Star Wars Outlaws review: perfectly fine open-world in an incredible universe

Star Wars Outlaws isn’t a game you play because you want to experience the most innovative open world. It’s not full of ideas that will shake up the genre, and its structure and gameplay can get pretty repetitive. In a lot of ways, it’s standard stuff. But for a certain kind of player, none of that will matter. Because what makes Outlaws notable is the Star Wars part — it’s an average open-world game but an incredible Star Wars simulator.

The game takes place between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and puts players in the role of Kay Vess, a low-level criminal who gets in way over her head very quickly. She’s a wise-cracking Han Solo type with an adorable companion named Nix who is half puppy, half axolotl. The setup is a cliche crime caper: Kay joins a crew to pull off one huge score, with plans to retire safely on all the cash she’s about to steal. Things go sideways, and not only is Kay left penniless — she has also pissed off an incredibly rich and powerful member of the criminal underworld. Whoops!

From there, the story takes an interesting turn, and the rest of the game is spent preparing for another crack at the loot. That means Kay has to build up her underworld credentials by taking on jobs, find a crew that can help pull off the heist successfully, and generally improve her skills and gear for a better shot. It’s a fun premise that works well with the open-world structure, ensuring everything you do in the game is building toward a big payoff at the end.

Perhaps the most unique thing about the game is the way factions work. There are four criminal syndicates you’ll be dealing with, and your status with them will change over the course of the game depending on what you do. Taking on a mission to appease the Crimson Dawn might piss off their rivals, for instance, and dealing with them all can feel like spinning plates. Getting in the good graces of a gang opens up new mission paths and other opportunities, while angering them can make certain areas off limits and — if things get really bad — have them attack you on sight. It doesn’t fundamentally change the game, but the structure does force you to make some interesting and occasionally tough decisions about whose side you’re on.

Much like with the Star Wars Jedi series, if you’re simply looking to be taken to a galaxy far, far away, Outlaws is a great option. There’s nothing quite like racing across the deserts of Tatooine on a speeder bike or landing on a new planet and heading into the local cantina to ask around. All of the details — the visuals, the sound, the storylines — feel perfectly like, well, Star Wars. Like you’re in one of the movies, able to walk around and soak in the details.

I always love market scenes in fantasy and sci-fi; they’re a great way to quickly get a sense of the culture of a place at a glance. And I spent far too much time in Outlaws wandering around snapping photos of street food vendors and watching patrons in cantinas. It’s not only a way to feel immersed in Star Wars in a way that’s impossible in other mediums, but it often pays to linger; multiple times, I leaned against a wall on a crowded street, only to overhear details for an interesting side quest.

Part of what makes this work is how dense Outlaws is. As opposed to, say, Starfield or No Man’s Sky, sci-fi games that offer giant — but mostly empty — planets to explore, Outlaws is more practical in scale. There are a handful of worlds, and while each has some open expanses to drive through, most of your time is spent in cities, settlements, bases, and other detailed and busy spaces. This doesn’t make Outlaws feel small, but rather more human in scope. You don’t need to spend hours scouring through nothingness to feel like you’ve seen what the game has to offer.

The problem is that what you’re doing at any given moment is largely identical to every other open-world game of the last few years. The missions revolve around either sneaking into an enemy base to steal something or going somewhere to collect an item and return it. There’s lots of crawling through vents, disabling cameras and alarms, and shootouts with very dumb stormtroopers and criminal thugs. Sometimes, you have a choice for how you approach a mission — you might sneak in the back door, versus going in guns blazing — but mostly, the moment-to-moment action follows a familiar pattern.

As opposed to a game like Tears of the Kingdom, where you have the tools to approach missions in inventive ways, in Outlaws, you’re largely following one of a handful of predetermined paths. Worse still, the game often forces you into specific modes, most notably some very tedious stealth sequences. It’s a structure seen across so many games in the genre, from Assassin’s Creed to Horizon to Ghost of Tsushima; I was having a lot of Starfield flashbacks during my playthrough.

How much you enjoy your time with Outlaws will depend on how much you want to live this fantasy. The underworld of Star Wars has always had some of the universe’s most interesting stories and characters, and here’s a chance to experience it all firsthand. That involves some plodding missions and conventional gameplay, which can be a tough sell if you’re burned out on open-world games already. But when you’re on edge infiltrating Jabba’s palace or enjoying the sights and sounds of the bustling Canto Bight, it’s easy to forget all of that for a few blissful moments.

Star Wars Outlaws launches August 30th on the PC, Xbox, and PS5.