Star Wars Outlaws is a fun space adventure that doesn’t quite reach its potential

On the surface, Star Wars Outlaws feels a lot like Respawn’s Jedi: Fallen Order.

It’s a game that takes an established developer, back by a monolith publisher, and lets them play with their Star Wars toys. It’s got sky-high production value, a fun cast of new characters, a standout main duo and it does deliver on the Star Wars fantasy.

However, the game also sets out interesting ideas that it doesn’t capitalize on, plays it far too safe, and is full of technical problems. We come away from Star Wars Outlaws having enjoyed our time, but also overwhelmed by the feeling that the sequel has the potential to be incredible.

Star Wars Outlaws follows Kay Vess, a down-on-her-luck scoundrel making her way in the galaxy. Following a job gone wrong, she needs to clear her name, and the hefty bounty on her head. Set in the year between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, in the Empire-controlled galaxy, the only way for Kay to make the credits she needs is to get involved with the underworld.

It’s here we’re introduced to the game’s main factions; The Pykes, Crimson Dawn, The Ashiga Clan, and The Hutts. Kay takes on missions for the clans, and how she completes these can result in her reputation with these clans increasing, or falling into disrepute.

The game does a good job from the outset of setting the clans up like they’re going to be a massive factor in your playthrough, but the reality is far less interesting. For example, outside of two specific instances (that we won’t detail due to spoilers) there is virtually no impact on the main story. What impact there is so minor that you can practically feel where the developer realized they’d have to execute this story moment in such a way that could fit every clan.

Star Wars Outlaws spends a lot of time telling you that the clan you side with is important, but the benefits are minor and largely cosmetic. Not only this, but even if you’re at the lowest possible rating with a clan, you can buy your way back into their good fortune via easily found in-game items.

The clan system occasionally manifests in gameplay when you’re tasked with entering an area that’s clan-affiliated, so your standing will impact if the enemies start to attack you instantly. Again, this feels like a big issue in the early game, but it’s largely forgotten as the game progresses.

“Star Wars Outlaws spends a lot of time telling you that the clan you side with is important, but the benefits are minor and largely cosmetic.”

Speaking of gameplay, Star Wars Outlaws is a third-person shooter, with a higher-than-expected emphasis on stealth. The gunplay is serviceable, akin to Naughty Dog‘s Uncharted series, but it’s never standout. The main narrative sets up some excellent, cinematic gunfights, but the random battles out in the world aren’t anything special.

The game’s stealth system largely revolves around using Nix, Kay’s utterly adorable companion, to distract your enemy, or interact with an alarm in order to either take the enemy down, or sneak past them. The stealth is never hard, and towards the end of the game we began to realize quite so easy it was to sprint right past most guards, but it’s also never massively intrusive.

Kay and Nix are the undisputed highlights of the game. Kay, played by Humberly Gonzalez, is a warm, earnest protagonist, that never feels like she’s doing a Han Solo impression. Kay and Nix have to carry the entire game, and considering one of them can’t speak, they do an excellent job. Much like Cal and BD-1, they feel like natural additions to the Star Wars universe.

The game’s strong writing carries across its main story, to its smaller side stories, and even down to its random collectibles. Every modern game is filled with random bits of paper full of dialogue, that most people will completely ignore, but we read every single data pad we found in Outlaws. Not only because they provide good context for the world, and provide some gameplay benefits such as the locations of items, but also it’s where some of the funniest writing in the game is found.

The game mostly avoids the trap of dangling dozens of legacy characters in front of you, but in these data pads it’s clear the developers wanted to have fun with the fact that they’re playing in the Star Wars toybox, and we don’t blame them.

Nix is not only a great comic presence and partner to Kay in the narrative, he’s also a useful gameplay tool. Developer Massive Entertainment previously described him as an extendable arm in the world. He’ll grab items, pick up collectibles, distract enemies, and highlight points of interest.

“Every modern game is filled with random bits of paper full of dialogue, that most people will completely ignore, but we read every single data pad we found in Outlaws.”

Star Wars Outlaws is pitched as the first open-world Star Wars game, but we were rather disappointed with the game’s four main planets. Only three of the planets, Tosharna, Tattoine, and a third we won’t spoil, are fully explorable. Kijimi is essentially just a city, that while detailed, and large, isn’t what you’d expect from an open-world area.

Tattooine is the best of the bunch. It’s large, and each of its settlements feels full of conversations to listen into, and buildings to stalk through. We acknowledge that getting the chance to explore a large-scale Tattooine is essentially just Star Wars porn, but it’s also the game’s best area from a content and writing perspective, not simply due to nostalgia.

While the game isn’t overstuffed with things to do in the typical Ubisoft sense, the side content that is there suffers from a different issue.  Outside of credits (which are incredibly easy to come by), the reward for almost every side mission or contract is tied to your standing with the various factions.

As mentioned previously, the faction system doesn’t end up being very important, and the rewards for being loyal to one faction or the other are so minor that an increased reputation with those factions is no great reward.

We encountered several technical issues during our playthrough of Star Wars Outlaws on PS5. This included things like characters disappearing out of the world, our speeder also disappearing leaving us floating mid-air as we sped across a planet, multiple voice lines playing at once, and interactable elements not appearing.

In the most egregious bug we encountered, Nix became entirely unusable, thus making that area’s puzzle entirely broken. The only fix for this was to load a save from three hours previous. We also encountered our share of hard crashes, though the game’s generous autosave meant this was more annoying than catastrophic.

We used the “favours quality mode” which runs at 40FPS, and is available to those on a screen that supports VRR. This was a nice balance between the choppy quality setting and the blurry, but steady performance mode.

Star Wars Outlaws does many things well, but we’re left disappointed that so few of its elements achieve greatness. The various Syndicates are set up strongly in the game’s opening, but fall to the side as the game progresses, leaving the reputation system feeling hugely underutilized. Tattooine is a standout, but the game doesn’t do as much with its other planets as we had liked.

You can play through Star Wars Outlaws and have an enjoyable time, as we did, but you’ll be left yearning for a sequel that takes all its best bits, of which there are plenty, and delivers on them to the fullest. For now, it’s a good first step into a wider galaxy, but won’t trouble lists of the best Star Wars adventures ever.

A copy of Star Wars: Outlaws was supplied by Ubisoft for this review.