northNostalgia is a funny thing: There are times when it suddenly appears like a TIE fighter and punches you in the gut, leaving you confused and sore. After an hour of playing Star Wars Outlaws, I didn’t expect to feel emotionally overwhelmed during a minor mission that involved buying spare parts from a group of Jawas. But then I drove my speeder out into the Dune Sea and saw their transport there, black and monolithic under the low suns, and then those little guys were running around, fixing droids… and it made me remember being 12 years old, watching Star Wars on VHS in our living room, eating a bowl of Monster Munch my mom had brought me, repeating lines along with Luke. There are plenty of moments like this in Ubisoft’s sprawling adventure, and they save your life on more than one occasion.
For all the pre-launch talk As for not being a typical open-world Ubisoft game, Star Wars Outlaws is a lot like a typical open-world Ubisoft game. You play as Kay Vess, a street thief who makes a quiet living off her cunning until a lucrative heist goes wrong and she ends up stealing a spaceship, which she then crashes on the remote moon of Toshara. From here, she must survive by working for the galaxy’s many criminal gangs, pitting them against each other and building a reputation as a mercenary and expert thief. This is where things get familiar. You’re immediately peppered with main story missions, dozens of optional minor tasks, and also the chance to take on side jobs for various smugglers and miscreants, which usually involve traveling somewhere and either scavenging stuff or blowing it up, like in Assassin’s Creed. Or Far Cry. Or Watch Dogs. It’s Star Wars: Heavy Lifting Strikes Back.
There are key differences, though. Here, you’re aided by your beloved pet Nix, who you can send out to distract guards, search for useful items, or crawl through tight spaces to unlock doors. He’s adorable, and serves to add emotional depth and danger to Kay’s lonely life. But more importantly, the game cleverly weaves in Star Wars lore, so that the buildings you’re sneaking into are beautifully realized Imperial research stations, crumbling Republic spaceships, and seedy Hutt strongholds, all filled with intricate visual and narrative details drawn from the original film trilogy. Everywhere you turn, there are treats for fans, whether they’re familiar droids, nuggets of history, or beloved spaceships. The streets of Mos Eisley are even patrolled by stormtroopers riding those monstrous spaceships. dew on the back.
The planets you visit aren’t huge expanses of explorable domain. Most have one major city and a few square miles of open landscape. But this is fine, as there’s plenty to discover, from Hutt treasure caches in the valleys of Tatooine to pirate camps in the swampy forests of Akiva. Sadly, the speeder bike is awful to control, like trying to traverse alien planets on a beat-up old Honda 125. Equally unwieldy is the space flight section, which is reminiscent of No Man’s Sky: planetary orbits are littered with derelict spaceships to plunder, as well as TIE fighters and pirates. You can help ships in distress or carry out cargo-collecting missions, but the flight simulation is definitely NOT on par with classic LucasArts space combat titles.
In most of the ground missions, there’s a familiar mix of parkour (scaling yellow-painted pipes and cliff faces, though you can choose to turn the paint off) and stealth as you creep along steel corridors, past walls of flashing buttons and beeping computer screens, then sabotage alarm panels and silently knock out enemies. It’s basic stuff, at times more akin to Mary Jane’s missions in Spider-Man than, say, the systemic complexity of Dishonored, and it can be frustratingly slow. As you progress, though, you meet a number of experts that let you unlock new abilities, such as quieter movement and cool stealth toys like smoke grenades, to make infiltration a lot more fun. You also have a hugely configurable laser pistol with a variety of unlockable modes, and while it’s possible to temporarily pick up other weapons, I like the fact that Kay sticks with her Han Solo-style pistol – there’s no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
Beneath it all is a sensational narrative that grows from the myth of the street kid who makes it big into something a little more interesting. As Kay recruits his assault team, including the heavily laser-scarred battle droid ND-5, he forges friendships that both enhance and contrast the heist plot. Clashes with rebel forces also call into question the ethics of their war and their methods. There are wonderful moments when it becomes clear that the designers are not only inspired by Star Wars, but also by the directors George Lucas appreciated: John Ford and Akira Kurosawa.
Some may miss the Jedi story or EA titles Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor; Outlaws is definitely a game for Solo fans more than Skywalker fans, just with a really nice new character at the helm. It will deliver what most movie fans want and give them plenty of geeky pleasure when they see EG-6 power droids or maybe an X-34 Landspeeder or… is that a Chadra fan Sitting at the bar in the cantina? I found myself wandering around for hours looking for these things and rarely came away disappointed.
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If this were If this were an Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry title, it would be one of the passable ones: fun enough, a little annoying at times, and packed with the tired clichés of the open-world genre. But time and again, the Star Wars license grabs this game by its Corellian pants and takes it into exciting territory. For many of the 40 hours I played, I felt like a 12-year-old again, slightly bewildered and dizzy, but enjoying every happily familiar moment.