Review: STAR WARS OUTLAWS Sneak Attacks with Charms and Thrills

At the end of August, Ubisoft released Star Wars Outlaws. The game has you playing as the scoundrel Kay Vess as she tries to make a name for herself in the galaxy between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The game is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S and while Ubisoft did supply me with a PC copy of the game for this review, all thoughts below are my own. If you want to play the game, you can buy it from your favorite stores including GameStop (affiliate link).

Experience the first-ever open world Star Wars™ game, set between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Explore distinct locations across the galaxy, both iconic and new. Risk it all as Kay Vess, a scoundrel seeking freedom and the means to start a new life, along with her companion Nix. Fight, steal, and outwit your way through the galaxy’s crime syndicates as you join the galaxy’s most wanted.

I was honestly a little hesitant to play Outlaws at first because the one or two trailers that I watched did not impress me. It was mostly just a lot of the animation feeling off, but I recently started playing Jedi Survivor so I got hyped to play another Star Wars game. My last note before we get to the main review is that I did not play any of Outlaws on my Steam Deck; it was all on my gaming PC with the following specs:

• CPU - AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

• GPU - AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

• RAM - 32GB 3600 MT/s

• Resolution - 1440p

I want to start the review by saying that I do not think that Star Wars Outlaws is a perfect game, but I have had a ton of fun playing it. On my PC, I started with the High presets for graphics and it ran really smooth even after a little tweaking to improve the visuals. While in interior environments, it was common for me to hit 130-150+ fps and while in exterior environments, I’d be able to maintain somewhere in the 90-100 fps mark with occasional dips to the 70s or 80s. I could probably tweak things more, but I decided that it looked fine and I’d rather play the game than get sucked down that rabbit hole. I did find it interesting that the game defaults to a 21:9 aspect ratio, but you can adjust to Fill Screen if you prefer. I will agree that the 21:9 feels more cinematic, but I also felt that it made everything a little too small on my 16:9 monitor and so I mostly played with Fill Screen. Another tip I have is to go into the settings and unlock the frame rate for the cinematics. By default, they play at 30 fps which is disappointing in my opinion. I wish you could lock it to 60 fps as an option, but unlocked did fine as those cinematics often fell between 70-90 fps minimum. My one graphical complaint (and a minor one at that) was that I thought that a lot of the hair ranged from looking just okay to terrible during gameplay. During cinematics, the hair actually looked really good.

Overall, the controls for Outlaws are really good. You can use a mouse and keyboard or a controller, so pick your poison. I personally preferred the mouse and keyboard for everything except the vehicles. Whether it was the speeder or the spaceship, I found that the controller just felt a lot better to use for those. That’s always a frustrating thing to me. I wish that vehicles felt better to use with a mouse and keyboard in all games.

The audio in Outlaws sounds really good in my opinion. The various sound effects are solid, the voices are good, and I really enjoy the theme song. I don’t really have any complaints about the sound. They did a great job.

I have not finished the story, but I have enjoyed it. Without getting into spoilers, you end up on the bad side of a syndicate as you try to leave your home on Cantonica and try to survive and make a name for yourself with other syndicates across the galaxy. Now, one thing I am a little disappointed in is how after about 9-10 hours, I have only been to two planets: Cantonica which makes up probably the first hour (that might even be generous) and Toshara. I haven’t gone crazy with side quests and so I was kind of hoping by now I would have been to at least one of the other worlds like Kijimi or Tatooine. According to HowLongtoBeat, I am probably about one third to one half of the way done. I just would have expected a bit more movement between planets (I am not counting an Imperial outpost that you have to sneak aboard).

One thing that surprised me a little about Outlaws is how much stealth is key to the game. I’m used to and enjoy games where there is a stealth element such as Assassin’s Creed. However, most of those games don’t force you to stealth. If crap hits the fan, you are typically able to fight your way out of a situation. In Outlaws, that is not always an option. Sometimes you can do that, but it can often be difficult because you’re not meant to go in guns blazing. There are plenty of times though where if you fail being stealthy, then you have to restart from the last checkpoint. I think it really fits thematically and in an era of games where stealth is encouraged but not mandatory, it feels nice to have a new stealth-focused game.

There are a number of other things that I enjoy in Outlaws. I enjoy playing Sabacc. I like how reputation shifts and how gaining favor with one syndicate can cause you to lose favor with another, adding a level of politics. So far, I have also not run into any characters that I thought were poorly written or unlikable.

One of my small complaints is that when you’re running around, there are certain spaces where you automatically slow down such as in cantinas. It’s just a little frustrating when you’re trying to hurry turning in a quest or picking up a quest and all of a sudden your movement is slowed to a crawl.

Now I want to talk about the crown jewel of Outlaws: Nix. Nix is a merqaal and a companion of Kay Vess. He is the best little guy in a Star Wars video game. Not only is he adorable, but very helpful. You can tell Nix to perform a variety of actions such as fetch items, open doors, trigger switches, steal from NPCs, attack enemies, and even distract them to make those stealthy missions a bit easier. All of that pales in comparison to the greatest interaction with Nix. You can pull out your gun outside of combat and if you look at Nix, Kay will say “pew pew” and Nix will play dead. It is one of the best things to come from video games this year for sure.

Star Wars Outlaws is a fun game with a new story for the Star Wars universe. I personally enjoy the gameplay and characters. Outside of the hair, the game looks good and I feel like I’m in Star Wars. And of course, the game has Nix who I would die for. I cannot say that the game is worth $70 to everyone, but what I will say is that I genuinely think that for some it will be worth it. If your situation doesn’t allow that or if you’re really hesitant, I would definitely recommend grabbing it when it goes on sale.