Star Wars Outlaws review: a perfectly ok bit of star war

When we talk about a game having a sense of place, it’s often about how adroitly it covers up the necessary falsehoods of a world contrived to accommodate the player character. It’s the good kind of lie. One with purpose, like Lucas smearing vaseline over the camera lens to cover up the landspeeder’s wheels. Star Wars Outlaws, then, is a strange case. Because while its planets and cities do feel ersatz as living places, they’re kind of incredible as film sets. That’s your job here. This is where the game is. You don’t play it so much as you perform your role in a series of loving, enthusiastic callbacks. That’s a star war. This is a star war. Oh, hey, I know that! That’s one of my favourite star warses.

“For the burglar, every building is infinite, endlessly weaving back into itself,” writes Geoff Manaugh in A Burglar’s Guide To The City. For Outlaw’s half-inching hero Kay Vess, the streets and crime dens of Mirogana unfold more linearly; less weaves, more straight shots through living blueprints with heist plans factored in from conception. Its pet doors and vents don’t require a seasoned burglar’s ingenuity to shine out like beacons above dune-dusted market canopies - Kay’s felony gremlin Nix can sniff them out. "Cities get the crimes their design calls for", says Manaugh. Virtual cities like Mirogana get the type of crime their two, sometimes three, alternative routes to a big score dictate.

But Kay will have to enter the city first, having fled her own planet after a job goes (inciting incidentally) wrong. Approaching a stormtrooper checkpoint, Vess grabs the hems of her jacket and stoops slightly, making her look about a thousand times more suspicious than before. The Empire’s finest scan her ID. She walks through, and as soon as she’s two feet past the checkpoint, she bellows “Glad I got that fake identicard!”

She’s lucky the city’s built for her, honestly.

In brief: What you’re getting here is a conceptually stale though still reasonably pleasant potpourri of The Witcher 3 (Vess takes on gun-for-hire quests with choices at the end, and also plays cards), Watch Dogs (she’s sneaky, Nix is effectively a remote hacking gizmo), and Uncharted (she climbs yellow things. You can make them not yellow if you want.) There’s a bit of Far Cry 3 (enemy camps, binocular tagging), and a bit of Red Dead Redemption 2 (wanted levels, gambling minigames, the spaghetti western sauce stains on Lucas’s lenses.) Ghost Of Tsushima was also namechecked as a focal reference by creative director Julian Gerighty. Cinematically? Sure, but none of that game’s notables (diegetic map guidance, novel checklist items, flowing stealth) are present here.

Outlaws is at its best when it smelts its hodgepodge of duct-taped systems into shiny coins for you to pop in the jukebox of Star Wars wish-fulfilment hits, and lets you clumsily copy the choreography. It’s hard to find the rhythm in combat that’s only ever tense because most scraps feature at least one variety of dude that can one or two-shot Kay, in which she can safely blind fire from cover with perfect accuracy. But there’s familiar joy in the panto participation of holding off waves of stormtroopers while your crew get the loading bay to your ship working; in hearing that elastic blaster pew echo about the docking bay.

It’s hard to get lost in the scoundrel fantasy of stealth that lets you knock out an imperial officer in the middle of conversation with a subordinate to no suspicion; that lets you drop loudly from a walkway a few feet away from an oblivious stormtrooper, only to take him down with one of several ponderous, bubble-wrapped canned animations. But there’s still fun in the performance of outsmarting science fiction’s most famously maladroit mooks, even if all you’re doing is keeping crouching pace with the reverse side of a floating baggage carrier.

And a performance it all remains, because there’s no real sense of the planets you visit being much more than themed tour destinations, though striking and quite lively ones. The constant contextual scenery interactions give the sense of an intermediary between you and the world, like you have to keep checking with the gaffer it’s safe to climb up some barrels in case you knock over a light. Even climbing a ladder feels like asking permission from it. Kay doesn’t jump to or clamber up ledges, she zips to them like a magnet, as if the acting force is coming from the rock face rather than her.

