is being brought to our screens by the teams at Massive and across Ubisoft. If you’re a Star Wars fan, Outlaws feels like the perfect video game representation of the seedier world we’ve found in Andor and The Mandalorian, and it continues to sow the idea that maybe, just maybe, we don’t need lightsabers to have a fun time.
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