Star Wars Outlaws Review — Scoundrels, if not Outlaws

Star Wars Outlaws is an open-world roleplaying game set in the Star Wars universe, focusing on the Outer Rim. This location is famous across franchise material as a hub of crime and villainy, and Star Wars Outlaws is explicitly built with this fan-favorite aspect of the series in mind. While the game feels vast, full of opportunity, and faithful to the source material, it seems to wobble back and forth with its identity and struggles to decide what kind of story it wants to be.

Star Wars Outlaws is a weird game.

The game takes place during the Galactic Civil War. More specifically, it occurs sometime after the destruction of the first Death Star, aka after Episode 4 and before Episode 5. It follows Kay Vess, a lifelong dream of hoping to score big and escape her crime-ridden life. After finally escaping her home planet of Cantonica, Kay finds herself taking dangerous jobs and building a reputation with the galaxy’s crime syndicates as she saves up to repair her ship and escape to the Core Worlds.

Star Wars Outlaws wants to be a game about crime and criminals. The gameplay loop sees you completing jobs for various brokers, earning credits, and gaining a reputation that allows you access to restricted areas and better jobs from the criminal underworld’s controlling gangs (or syndicates). Side and story missions see Kay engaging in illegal activity to repair her ship and escape this life for good.

While playing Star Wars Outlaws, I constantly found myself thinking of the game Cyberpunk 2077. They’re very similar in premise and gameplay, both being crime-focused RPG games with the narrative focal point being various jobs you complete for the underworld. Cyberpunk excels in portraying criminal identity, while Star Wars Outlaws struggles in this area.

Star Wars Outlaws teeters a very fine line between combining Kay Vess and the player to be a criminal and trying to protect the Star Wars formula of likable, do-no-wrong protagonists. Sure, Kay is working with the underworld, but you hardly ever (if at all, as I struggle to remember the details of every job) do any illegal activity that actually hurts anyone except for bad people.

It always feels too convenient that Kay Vess can earn boatloads of credits without ever engaging in what actually feels like a crime; you’re only ever stealing from crime bosses, hurting outlaws or imperials, and never really doing anything that makes you question Kay’s morality.

At the same time, the game allows you to engage in wonton murder sprees that, while always against bad people, make our protagonist feel more like the morally questionable rogue we’re meant to believe she is.

It feels like Star Wars Outlaws wanted to be something else; it shows a little bit of edge here and there and insists that it is a game about criminality but refuses to fully cross that line or break away from the family-friendly Star Wars formula that we have seen in basically every piece of Star Wars media Disney has released. It follows too many familiar Star Wars tropes and doesn’t fully commit to its “Outlaws” theme and identity, making the game feel more like Star Wars Scoundrels.

Though I often found myself disappointed by the reuse of these tropes in the story and wasn’t a major fan of the dialogue, it was still a good enough story to keep me invested. While I wanted the crime jobs to feel more like crime and not just bullying the mafia, each one had a plot interesting enough to make me want to see the concept through to the end and occasionally had twists I didn’t see coming. Again, Star Wars Outlaws allowed for just enough edge to show to make the game feel grimier than your usual Star Wars story.

That being said, I did find myself enjoying the characters, even if a lot of them felt par for the course for a Star Wars tale. Kay Vess is colored a bit outside the lines for your typical Star Wars protagonist, and playing her as a clumsy psycho who has to gun her way out of any and all situations honestly endeared me to her a lot. Plus, the battle droid in a leather coat is just plain cool, no matter how you look at it.

When it comes to the gameplay, I would say that Star Wars Outlaws does enough but leaves wanting.

As an RPG game, Star Wars Outlaws wants to hook you on immersion and storytelling. To make the Cyberpunk 2077 comparison again, Star Wars Outlaws does an almost “episodic” take on storytelling, with each mission being a different job you’re going on with a new mini plot to be invested in. It’s a formula that works really well, and as I said above, it was the stories of each job that kept me invested in the game for as long as I was.

Outside of this, the game has a handful of simple mechanics that, like I said before, are enough to keep you playing if you’re invested in the game’s storytelling but leave you wanting on their own.

Most of the game comprises stealth segments, which are fairly simple: get in, get out without being seen by roaming guards-style levels. These are pretty basic, with obvious paths laid out, so you don’t have to do too much sneaking. I found that the guards, at times, would see me through walls or with their back turns, which made sneaking frustratingly inconsistent. Thankfully, most of these segments allow you to engage in combat instead, the combat mechanics being basic but, again, serviceable.

Speeder bike travel and space dogfighting segments also exist, but like everything else in the game, these feel pretty bare-bones; there isn’t much to say about them.

The real standout mechanically would be Nix, your pet-type thing, which you can command at any time to interact in several different ways with many elements of the environment. Nix can steal (but only from bad guys), open doors, distract, or even attack enemies. It’s pretty simple, but having a sidekick who can do everything you can do without you getting directly involved is a nice touch that helps make me feel a bit more like a scoundrel, if not an outlaw.

I didn’t encounter many bugs during my playthrough, but one that was particularly annoying was when I could not complete a quiet because a real-time cutscene failed to load. This caused me to restart the game only after roaming aimlessly for a while.

If there’s something Star Wars Outlaws does incredibly well, it’s making you feel like you are in Star Wars. Flaws aside, the level design, world-building, and overall vibe definitely feels like you’re in the Star Wars universe, even if I feel like a real Star Wars crime story would be much grittier than what Star Wars Outlaws presents.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Star Wars Outlaws is available in the UbiSoft store, Epic Games, Xbox, and PlayStation.