When Star Wars Outlaws released on console and PC in August 2024, many gamers likely dismissed it as Assassin’s Creed with Star Wars flavor. I initially enjoyed the world and its characters in the game’s admittedly slow opening hours. But as the wider galaxy opened up and I found myself on the first “open world” planet, I started noticing those familiar signs of Ubisoft open world games, the intimidating map size, the “checkbox” style exploration where you go to a point of interest (POI), complete one of three activities (stealth, combat, or puzzle) and earn a small, ultimately meaningless reward for your efforts. Repeat ad nauseam for 100 hours. At that point I put the game down, confident I would return to it someday.
A New Hope
What excited me most about the release of the Switch 2 wasn’t the promise of a new Zelda or Mario game; it was playing optimized ports of 3rd party games that have been collecting dust in my backlog. I was more excited to get my hands on Elden Ring than I was Donkey Kong Bananza. The original Switch was home to two of what I think are the perfect apps for a portable console, Skyrim and Stardew Valley, and I was eager to get into some long, time-consuming RPGs on my shiny new hardware. Enter Star Wars Outlaws, the plucky Ubisoft game that was a spectacular commercial failure on its cousin hardware, given new life on Nintendo’s shiny new toy. The recent port of Cyberpunk 2077 gave me some hope that the graphically impressive Star Wars Outlaws might survive the transition, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the “technical miracles” of Switch ports like The Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come Deliverance. Plus, the type of open-world activities are perfect for a portable.
I won’t get into a ton of technical details about the Switch 2 port, but needless to say, it is by far the new gold standard for Switch 2 ports moving forward. So little is lost in the transition that I often completely forgot I was playing on hardware that’s essentially little more than a high-end Android tablet. Sure, the framerate is capped at a fairly stable 30fps, and there’s definitely been a reduction in environmental detail, but the AI upscaling does the job. Ubisoft even managed to include ray tracing on top of the already impressive visuals. The only places where upscaling struggles are in the finer details, such as protagonist Kay Vess’s hair, which sometimes looks slightly cloudy. Particle effects like smoke or dust can also cause the upscaling to blur the entire scene into a murky gray image. While impressive results, it’s a common issue I see in games making heavy use of AI scaling. But those details tend to disappear as you find yourself immersed in a classic Star Wars experience, one I was able to enjoy on a cross-country flight or Philly hotel room.
It’s about family, that’s what’s so powerful about it
Taking place shortly after the events of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars Outlaws tells the story of Kay Vess, an orphan in the casino city of Canto Bight, a familiar location to fans of recent Star Wars media. Kay and her adorable pet, half-dog, half-gremlin companion, Nix, struggle to escape their lives of petty crime and thievery, dreaming of a future where they explore the stars. An opportunity presents itself in the form of a daring vault heist of local crime lord Zerek Bresh, but as these things do, the caper quickly goes south and Kay finds herself in a stolen starship, on the run from one of the most powerful criminal empires in the galaxy.
Star Wars Outlaws is, at its heart, a heist story, as Kay travels the galaxy recruiting allies and tools to pull off another run at Bresh’s vault. The story plays it relatively safe, but in classic Star Wars fashion, Kay quickly finds herself in the middle of a greater galactic conflict between the rebels and the empire, as well as dealing with several criminal outfits where loyalty is paramount but quickly ignored in favor of fortune. Along the way, the once independent Kay opens up to her new crew, finding a place and family in the least likely way. While a rather by-the-book Star Wars story, it was refreshing not to see a single lightsaber throughout the entire 40-hour game. Exploring the fantasy of being Han Solo rather than an all-powerful Jedi shows how much storytelling potential there still is in Star Wars, if developers would just have the discipline to explore other parts of the rich universe.
Speaking of criminal elements, one of the game’s defining features is the interplay between the multiple criminal outfits. Kay is always running missions for one or another, and the player is frequently presented with opportunities to double-cross their current bosses in favor of lucrative rewards. The cost is a loss of faction with the betrayed, closing off access to merchants and making it more difficult to traverse their territories. However, this feature is disappointingly unimportant, as factions can easily be farmed through endless randomly generated missions, and the consequences for betrayal often amount to angry fist raising and shouts of “we won’t forget this, Kay Vess!”, which are almost instantly forgotten.
