GameCentral spends several hours with Ubisoft’s new Star Wars game, but how different is it to their other open world titles?
We’ll no doubt mention this again in the review but for decades now Lucasfilm Games has dedicated themselves to making every Star Wars game imaginable, except for the one we’ve always wanted: a Han Solo simulator. Actually, that’s not quite true, despite having helped produce many great Star Wars games in their time, the X-Wing series of space combat simulators are the only ones to match perfectly with what we wanted and always imagined.
That is one of the central problems of Star Wars media, in that every fan has their own very specific idea of what they want and considers every failure to provide it as a betrayal of their loyalty. Nevertheless, there is so much left on the table, even from just the first three movies, that it’s baffling that so much time is wasted with rubbish like Star Wars Hunters or the nth version of Battlefront. Especially when we’ve still never had a decent game featuring bounty hunters (and yes, we know all about the remaster of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter).
The biggest appeal of Outlaws is that it deals primarily with the sordid underbelly of the Star Wars universe, which despite providing most of the best live action content since Disney took over is still sorely underrepresented in terms of games. Here, you get to play as a low-level thief called Kay Vess, who is trying to make a name for herself with the galaxy’s four biggest criminal gangs, while stockpiling the resources and skills necessary to take on a major heist, that is the focus of the story campaign.
Publisher Ubisoft constantly refers to Kay as a ‘scoundrel’ and yet despite over three hours of hands-on gameplay we’ve yet to see her do anything particularly roguish. As Alden Ehrenreich has already discovered, there’s only one Harrison Ford and it’s impossible to recast any of his most iconic characters. Even so, Kay still comes across as disappointingly bland. She’s not funny, or overly cocky, and it’s not clear that she’s got any substantial character arc to follow.
She’s not exactly alone in that, when it comes to video game action stars, but while we didn’t get to see the opening cut scenes – so are missing some of the context of her story – it all seems pretty straightforward. You could say the same about the game as a whole, which is, perhaps predictably, spliced together with elements from a dozen other titles, many of them from Ubisoft itself.
Assassin’s Creed provides the biggest slice of the pie, with large open world areas (there are multiple planets) filled with side quests. But there’s also a greater emphasis on stealth than is normal for a Star Wars game, with far more time spent in air vents than we were expecting. The movement and platforming is more similar to Uncharted, while the ability to use Kay’s alien pet Nix to distract guards or set off machinery is functionally identical to Watch Dogs.
One of the many things we’ve never felt Star Wars games get right is the feeling of blaster combat, with even Battlefield managing to make the gunplay feel weedy and unsatisfying. Here it feels more insubstantial than ever, made worse by the ability to tag enemies while in cover and shoot them all instantly without even aiming, which seems a strangely advanced ability for a young up-and-comer like Kay to have.
Her other skills include using a grappling hook, and her gun having a stun setting. What difference this makes we’re not sure, but we assume it affects your overall reputation. She can also lockpick and hack computers, but these may have been skills unlocked earlier in the story. Either way they’re horribly inane, with the hacking being a thinly veiled version of Wordle and lockpicking being a rhythm action mini-game that we turned off almost instantly via the accessibility options.
The end result of this is that Outlaws plays… fine. The gameplay is as unoriginal as it’s possible to be but functionally it does its job. The days of Star Wars video games being as innovative as the movies themselves are long gone and while we did find the gunplay disappointing, the rest is perfectly competent on a mechanical level.
If that sounds like the faintest praise possible you might be right but there is more to the game than that, which is no doubt why Ubisoft made sure to organise such a long preview event.
The first major positive is… it’s Star Wars. Obviously, your mileage will vary on how big a draw that is, but the open world planets are something we’ve never really seen outside of MMOs. There was an open world element to the Star Wars Jedi games but the level design there is more abstract and gamified, which made sense given the influence from Dark Souls et al.
In Outlaws, and this is not a criticism, they’ve gone full Ubisoft, with a giant map teaming with side quests and distractions. Many of these distractions are simply watching a Star Wars world going about its business, with aliens and humans mixing in bars, Imperial troops bullying the locals, and droids wandering around as they please.
It was difficult to see the fidelity of the graphics when they were being streamed at low resolution but the overall impression was of a technically impressive game that looks exactly like it should. We visited two different planets – one a generic wilderness world and the other the Tibetan-looking city from The Rise of Skywalker – and as far as we understand you can move between any of them whenever you like.
We weren’t allowed to control that ourselves in the demo but were instead moved on to a later save where you start out in space, where again there’s lots of tempting side quests. This included what seems to be mining and rescuing helpless freighters, and some competent space combat.
It’s not exactly X-Wing but, unlike Starfield, we did manage to get outmanoeuvred occasionally, while trying to weave around. We’d have to play it more to make a final judgement but at this stage it certainly seems more interesting, and skill-based, than the ground combat.
The other area where Outlaws seems to be doing something different is the way that Kay has to balance her relationship with the four major powers. Doing a job for one often ends up upsetting another, which not only changes whether they’ll hire you but what areas you can enter unopposed and whether people will try to shoot you on sight.
What’s also interesting is that in order to learn new skills you have to go out into the world(s) and find someone that’s an expert in it to teach you, which is a neat idea. Again, we’d have to see how this plays out at length to see whether it’s just window-dressing or a genuine innovation, but it did seem to make side quests feel more purposeful and rewarding.
And that’s all we can really say at this stage, except that the other thing we’re optimistic about is that despite having multiple worlds to explore the developers have made a point of saying that this isn’t intended to be some 200+ hour epic, but something that can be beaten in a much more manageable timeframe.
The fact that we’ve got to the point where that is a major selling point says a lot about the current state of open world game design but if Outlaws’ only achievement is to promote a lack of bloat then it will still have been worthwhile.
We’re also interested to see how the heist comes together and whether it does so organically, with multiple options, or if you’re just ticking off requirements from a checklist. If it’s the former than that will be very interesting too.
We’re also interested in seeing how much leeway Kay’s character is given in general. We usually can’t bring ourselves to play a character as evil in a role-playing game but with this one we’re going to try and make sure our choices are as selfish as possible, just to see whether Kay really is a scoundrel after all.
We hope so, because we’ve waited for a game like this for decades and even now, after having played several hours of it, we’re still not sure how it’s going to turn out.
Formats: PC (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Massive Entertainment
Release Date: 30th August 2024
Age Rating: 12
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