Star Wars Outlaws

Definitely my favourite Star Wars game in many years, possibly ever. Atmosphere is unmatched, characters are excellent, and despite some small bugs and annoyances, I still keep going back to do little side bits almost a year after I finished the game. Love it.

When you buy a product from a AAA developer, you expect high-end, or at least high-fidelity, not recycled and packaged crap. Star Wars Outlaws is a textbook example of a supposedly top-tier developer assembling a third-rate product, stitched together like a patchwork quilt from bits of old code from previous products, packaged in a new cover. Watch Kay Vess open a chest, watch the scene. Then watch the scene of Lara Croft opening the chest. Compare. There's no difference. Only the characters' appearances and the words they speak. A complete cloning, code transfer from game to game. There's also a similarity to Lara—Kay jumps, climbs, and leaps in exactly the same way. The covers are different, but the essence is the same. Or Kay Vess and her companion Nyx, and Cal Kastis and BD-1... There's no difference. Unification—borrowing ready-made solutions and entire chunks of code from older products, libraries, to improve product reliability and development speed? Well, yes, that makes sense from the perspective of a solo developer trying to save money. But for a AAA developer, it's cheap, and from the buyer's perspective, it's like being served a flatbread made from recycled crap ten times over instead of a fresh steak. I bought the game on sale, at a good discount, and I overpaid. The game isn't even secondary, it's tertiary—a carbon copy of a carbon copy, completely lacking in originality. So, I'm almost finished with the game and can now give a fully informed opinion. As I said above, I hate borrowing, plagiarism, and copy-pasting solutions in everything. It's cheap. The game is a copy of previous Ubisoft projects, and that's cheap. It's disrespectful to customers who are forced to pay huge sums of money for an unoriginal project cobbled together from bits and pieces of old games. The ad: "Meet the first-ever open-world Star Wars™ game!" It's a lie. There's no open world. There's a fixed number of maps, locations, and missions. Totally linear. There's absolutely no variability in the game. All your decisions in the main campaign are hardwired into the system. There's no opportunity to make choices, only as stated in the script. The result is predictable crap. They wrote about how well the criminal world was written. Nonsense. The criminal world is superficially and schematically written, and the character's interactions with the syndicates are also superficial. As Kay said, the Resistance is just like the syndicate, and it's true, they're all the same – gray, faceless, boring, uninteresting. The script is crude and empty. The motivations and backgrounds of all the characters, except for Kate and the robot, are superficially written. The graphics, the interface, the user experience – everything is familiar, nothing new or fresh, in other words – it's just old hat. To sum it up: it's pathetic. If I weren't paying for this, well, you never know, some clowns decided to save money and slapped together something third-rate from used parts and junk, but trying to sell it as a super-duper product, especially as "the first open-world Star Wars game," is a cheap disgrace.

Even with a huge discount this game isnt worth 20 bones to old school star wars fans. It's unfortunate but Disney really has managed to destroy this franchise. They filled the universe with their politics and identity ideology. It's a shame because visually the tech we have can deliver incredible immersive environments but these fools lost the plot a long time ago. To sum up the game play would be lack luster at best. It's mid everything and repetitive. The plot is ♥♥♥♥♥ footed to their agenda. Watered down main character traits that have no place in the galaxy you once may have known. Spare yourself the money and urge to vomit.

[b] Performance: [/b] + Runs reliable 50 FPS on older Hardware + No Stutters - Some Areas load slower, which lets you fall through the floor (Despite SSD) [b] Story (No Spoiler): [/b] + Beautiful handcrafted Story + Beats Cal Kestis's Games tenfold + Absolutely gorgeous worlbuilding + Extreme attention to Detail + Superb Voiceacting - No negative Experience during Gameplay Reccommend 10/10 if you like Battlefront/FallenOrder

