A Very Good Star Wars Sandbox

As a big Star Wars fan and video game lover, I’ve long dreamed of a game just like Star Wars Outlaws: a massive open-world action game set in the Star Wars universe that would let me rub shoulders with Jabba the Hutt while freely exploring every inch of a planet like Tatooine. It’s wild that it took this long to finally get a true open-world Star Wars game. And while it has some frustrating flaws, the experience Outlaws offers is worth it.

In Star Wars Outlaws you play as thief Kay Vess, a young woman who has been on her own for many years now. The only person she trusts isn’t a person. Instead, it’s Nix, a small and very cute alien creature that acts as her pet, best friend, criminal partner, and little brother.

The game starts with the two of them getting into big trouble with a powerful and deadly criminal syndicate, Zerek Besh. They need a big score to earn their freedom and escape their fate. And that opportunity arrives in the form of Jaylan, a smooth-talking criminal who is planning a heist against the leader of Zerek Besh. He offers Kay a large cut of the credits and asks her to help him with putting together a crew to complete the big job. Kay’s not big on working with others, but she accepts the deal. To help her (and kill her if she betrays the plan) Jaylan partners her up with ND-5, aka the sexy robot people fell in love with last year. ND-5 is a cold BX commando droid. But as the game progresses, Kay and ND-5 start to respect and even like each other as she learns that it’s okay to trust people. Well, some people.

Without spoiling anything, I can say that ND-5’s role in the game surprised me. I wasn’t sure how much screen time he would get or how important he would be in Outlaws. I assumed he’d be around, maybe give some quests and help you a bit. In reality, a large chunk of this game’s narrative is dedicated to Kay’s friendship with ND-5, who doesn’t have free will due to a restraining bolt placed on him by Jaylan. Ubisoft and Massive devoting so much time to ND-5’s arc was a risk, but it paid off as it’s one of the best parts of Outlaws.

The amazing open world of Star Wars Outlaws

After you get past the opening hour, Outlaws opens up, letting you freely visit its planets and the space between them. Now, Outlaws isn’t No Man’s Sky or Starfield. There aren’t hundreds of planets or cities to visit. Instead, Outlaws focuses on quality over quantity. As such, there are only four worlds you can land on and explore: Tatooine, Akiva, Kijimi, and Toshara. And each planet contains a single large map to poke around. That might sound disappointing, but Ubisoft has packed these places with so much detail and so many opportunities that you can easily spend a dozen hours just walking around each one. And you should!

I was able to complete the main story of Outlaws in about 20 hours and it’s probably possible to mainline it and finish it even faster. But I wouldn’t recommend doing that. The best moments I had in Outlaws, and what I’m excited to do more of when I’m done writing this review, happened when I was just walking around Tatooine or Akiva and organically stumbled upon an activity or opportunity.

I can’t overstate how amazing it is to just walk around these digital recreations of famous Star Wars locations. Ubisoft and Massive have nailed every detail. Aliens look like they do in the movies. Every noise is perfect. Walking through Mos Eisley and seeing hundreds of aliens milling around made me feel like I had just been transported into a scene from the movies. As a big fan of the franchise, visiting these planets was one of the coolest things I’ve experienced in a video game.

One time I was walking through the bustling streets of Mos Eisley and eavesdropped on a conversation about some stolen loot hidden in a cave. I traveled to the area and found it, but got ambushed by some bandits. I fled on my hoverbike, escaped, and then found myself near an Imperial camp. Sneaking in and looking around, I was able to grab some credits and resources but also found a datapad with information on an Imperial officer. I sold that info to the Hutts for a pretty penny and then realized it was like 2 am and I needed to go to sleep.

Outlaws feels less like the checklist simulator that so many open-world games have become, and more like a living world that reacts to you and which is also filled with secrets and things to do. You just have to take a moment to slow down and look around. But don’t get too distracted by the gorgeously rendered and wonderfully accurate planets of Outlaws, as this is still Star Wars, where crime, action, and danger are always around.

Balancing the criminal underworld

Kay’s goal of building a heist crew to take on a big criminal gang inevitably leads to her interacting with other criminal syndicates and outlaws. In the game, you’ll interact with four main syndicates: The Pykes, Crimson Dawn, The Hutts led by Jabba, and the Ashiga Clan.

Each gang will offer you jobs and missions. Succeed and you’ll build a reputation with each syndicate. If a gang likes you a lot, you can freely explore their turf, receive discounts when buying items from their vendors, and even get some fun gifts and exclusive contracts to complete, too. However, if you fail a contract, betray a gang, or upset them in some other way (like attacking their members or stealing), you’ll lose rep. And if you lose too much, you can eventually become hated by that gang, leading them to shoot you on sight and barring you from exploring some areas of the game without sneaking around to avoid conflict.

Balancing the four gangs is a key part of Outlaws. It can change how you complete missions, even main story quests. For example, a campaign mission might ask you to go to a specific location to meet someone to scout out a camp and then attack. But the starting spot might be located in Hutt turf and if they currently hate you, it will be much harder to start the mission. On the flip side, if they like you, then you’ll just be able to walk in and not worry about it.

It’s also fun to play gangs against each other, to earn more credits and resources, which lets you upgrade your spaceship as well as your speeder bike.

