New Star Wars Outlaws Review: Why Critics Are Loving It, But Gamers Are Hating It

A few days ago, the long-awaited game Star Wars Outlaws was released.

For the first time in many years, it was not EA that worked on its development, which lost its right to exclusivity in 2023, but Ubisoft. The situation with the game turned out to be quite ambiguous: while foreign journalists give the newspaper the highest marks, users underestimate the game’s rating. At the time of writing the review, the news had a rating of 7.6 from critics and only 4.8 from users.

We’ve already played about 20 hours and are ready to share our impressions. Did Ubisoft manage to make the transition with Star Wars or did they fail this task as an indicator of the share of gamers? Let’s find out.

Return to the beloved universe

The studio responsible for the creation of the new testing product is Massive Entertainment, responsible for both popular and mediocre projects, including Tom Clancy’s The Division and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

In Star Wars Outlaws, we are told about the thief Kay Vess, who has been touching this sphere since childhood. Now she wants to go on a big job to earn a reputation in the thieves’ world and get rich. In parallel with this next job, things did not go according to plan, and a large reward is announced for Kay’s head throughout the galaxy.

The story turns out to be quite simple and easy to follow. We are not overloaded with micro-plots and kept for a long time within the framework of one global event intersecting with a number of others. On the one hand, this is good, since we can look at the turn of history without being distracted by something secondary.

However, on the other hand, the plot is not written in a diverse way, it does not have too many layers and is too simple in itself, which can cause melancholy in the ranks of players (but here the fragments of comic situations, in which Vess intervenes with his animal Nix, save).

It is the facial animation that prevents you from enjoying the dialogues. It seems stuck at 2016 level. Everything looks too rough, the main character’s face periodically blurs for some reason. And I’m not talking about ordinary gameplay elements – such flaws in full-fledged cutscenes, where everything is directed at a low level, but facial expressions are almost absent. How is that possible, Ubisoft?

Outlaws has a full reputation system. You can be friends or enemies with your own factions/clans. Your actions directly affect their attitude towards you, meaning you can become both a respected member and a sworn enemy.

But the implementation of the reputation system itself is lame. Why? For example, you constantly steal something from the gang’s territory, kill everyone in a row, and then complete a couple of contracts, and they forget about your perfect thoughts. And you can build American relations with them again.

This applies to both plot choices and secondary tasks, including those very contracts. Somewhere you will need to choose a design, and somewhere you can get out of it very easily. Because of this, there is no possibility of the importance of your actions and social life over other characters (after all, you can even destroy an entire civilization with your actions, but you will ultimately not care about it).

Your animal is a full-fledged character.

The developers did a great job on Nix. He always accompanies you wherever you go. He is not only functional, but also well-developed character.

This companion can do a lot of things: open ventilation, carry objects, dropped weapons, interact with objects (for example, attack it or steal something from it), blow up barrels, break mechanisms and a bunch of other things. In general, this is your full-fledged legal hand, without which you often cannot do.

But in addition to this mechanic, there are more personal activities. For example, you can feed the animal. And this will be a full-fledged mini-game, in which you can catch funny situations or just sit and be touched by his interaction with Kay. Well, plus these activities also give their own buffs for the kitten.

If you aim at him, he will pretend to be dead.

Nyx is used constantly both in the story itself and in your daily activities. For example, you can play the card game Sabacc for money, where Nyx will help you cheat and look at your opponents’ cards.

Overall, it’s just amazingly designed, the attention to detail is colossal, and he’s just so cute and cool in his own right!

Stealth and customization. Very, very controversial.

Lost in the middle of nowhere, yeah

The combat system is mostly stealth, where you need to sneak past enemies, because Kay is not the strongest girl who can put a crowd of droids or imperials in a minute.

For this reason, you often have to hide and act unnoticed. True, your movements are often represented here in a crouching position. You squat around the corner, and no one can see you anymore – I’m exaggerating, of course, but that’s roughly how it works.

AI enemies leave much to be desired. Once you’ve been in a heated shootout, run away into the smoke from a sewer hatch, they’ll remember you in one room of that smoke. Once you move a meter, the enemies lose you. It’s that stupid and simple. The same goes for herbs. The enemy’s intelligence clearly needs some work.

Your primary weapons are your fists (3 hits on almost any enemy and they’re out) and a blaster. The latter can be upgraded and improved to unlock new firing modes and increase overall combat power, rate of fire, etc.

The key can be used for other weapons, but it is far from being given to carry (to the point of banality – go into the elevator and throw the gun). And the other guns that you pick up have only one clip. But at least there is variety in them: from automatic rifles to grenade launchers.

The problem with firearms is that there is no effect on them. You don’t feel how you hit the enemy, you just see a marker that tells you about it.

As a result, the combat system and stealth in the game are weak on both legs.

Leveling up, open world and space exploration

The key is to improve your skills with the help of some mentors. Each of them unlocks job skills that are unlocked in fewer games. There are no points to invest anywhere.

To level up you only need just play the gameEach mentor has a series of challenges that need to be adjusted, and a new ability will be unlocked for them.

There’s a lot of Uncharted-style climbing here.

For example, you can fly past some rocks on a speeder, fly 60 meters and not fall. To do this, you will learn to switch to transport to limit restrictions. Or talk to other traders, and you will learn to charm enemies to distract their attention.

The open world itself is represented by original planets (5, if the starting location is required) in different environments. For each of them the player is given big mapwhere you can move around and look at them freely. The game world itself looks alive thanks to the abundance of NPCs going about their business. However, many are fixated on one animation, which can occasionally worsen the “livelyness” of the open world.

To get into space, Kay Vess has a square ship, the Pathfinder, which can also be upgraded by buying attachments for it, such as a more powerful engine or enhanced guns.

The ship flies out into space differently than into the Star Field. Or rather, differently. This also happens through a cutscene, but there are no screen loads, you can continue to control the ship, which is rapidly rushing into space through the clouds (which is what I use to open the loading screen).

In general, you have no conditions created for losing control of the ship into space, and it seems that you are really artificially flying out (if you do not dare to skip this cutscene, there is a button for this).

There are also zones for exploration in outer space. However, you cannot leave. Here you can also look for caches (you can learn about some from dialogues of simple NPCs), draw on ships with other factions, steal cargo and much more.

Of course, without outposts failed to achieve on the planets. This is Ubisoft, did you really think they would give up on them? But I will say in the company’s defense that there are a minimum of checkpoints here, and you don’t encounter them very often. And they represent the current challenge.

In general, they don’t irritate me, but quite the opposite.

Technically, everything is far from perfect.

Numerous landscapes just for the fact that your hands reach out to take a screenshot. The game looks Great.

But there are a number of nuances. And they consist both in the characters’ own animation and in the half-baked state. The abundance of graphic tools, large fragments – all this negatively affects the gameplay.

It is because of these aspects that gamers mostly criticize the game. However, I personally did not encounter so many of them. Yes, there is some dampness, but it does not cause irritation, as it did in Cyberpunk 2077. In any case, on PlayStation 5, where I am playing the game.

It’s still worth playing

Star Wars Outlaws turned out to be controversial, many elements in it do not work as you expect. Its technical condition raises questions, and this at a price of $70 (about 7 thousand rubles in Russia).

The game itself is casual and fun, but it still needs some work and polishing. There’s obviously no rush to take the news now, especially when other important titles are coming out in the coming days.

Let Ubisoft first approve the game, and then you can get it at a discount (or with the Ubisoft+ subscription, which is available on PC and Xbox). But it is definitely worth getting, it is able to adapt to the atmosphere of “Star Wars” and just be entertained completely.