Announced in 2021, Ubisoft's Star Wars game has generated a lot of interest and doubts among players who fear having more and more of the same thing, the same formula and especially the same flaws. Very quickly, it was confirmed that the Ubisoft Massive teams would be in charge of the project in parallel with Avatar Frontiers of Pandora. The title is also arriving only 8 months after the release of the latter.
From the first images in 2023, and after the release of Avatar, we felt that the Ubisoft Massive teams wanted to offer something new. Expectations are high for this Star Wars Outlaws which is the very first open-world Star Wars game. Has the challenge been met? Let's take stock right away.
Play it like Solo
Star Wars Outlaws puts us in the shoes of Kay Vess, a native of the planet Cantonica, left to her own devices from the age of 12 and who will gradually become a smuggler alongside her little companion Nix. Abandoned by her mother, the young girl has no choice but to fend for herself to earn a living and survive in this galaxy far, far away and merciless.
The story takes place in the midst of the terror of the empire, between Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. Kay, aged 22, takes on small jobs on Cantonica to collect a few credits. Alas, what had to happen happened.
While she is hired for a big heist, which would allow her to pocket enough money to leave her home planet and change her life, the heist goes wrong and Kay remains trapped in the mansion of Sirlo, one of the richest and most influential men in the entire Galaxy. By a lucky pirouette, Kay manages to escape. But of course, Sirlo will put a big bounty on the smuggler's head to find her and get revenge.
This is when the adventure of Star Wars Outlaws begins. Kay has no choice but to come up with a plan to bring down Sirlo and regain her freedom. Get ready to follow in the footsteps of a certain Han Solo, the most famous of smugglers, by chaining together contracts to earn money, build relationships and acquire the skills necessary to bring down one of the most important men in the Galaxy.
The life of an outlaw
We could already feel it with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the teams Ubisoft Massive were keen to change things and the game mechanics. Unfortunately, it wasn't a total success on Avatar with still a lot of repetitive moments, and a formula specific to Ubisoft titles for the last ten years that are running out of steam and don't work in open world games.
With Star Wars Outlaws, this change is much clearer as the trailers suggested. Of course, not everything is perfect, however, there are very good ideas and many recurring flaws that are starting to disappear. For example, we are finally done with the towers to climb or the camps to clear to reveal the game map. Now, the different areas of the planets to explore are freely accessible and you just have to walk around to reveal them with the places and treasures to discover. Star Wars Outlaws therefore pushes us to explore on foot or on your speeder to discover every corner of the different planets that you will visit in your adventure.
The title offers you to travel no less than five planets: Cantonica, Torshara, Tatooine, Kijimi, and Akiva. In addition to this, it is possible to fly in orbit around each star, with nebulae, asteroid fields and other places to find around the systems. The planets offer a relatively large map, with deserts, jungles, villages and large cities to comb. The planets are detailed, with a multitude of small references. It is a real pleasure to move around on foot in the cities and villages, and to travel the different panoramas in a speeder and discover a plethora of places faithful to the soul and atmosphere of Star Wars.
Ubisoft Massive has considerably reduced the famous "camps" that we were starting to no longer be able to stand in FarCry or Avatar. The camps are still present, but much fewer in number. They are thus replaced by areas belonging to factions. If you get along well with these factions, you will be welcome. Conversely, if you are in conflict with these factions, you will have to move in infiltration to avoid being spotted.
Rather than enemy bases all over the map, we find a lot of places to explore with treasures to find. Some places will be simple dwellings or small cantinas. Others will be caves or hidden areas that will be a kind of dungeon with a lot of climbing and platforms to discover great resources.
Of course, in these places, you will meet many NPCs who will offer you missions, they will give you information on hideouts, etc. This will allow you to explore the Galaxy even more.