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid
While comparisons to Ubisoft’s open-world Assassin’s Creed are inevitable considering the developer’s pedigree, it becomes quickly apparent that this is very much an abridged version of that experience. There’s no experience or leveling system to speak of, Kay learns new skills through friends she makes along the way. Each new skill has either a few skill challenges (kill a few enemies with headshots, cheat at the addictive card game “Sabbac”) as well as some items usually acquired from raiding a dangerous imperial base or seeking out a rare merchant. In a sense, the open world simply serves as a connecting bridge between set pieces, something we’ve never seen Ubisoft disciplined enough to do until now, and the results are very refreshing. It’s almost like they looked at the recent copy+paste gameplay of landmarks in their games and got rid of all that, distilling the open world down into what’s important.
And that’s a good thing, as the actual gameplay of Outlaws starts to outstay its welcome and wouldn’t hold up to a massive 100 hour adventure, as gameplay boils down to either Assassins Creed-like stealth sections, Uncharted-like climbing/exploring sections, or surprisingly competent space combat sections that vaguely reminds me of the excellent and oft-overlooked Star Wars Squadrons released by EA back in 2019. Gunplay makes the unusual choice of only giving you Kay’s customizable default blaster, other weapons are only offered as temporary “power-ups” that are disposed of when ammo is expended, not exactly canon-friendly. Not to say any of the gameplay is bad, it’s all done competently, but you do start to feel fatigue as you find yourself once again breaking into yet another imperial base or having to outrun a gang of speederbike thugs for the sixth time. And at the very least, the game delivers both a hacking and a locking mini-game that I didn’t hate. Also, the aforementioned Sabbac, which is probably the best interpretation of the infamous Star Wars card game that I’ve seen yet.
Hey, whose scruffy looking?
All of this is wrapped up in a very shiny coat of paint. On PS5, XBSX, and PC, Outlaws is an absolute graphic standout, on par with some of the best games of this generation. Ubisoft once again flexes the power of its Snowdrop engine, providing one of the most immersive and detailed open-world games on the market. And of course, on Switch 2, the game is nothing short of a technical miracle.
Of course, if you’re doing Star Wars, it needs to sound like Star Wars, and while the sound design is absolutely impeccable and spot on, the music did leave me wanting. Few original tracks from the films are used, instead relying on original pieces composed to sound vaguely like classic Star Wars music. Nothing stood out as particularly memorable, forgettable at best, but serviceable.
Another ding is the odd learning curve of the user interface and user experience. The game puts an unusual amount of emphasis on pressing R3, since it’s used for almost everything, from picking up items to swinging from ropes and hacking terminals. It never felt quite right, especially since the action could have been mapped to one of the four main buttons. Overall, it was a perplexing choice. Furthermore, the game’s menu screens and map have a bit of a learning curve and some frustrations, like the unusual amount of time it takes to transition from city map to world map to galaxy map when you need to fast travel. The game’s various quest trackers and mini-compass can also be a confusing mess.
Come on, let’s keep a little optimism here
As of this writing, Star Wars Outlaws was an out-and-out commercial failure, failing to sell even a million units in its first month out the door. This led to a drastic drop in Ubisoft’s stock price, a cancelled sequel, and a re-evaluation of third-party IP-based games for one of the biggest publishers on the planet. It’s a shame that more people didn’t give Star Wars Outlaws a proper shake, but understandable when you look at the greater picture, where even the most ardent Star Wars fan might be feeling a bit of franchise fatigue.
Still, the bones are there for what could be a great new model to Ubisoft’s ubiquitous open world games, a recognition that maybe these games don’t need to be 100+ hour marathons, where distilling them down to just the fun parts makes the game a manageable experience. And as a stand-alone Star Wars experience (I’m pretty sure the game’s financial performance means it’ll be a cold day on Tatooine before a sequel is ever greenlit), I’m a little saddened we likely aren’t going to continue the adventures of Kay Vess and her crew of space rogues anytime soon. Star Wars Outlaws has the distinction of being one of the few games that immerses you in Star Wars. Instead of the constant warfare of the Battlefront series or the power fantasy of the Jedi series, Outlaws exists in a weird space where its content just lets you hang out in a cantina, listening to conversations around you and simply existing within its universe. It’s a feeling that hasn’t really been captured since the seminal MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, where you can be an ordinary person in a galaxy filled with space wizards and laser swords. For all those kids who wanted to be Han Solo instead of Luke Skywalker, Outlaws is the perfect world to live that fantasy.