Very authentic vintage Star Wars vibes with great music and sound production, and a lot of pretty locations and visuals. There is nothing ground breaking going on here in Outlaws, it's full of safe and established gameplay mechanics you'll have seen before in similar open world games. Collect materials and credits to unlock gear, take side jobs. Sneak or blast your way through the game. If you're like me and a sucker for side quests, sadly they can get a bit 'samey' with only around 3 or 4 variations of them, I actively started to avoid certain ones like 'take item from A to B' because they just got dull. Sneaking ones I ended up just blasting through them because it was more engaging, and quicker. Certain missions you get 'one shot' at which I guess raises the stakes a little. Saying that... Sneaking is quite fun, although not very deep. Exploration is often rewarded with a vent or a ladder or a way to bypass enemies and route to the objective- its generally obvious or easy, this ain't no MGS or Deus Ex level of infiltration, it's plot convenience vent placements or rope swings. Again, very Star Warsy. You use your pet rat[?] thing to help you as well, who can pickpocket people, press buttons and grab guns for you. It's a neat extra bit to the sneaking. Sneaking into Imperial bases is probably where the main fun was for me, because they look awesome, then blasting your way out - it just feels peak Star Wars when the alarm starts blaring and you're tagging endless Storm Troopers from all directions. There is a sort of 'wanted level' system going on as well which is pretty cool, eventually you'll face Death Troopers. The gunplay is alright, I found it fairly satisfying and consistent overall. Headshots count and there is a surprising selection of weapons, albeit all very similar. Your pistol has a few firing modes too. Like I said, blasting your way out of places, to me, seemed the most fun thing to do after sneaking deep into a base / mission. There are other systems at play too, such as reputation levels with various factions and gangs but it's very shallow and fickle. Doesn't seem to make a difference to the overall story and is mainly a gameplay mechanic for early-mid game. You can typically just buy your way up the reputation bar if and when you need to. I never had any issues with this, but it did make choices have a little extra weight at times. You can fly your ship into space around the various planets you'll visit and there is some respectable space combat to be had as well. Ok, again, nothing deep but visually impressive with authentic Star Wars sounds and music -these sections don't overstay their welcome, and there was enough going on to keep me entertained. What I appreciated most about Outlaws was the fast travel - it really is fast travel. I could be stood in the middle of the desert on Tattooine and fast travel to a location on a completely different planet for a different quest. That is a shining example of how fast travel should work in a game. If you wanted, you can get on your speeder, speed to your ship, get in the seat, fly into space, jump to the planet, land on the planet, back on the speeder and go there manually - if you wanted - or just appear there. The fact I can just jump from anywhere to anywhere is easily the most under rated feature of this game. It genuinely makes me want to go back to it to do collectables because this exists because it respects my time. There was a few bugs. I fell through the floor a few times, and got stuck in geometry, and I did crash to desktop (turning off all the ray tracing fixed this for me) but I didn't encounter anything quest breaking. The game autosaves practically every minute as well so, not really a big issue. I think my main qualm with Star Wars Outlaws is the writing of the main protagonist, Kay Vess. A name you'll hear a lot of since she introduces herself to total strangers with her full name in almost every interaction, like she suffers from a special form of tourettes where she can't help but blurt her own name out randomly, even though for the majority of the game you're literally a 'wanted dead' criminal, you'd think she'd use an alias or something; but in typical Star Wars writing style, she's just a super vanilla character, with no clear motivations or depth or edginess - the story throughout the game treads the line of goofy and serious and this even plays out at times, like when sneaking up and KO'ing Storm Troopers you do this sometimes with an overacted uppercut, or with the help of your little pet rat thing, is just like a physical comedy sketch - yet other KO animations actually look pretty legit badass. Often, Kay Vess in dialogues sounds like she has no idea what she is doing, even though she is meant to be some savvy criminal thief from the crooked casinos of Canto - I only really got invested in her as a person when [spoiler] she loses her pet rat friend briefly, she actually shows some emotion[/spoiler]. I think this is a me problem with the Star Wars franchise though, not really a problem with this game perse. Star Wars, generally I find doesn't ever go 'dark' enough, even though it could, and I suppose I find disappointing. Overall though, I enjoyed this one. The main story is quite short, but there is plenty of other stuff to do, which I may go back and mop up side quests and collectables and achievements later, thanks to that wonderful fast travel.

I don't understand the hate this game received, other than maybe major bugs at or near launch, of which I am happy to say I did not experience in my playthrough. I genuinely thoroughly enjoyed every moment and I'm glad I took the time to give it a proper playthrough! If you are on the fence do not let all the negativity sway you. The worlds are beautiful, the core gameplay loop is thoroughly enjoyable and there always seems to be something else to do or explore.

This game is actually really fun! I do wish that there was some kind of character customisation, and that the blasters you pick up lasts longer. But other than that, the enviorments, quests and the gameplay in other space i quite exciting.

I should have known not to buy this crashing ubisoft trash

Could've been soo much better. It almost hurts you to see the missed opportunity. Jaw dropping viusals, fantastic Star Wars world building, only to be companied with repetetive content, repetitive gunplay, bad facial expressions, bad take down animations, meh writing. However, it is a fun game... It feels good to be a part of this universe. I don't think it deserves the full price, recommended on sale.

Constantly crashes, terribly storyline, awful characters, and very cringy. I like the world you can explore and some of the combat is fun but Disney ruined Star Wars and its cool factor is zero. Not appealing, simply being driven to complete this game because I'm an addicted completionist. Glad I got it on sale and way after release.