Hands-on: Outlaws feels like the Star Wars Uncharted we never got

A decade ago the world was buzzing about a behind-closed-doors E3 demo for Star Wars 1313.

The game, which was pitched as ‘Star Wars Uncharted‘, was all anyone could talk about at that year’s show. Anyone familiar with Star Wars 1313 will know exactly how that story ended.

Now, a decade on and a console generation or two later, Star Wars Outlaws is the third person action adventure shooter that instantly gave us echoes of that long-lost demo.

Our play session was split into three, the first mission saw us sneaking into a bar to retrieve an item from the Crimson Dawn, a faction that was introduced in Solo, led in that film by Darth Maul. The bar was crawling with scoundrels that our protagonist, Kay, could sneak up behind and take down stealthily.

That was, of course, until we messed up our quiet approach and all hell broke loose. Cue excitable music and us diving across tables to get cover. That instantaneous spark of chaos turns the game from a sneaking mission into enemies pouring from every single door, with only you and your blaster between them.

The demo version saw Kay’s weapon have three modes. A standard fire mode and a mode that disrupts shields. There’s also a stun that takes down most enemies in one hit, but it’s on a cool-down. This light puzzle element of using the right mode against the right enemy kept things from mindless blasting, but if you want to do that, you will eventually take them down.

The next part of our demo saw us exploring an abandoned cruiser. The game is set in the original trilogy era, just after the battle of Hoth. This means that we’re likely to see plenty of ex-Republic and ex-Clone Wars remnants to explore. It also gives you an idea of the factions at play in at this time.

This mission was fairly standard third-person-platforming fair, but for Star Wars nerds there was plenty to rifle through. The game features fairly generic third-person climbing and platforming, although the Galactic Empire hasn’t gone as wild with the yellow paint as you might expect. This ended in an interesting shootout wherein two enemies that could cloak themselves stalked you around the room. We eventually won by blasting them in all directions, uncivilized, but it got the job done.

Our last mission saw us above an imperial ship. We snuck our way through the ship to the bridge, then in an attempt to steal our ship back, got into a colossal fire fight. Here is where we discovered the game has a special move similar to the DeadEye system from Red Dead Redemption.

The game goes into slow motion, you mark your targets and you watch them crumble. Incredibly satisfying. After stealing our ship back we did a bit of dog-fighting, which is the only part of the demo we didn’t find all too exciting. The space combat felt like a simplified version of the dogfighting found in EA‘s Battlefront games, and didn’t challenge us at all.

After landing on a planet to check in with the next part of our mission, we got taste of the seedy underbelly we’ll be calling home. The game is an open world, meaning between missions you can play Sabacc, talk to characters and perform side quests. We came across a character down on his luck after losing all his money gambling. We ended up giving him 500 credits to try again. 99% of gamblers quit before their big win.

We assume this will crop up later when he’s some kind of mob boss that arrests us, or we come back to the planet in a week and he’s flat broke again. The world feels lively. It’s grimy. It’s not a part of Star Wars that’s been overly portrayed.

The game is entirely letterboxed, which while we didn’t personally like, does clearly evoke the cinematic feel they are going for. It’s also absolutely sodden with film grain. Something we will be turning off at the earliest convenience.

Star Wars as a brand is currently in a strange phase. The movies ended on a truly sour note, the TV shows have either been fantastic or like someone hitting their action figures together, but in games, Star Wars is in a bit of a golden age. Star Wars Oulaws is like a lot of games you’ve played before, but it feels like a good one of those games.

The key for us is the scale of the game. While the gunplay and the characters are enjoyable, we suspect that stretched across a 40-hour Ubisoft epic, it will become rather thin on top. However, condense it down into a 20-hour package and you’ve got a Star Wars Uncharted-like that we were extremely keen to play more of as soon as the demo ended.

Can it resist a boss fight where Luke, Han, Leia, Ackbar, Nien Nunb, and Dr. Cornelius Evazan all show up so you can clap in recognition? Who can say? Using legacy characters is fine, Respawn‘s Jedi series has done it perfectly,  but it needs to be handled with more fidelity, and less Filoni.