Shortly after starting my remote Star Wars Outlaws hands-on, I get what I’ve been waiting months for: a chance to ride protagonist Kay Vess’ speeder bike. There are few things that feel more apt for a Star Wars game than streaking across the surface of a planet on a motorcycle that hovers a few inches off the ground, so I’m ecstatic that I get to it so soon into the demo. But then I actually drive it, and it’s as unwieldy as a shopping cart with a 650cc moto engine strapped to it, and I sigh. The potential.
There’s a lot of that here in Ubisoft’s open-world Star Wars game, which sparkles and pops with the special sheen reserved only for George Lucas’ universe, but often has the weight, heft, and languidness of that Yoda puppet in The Phantom Menace. Part of its slowness could be chalked up to how I was playing it (a remote session beamed in through game launcher Ubisoft Connect), but not all of it. With Outlaws, Ubisoft nails the Star Wars vibes so well that I have a thought near the end of my hands-on: is the game purposefully a little retro-feeling, to coincide with the ‘70s energy it exudes? Is Ubisoft that galaxy-brained?
Grand theft speeder
My hands-on begins with Kay waking up in the cockpit of a crashed ship that she can’t get back off the ground. She ventures out in search of parts to fix it (a moment that actually takes my breath away, as the ship’s hatch opens and a chink of sunlight widens into a swath, Kay’s hair whipping about her face and her eyes blinking in the bright afternoon light) and heads out onto Toshara, a world created specifically for Star Wars Outlaws. She’s immediately attacked by a Rhodian mechanic named Waka, who apologizes, chalking it up to his belief that she was “one of them.” By one of them, he means the bandits who are now shooting at us.
A waist-high wall protects Kay and the Rhodian from blaster fire, and a prompt tells me to use her full adrenaline meter to do a sort of Red Dead Redemption Dead Eye Targeting system that makes everything go slo-mo, allowing me to mark multiple enemies to take them out in rapid fire succession. It works, though it’s not reinventing the wheel, and now that the baddies are dispensed I can get on my speeder and head to Mirogana City, the heart of Toshara, and the home of the Pyke Syndicate.
The speeder is unwieldy, and the chase that ensues across the beautiful plains of Toshara is messy: I slam into a rock at one point and send Kay flying off the front of the bike, then awkwardly scramble back on it just to clumsily swerve down a dirt road. I spend about two hours with Outlaws, and I just start to get the hang of the bike’s heft by then—but still miserably lose a race with a random NPC I encounter. That stickiness of the speeder permeates throughout other parts of Outlaws gameplay, namely the platforming, which feels like Jedi: Fallen Order if Cal Kestis was barred out on Xanax.
But the moment Kay walks through the checkpoint at Mirogana, I feel the familiar pull of a Ubisoft game—a glittery, enticing world that promises to pull me into a satisfying, but safe, gameplay loop. I want to explore every nook and cranny, but I’m on a mission, and on borrowed time (I was allotted four hours for this hands-on, though my internet crapped out around hour three), so I decide to move the story forward rather than meander down the dark alleys surrounding me.
Mirogana is all grime and neon and shady characters, a perfect world for the criminal underbelly that Outlaws wants to embed you in. NPC barks fill my ears as I run towards Makal’s gambling parlor—Stormtroopers searching for contraband, traders concerned with crossing the Pykes, a Hutt enforcer complaining about the chewiness of a certain cut of meat. Kay has to get in to chat with Gorak, the head of the Pykes, and Outlaws offers you several paths to achieve that, including paying a scalp for a VIP pass (I didn’t have enough credits) or bribing a technician to open up a faulty door (still not enough credits). After a few dead ends, I discover my in: overriding the lock on a supply closet, then a ventilation shaft, then dropping down into the turbolift that heads straight to his suite.
There’s a lot of this semi-stunted gameplay in my first hour or so with Outlaws, a lot of meandering around dingy hallways and trying to get through spaces undetected (I am famously bad at stealth mechanics, I’m like a pitbull in a room full of bubble wrap), but where this would frustrate me in other games, the Star Wars sheen holds my attention, a shiny bauble glittering on the horizon. I am pulled into this world with ease, spurred on by the allure of actor Humberly González’ portrayal of Vess, by her adorable sidekick Nyx, and by the array of side characters. Now this is Star Wars.