Perhaps you start a mission helping the Pykes protect a convoy of goods. But then Crimson Dawn calls and says, “Hey, why don’t you actually destroy that convoy, bring us the goods, and we’ll pay you twice as much!” At that point, you’ll have to make a call. Maybe the Pykes already think you are the best, so you can afford to lose some rep with them to make more money. Or maybe they hate your guts and betraying them will make your life harder. But perhaps double the credits is worth it? This balancing act can lead to some truly tough choices and makes even small side quests and contracts feel important and meaningful. Regardless of which gang you help or betray, most of the missions and jobs in Outlaws involve stealth and combat. And it’s here that I think some players might run into trouble.

Sneaking and blasting your way through the galaxy

Stealth is a big part of Star Wars Outlaws and in the game’s second half, you spend a lot of time infiltrating bases filled with guards and alarms. Sometimes you can’t trigger an alarm or you’ll fail the mission, so you have to be really careful.

Sadly, sneaking around places feels extremely inconsistent in Outlaws. Sometimes I’d get spotted from halfway across the map by one random trooper. Other times I’d be next to three different enemies and none of them would see me. You can hide in bushes, but that doesn’t always work. And enemies sometimes could hear me, but then later were oblivious to my heavy footsteps.

Thankfully, you can usually go loud and fight your way out of most situations, which I found more fun and wound up doing often. But when the game demands stealth, it felt like I needed luck on my side to succeed. Eventually, I did get better at sneaking around. It also helped that I unlocked some useful upgrades via the game’s expert system, which has you completing challenges from different people to unlock new skills and perks.

But still, I never found myself excited to sneak around in Outlaws. On the other hand, I almost always had a good time blasting my way out of a situation.

Combat in Outlaws feels hectic and messy, which feels perfectly suited for the Star Wars universe. You only have one main blaster in the game and can’t permanently pick up and store other weapons. Your main blaster has four options. A plasma bolt setting that can kill most things, an electrical mode that fries droids and shields, and a heavy option that can blow up rocks and take out groups of enemies. (And there’s a quick stun option always available as a secondary fire, but it uses a cooldown.) As I upgraded and modified my single blaster and its options, I didn’t mind that I only had one gun because it felt like I had four and they all served their purpose during combat and helped out with puzzle-solving outside firefights.

Still, there are times when you might want a bigger blaster to take out a large group of Deathtroopers or droids, and Outlaws lets you pick up enemy weapons to temporarily gain an edge in fights. You can even order Nix to grab you a stormtrooper blaster and bring it to you while you take cover. These enemy weapons can’t be stored or improved.

It might seem like an odd choice, but I think it works. Instead of showing up to fights with five amazing guns like you might in Far Cry, you arrive with one blaster and your trusty pet Nix, and have to improvise the rest. Moving around, shooting, and taking cover in Outlaws is smooth and responsive enough that improvising in firefights is fun and satisfying, letting me live out my Han Solo fantasies. Telling Nix to attack someone, then sliding over cover, punching them in the face, grabbing their blaster, shooting a few other people, and then tossing a grenade at some other enemies before rolling out of the way never got boring.

Do enough of this cool stuff and you can slow down time, mark enemies, and take them out Red Dead Redemption style. It’s a neat trick, though it does feel a bit out of character with Kay Vess, who is never presented as an expert gunslinger. But whatever, it’s so cool that I’ll look the other way.

On the opposite side of cool is space exploration. Heading out into space and flying through shipwrecks and nebulas should be awesome. But space is unfortunately the weakest part of Outlaws. Exploring space is dull, unrewarding, and tedious due to how heavy and stiff your ship feels when maneuvering it. Space in Outlaws also never offers the same organic flow of discovery that on-foot planet exploration provides.

The problem is that, in addition to your ship not being great to control, the space around each planet feels small, isolated, and empty. And, yes, I know that in real life space is mostly empty, but that doesn’t translate to much fun in a video game. Off planet, combat isn’t much better, as it is way too easy to survive big fights against TIE fighters or pirates, and with a few upgrades, I turned into an unbeatable space tank. At least space exploration in Outlaws is a fairly small part of the game and hey, you never have to sneak around in a spaceship. So that’s nice, I guess.

The best way to visit the Star Wars universe

Yet, despite some annoying stealth sections, a few problematic bugs, and space exploration being mostly disappointing, I still adore Ubisoft’s open-world Star Wars adventure.

The first time I landed on Tatooine in Star Wars Outlaws, I’ll admit I had a big, dumb grin on my face. And that smile didn’t go away as I jumped on my hoverbike and sped around the photorealistic recreation of the famous desert planet seen in so many Star Wars movies. Plenty of Star Wars games have included this iconic (and admittedly overused) world before. But none let me truly, really explore it and poke at every perfectly rendered dune, rock, cave, building, and crevice for hours and hours.

On Tatooine, I found a random moisture farmer who needed help with his droid. I visited Tosche Station. I met some Jawas. I leaned up against the famous Cantina bar and overheard a dozen alien conversions around me as the band played in the background. Playing Outlaws is the closest I’ve ever felt to actually visiting the Star Wars universe.

And that’s the thing that I love most about the game. Yes, the story of putting together a crew to pull off a heist is great. And yeah, working with and against criminal gangs led by people like Jabba is fun. And I love ND-5 and Nix, too! But what I appreciate the most about Star Wars Outlaws is that finally, after all these years of watching the movies, I can step into the Star Wars universe and just exist in it.

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