In the structure of the game, we are also on something radically different from previous Ubisoft titles. This Star Wars Outlaws offers few main quests. There must be about fifteen and the game can be completed quite quickly (in about fifteen hours max). On the other hand, Ubisoft's production offers a fairly gargantuan amount of additional content that is almost essential to do to progress in the adventure. For this test, it is more than 35 hours of play and 100% has not yet been reached. Because there are a lot of things to do outside of the main storyline.
For example, you have the “Expert” missions, which are legends of the Galaxy who will teach you special moves and perfect your skills. You will then have to complete different challenges to learn new abilities, to improve the efficiency of your bombs or even improve your blaster accuracy.
There are also the syndicate quests, which allow you to improve (or not) your relations with the different factions, of which there are four: the Pyke Syndicate, the Hutt Cartel, the Scarlet Dawn and the Ashiga Clan. These quests are important because they allow you to make things easier for yourself in certain main missions that take place in the territories of these factions. Similarly, you have contracts that are given to you by informers (mainly in cantinas) that allow you to do missions for these different clans in order to improve your relationships again.
You also have information quests, which are investigations to be carried out on one or more planets to find rare resources or to help out key people who can return the favor.
Of course, you also have side quests with small missions that are given by NPCs or your companions that you will meet during your adventure.
This system allows for a short, simple, but effective scenario that doesn't drag on. On the other hand, we have a lot of things to exploit the open world and push us to explore the different planets and it works pretty well. We don't have this feeling of redundancy with not very exciting missions that repeat themselves giving us the impression of always doing the same thing. It’s quite enjoyable, especially in the Star Wars universe which is extremely well respected and faithful.
Efficient gameplay
While Star Wars Outlaws brings a lot of changes in its structure, its open world, or its quests, we can point out that there is also a pretty good variety in terms of gameplay. The title is not only an action and adventure game where you chain gunfights. The game offers infiltration phases, platform sequences, dungeons, gunfight, but also exploration and space combat. The title is complete and thus offers a great diversity in its content.
Ubisoft does not make the mistake of wanting to create an RPG (role-playing game) with a gigantic skill tree and levels. We don't worry about it and we just have our challenges to complete to receive advice from the experts to improve Kay's performance.
Nix also plays a big role since he will help us throughout our adventure to attack or distract our enemies, to solve puzzles and even to steal objects. Its integration is again well balanced and very nice to use.
Unfortunately, we cannot pilot our ship on the planet as we could suggest. On the other hand, it is possible to navigate it in orbit around the different stars to explore and carry out galactic battles which are quite enjoyable even if it lacks a bit of punch at times.
On the planets, we can however drive our speeder, which is very maneuverable and allows us to visit the vast expanses more quickly.
Of course, it will be possible to improve your blaster, your speeder as well as your ship by purchasing modules and by completing them with rare objects that you will find while traveling the Galaxy.
Still troubles in the Force
Despite many good points, there are still flaws that continue to frustrate us, and mainly at the AI level. It is once again a disaster. Whether it is the NPCs (non-playable characters) who come and go aimlessly in the cities, streets and settings of this Star Wars Outlaws. But also the enemies who also have deplorable intelligence. You can run and jump next to them, and they will not notice you. If you pass behind them, they will be surprised, but the latter are capable of directly losing track of you while you are right next to them. In addition, most enemies remain static, facing walls or doing identical rounds, allowing you to get rid of them without an ounce of difficulty. Too bad.
The title offers a system of random events that occur from time to time near your position when you walk on the planets or in orbit. A bit like Rockstar productions in GTA V or Red Dead Redemption II. If the idea is good, we regret that there are only four or five random events that are constantly repeated on the same planets. Too bad there too.
Finally, we deplore quite a few bugs. If we did not have major bugs that prevented the progression of the main story, we still note a lot of problems, including about ten bugs that crash the game on a 35-hour game. Some objectives do not activate, forcing us to reload the save. Some secondary missions or random events are bugged and crash the game each time. Quite a few collision bugs. In itself, it is not catastrophic and they are not critical bugs that spoil the experience, but it remains frustrating. We hope that a Day One update will optimize all of this.
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