Crime pays
On-rails stealth missions and shootouts are perfectly fine (I particularly enjoy hacking and picking locks, and very much dislike stealth missions in large rooms), but Outlaws sings when the world opens up in front of you, whether that’s topside on a planet or out in the far reaches of space. After completing my main mission in Mirogana City, I’m sent towards Jaunta’s Hope, an outpost several kilometers away from the bustling crime hub. As I head out on my unwieldy speeder bike, I take a second to enjoy the beautiful vistas, the low-hanging rain clouds threatening to burst overhead, the strange rock formations looming in the distance, the shifting grasses of the plains. This game is beautiful, even with the visual quality somewhat dampened by the stream.
A few more brief missions on Toshara (and a chance to pet some bug-eyed alien creatures that look like a cross between a meerkat and a rat), including one that gets me a blaster module that allows me to override shields and reboot electronics, and we’ve got the parts we need to get off-planet to run an errand for the Twi-Lek Eleera and the Crimson Dawn. Yeah, that’s right, Outlaws gives you the option to forge allegiances with (or double cross) the biggest crime syndicates in the galaxy, and I decide to go with Crimson Dawn because I think Eleera is hot. I’m a simple woman, okay?
Eleera needs us to “cross some Imps,” which means we’re sneaking onto an Imperial station to wipe some data they have on Crimson Dawn. Brilliantly, beautifully, I jump into the cockpit of Kay’s ship, press “A” to takeoff, and get a brief cutscene with the familiar swelling Star Wars horns that seamlessly transitions into me controlling the ship as it exits orbit. It’s fucking sick. I streak out into space, towards a shipment freighter Crimson Dawn had disabled that was hauling spice to the Imperial station. It’s time for us to pretend to be the galaxy’s Uber Eats, and deliver it ourselves.
The space surrounding Toshana is filled with the debris of derelict ships set against a backdrop of ominous terracotta clouds. The way the light punches through the holes in the abandoned ships and glitters off the detritus is entrancing, but I don’t have much time to ogle it, as pirates sweep in and kick off a dogfight. I can confirm that fighting in space is fun in Star Wars Outlaws—it feels the most polished of all the gameplay features, the most fun to engage with. I’m not sure how much of it will be in the game, but I know that it’ll be thoroughly enjoyable.
Unfortunately, this dogfight is fairly brief, and before I know it we are escorted to the Imperial station by two TIE fighters, steering the ship towards the docking bay, where a cut scene takes over shortly before reaching it. Waka promises to distract the Imperial guards so Kay can sneak through the station and find the data Crimson Dawn needs deleted.
This is where I run into the most trouble. I manage to sneak through the majority of the station without getting caught, but once I get to a point where I must navigate Kay through a massive open room, I struggle. There’s a ton of guards, and though the game offers myriad ways to get past them, I can’t seem to figure it out. Alerting them triggers a timer in which one of the guards starts to raise an alarm, and if you don’t stop them in time (read: shoot them), you’ll fail the mission. I use Nyx to distract a few Stormtroopers so that I can silently incapacitate them, then instruct the little guy to detonate an explosive barrel to call even more guards over, but there are so many sightlines to avoid that I continuously get caught. After an hour of struggle, I lose internet. I’m frustrated. I guess I’m a bad criminal.
Both of my hands-on experiences with Star Wars Outlaws were fairly controlled. The first one, during Summer Game Fest, was completely on-rails. And while this one opened up quite a bit in comparison, the pressure I felt to ensure I got through the main mission meant I self-imposed guardrails, avoiding nooks and crannies in my quest to complete the more important tasks. I can see this game being special when you have freedom of movement, when you can travel down dark alleys and play a sketchy game of sabacc, or can stumble upon a small outpost hiding a treasure trove of credits.
There is promise in this world that Ubisoft has created, from the beauty of the visuals to the impressive depth of the main cast of characters. Though the gameplay mechanics feel frustratingly dated and reliant on existing systems Ubisoft often utilizes, some of that jank adds to its charm. I’m intrigued and want more, even if my final minutes with the demo were spent angrily trying (and failing) to gun down a host of Imperial bastards.
Star Wars Outlaws releases August 30 for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC.
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