If you want me to have a strong opinion on yellow paint, you will have to come do a long, dehydrated wee in the pot of Dulux Brilliant White I’m currently painting my ceilings with. I can take it or - providing you highlight the way out for me in bright yellow - leave it, because games like Outlaws actually vex me more when they suddenly expect me to use my brain after lulling me into a pleasant numbness. It’s not an exciting way to design a game, but it is at least consistent in its concessions to a head zonked from whatever else life threw at you that day. There’s value in that, even if there’s not much aspiration beyond hewing close to a proven formula for a safe product.

So here’s something I have to praise on principle, even if I think it’s a little misguided given said lazy numbness. Most climbing bits in Outlaws break up ledges and nets with either giant fans that periodically blast Kay down a death pit if she jumps at the wrong time, or moving blocks that can knock her off. Environmental hazards?! In my blockbuster climbing section! I know, low bar. But you play enough gritty realist Playmobil sets, a wall made of Lego starts to look downright intricate.

Space fares better. A braver game might have gone more Freelancer, scrapped the open plains and expanded the trading for parts and conceptually interesting but otherwise minimally impactful faction reputation: you have to sneak into some areas rather than walk through them. Certain side jobs aren’t available if you anger the wrong syndicate. Affiliated merchants will sell you cheaper, better gear.

Still, there’s some lovely detail in what might have otherwise been a fast travel menu between planets. Target points show you where to aim at hostile ships to account for laser drop-off. Your wing and boosters spread out like a mechanised bird when you increase thrusters. The space above Toshara is a gorgeous mess of junk particles and rusted debris flung across ochre nebulae, like clouds of disturbed sand at low tide, and further planets reward similarly beautiful atmospheres. Outlaws is not a breathtaking game to look at, but I’d bet you a lot of its concept art is.

If I had money to burn, I might even spend some on a special edition art book. And even if Kay’s fur-axolotl companion Nix chewed up the spine, I still don’t think I’d be able to take him out on the patio and punt him over a fence. This, folks, is how you endear your obligatory star war merchandise creature to the audience. Firstly, he’s just incredibly useful. One moment, he’s rolling about in front of a camera, play-acting a spleen explosion so Kay can sneak past. The next, he’s activating a switch on the other side of a laser barrier. As I said, it’s Watch Dogs. He can even activate explosive barrels in tiny increments, so you can time the last blip for an explosion when some stormtroopers walk past.

This is where the game gets Star Wars the most; a universe as much about animatronic gribblies making squeaky noises as anything else. It’s not only Nix’s practical benefits - the relationship between him and Kay make for the game’s most authentic and touching story beats. She’s not especially convincing as a blasé Han Solo type, but I absolutely buy her as a hard working pet owner who just wants to provide the best life possible for her beloved crime gremlin.

Authentic, too, are the small moments. Tatooine’s cities feel like dioramas, but a tucked-away junk shop is all sparking wires, dust motes, and droid chatter. You can practically smell the soldering. Alien bands in cantina alcoves score brilliantly animated and reasonably fun Sabacc matches. For a game that will not allow Kay to enjoy a meal without first performing a quicktime event, Outlaws at least populates its dioramas with healthy smatterings of interactables, simple minigames, and wayward souls you can cheer up with a quick chat.

It can be very endearing in these smaller moments, but it still all feels bit false, a bit watery. And it manages to draw out tedium at times that should be breezy. “The core goes here, I guess?” muses Kay as she ponderously slots a battery into a door, finally letting me through many seconds after I politely ask the game to let me progress. But escaping an imperial station on high alert, only to find my mate waiting with speeder bikes outside, then zipping through a chase across sand dunes evokes a certain dusky Star Wars thrill like little else before it. I don’t love Outlaws, but I’m not mad at it. The clipped hug this fish lady gave me was too nice for that: