Star Wars Outlaws Review: Beautiful Thieves

Star Wars Outlaws Review

Star Wars games are great, but they tend to tread pretty familiar ground. You get a lot of Jedi, space battles, and non-space battles. Star Wars Outlaws tries something a little different. And it works! Finally, a glimpse into the massive criminal underworld. On the other hand, if you don’t like sneaking around and stealing stuff, this game isn’t for you. Which isn’t to say that there’s nothing else going on. You’ve got speeder bike racing, puzzle solving, space battles, and even some non-space battles. But the core of Outlaws is definitely stealth-based.

I have a terrible attention span, you see. Stealth requires a lot more patience than I have, in general. I’d rather just run in, guns blazing, and do things the loud way. But Outlaws would prefer you not do this. For one thing, you’ll almost certainly die. Laser fire loves our hero, and will seek her out at every opportunity. And it doesn’t take many lasers to cut her down. As such, stealth is your best option. So I find myself at odds with the central ethos of this whole game. Which is unfortunate, since the stealth mechanics are quite good.

Enemies react to your presence immediately. They have deadly good line-of-sight vision, and they’ll (temporarily) change their patrols if they realize you’re around. They’re pretty deaf to footsteps unless you get very close, but they can hear laser fire quite well. This also changes depending on who you’re up against. Imperial troops take intruders very seriously, for example. Kay Vess doesn’t have much in the way of stealth skills, she’s just quieter than the average person. Nix is a different story. He is a tiny, cute MacGuffin that you could not possibly survive without.

Blasters Are So Loud

Nix is a clever loophole that keeps Kay feeling like a grounded character while still giving her tons of abilities. He can pickpocket, distract enemies, attack them outright, and reach distant buttons. Plus he’s adorable, which is a bonus. If you’re ever short on funds, Nix is extremely useful. At normal difficulty he can turn any solo encounter in your favor. He can sabotage electronics, scan for enemies, and even set off explosives. Relying on Nix felt weird at first but he quickly became indispensable.

While I didn’t mess around much with the difficulty settings, there are a ton of settings to mess with. You can tweak your experience with refreshing precision. If any individual element of the gameplay is giving your grief, you can solve that problem. Or if you just want the game to be crazy hard, you’ve also got that option. Since there’s no traditional level system, I couldn’t just grind my way out of any tricky stages. It was either get good, go home, or (as a last ditch tactic) move a couple sliders around.

Though there aren’t any levels to gain, you can still round our your skill tree. Experts you meet pass on their skill sets, each with unique unlock conditions. Things like raw materials, repeated actions, and specific side missions all unlock new abilities. You can also upgrade your blaster and augment your stats (slightly) with new gear. Even with all these options, your own skills are still your greatest asset when playing. I was forced to find patient and creative ways to succeed against long, nasty odds. I admire Outlaws’ dedicated focus on thievery, even if I don’t resonate with it.

Just Stealing All The Way Down

I won’t go into story spoilers, but I liked the narrative well enough. It’s a thrilling tale full of twists, turns, and backstabs. It’s honestly remarkable how every part of Kay’s life is connected to thievery in some way. Her proclivity for larceny is both the cause of and solution to all of her problems. Every favor she does for every crime boss involves stealing. Theft is the inciting incident, the main plot beat, and the driving force behind the story.

Even if I wasn’t enamored with Outlaws’ mechanics at times, the Star Wars of it all was genuinely impressive. That ‘used future’ aesthetic is on full display here. Just walking through the levels is a real treat. There’s so much attention to detail at every turn. Things like clothing, containers, weapons, buildings, and advertising all drip with authenticity. The character designs are rich, and the vehicles all look amazing. Your ship, the Trailblazer, feels lived-in and alive. Every new location required a short tour, just to see everything.

Also, Sabacc is an awesome card game. You can start playing pretty early in the game, and I highly recommend doing so. It’s basically space poker, but with sudden rule changes thrown in. You can build up some proper skill, but this is very much gambling when you get right down to it. What separates Sabacc from other card minigames is attention to detail. The camera’s focus remains on the table (and the players) the entire time. You hear other players make little remarks and subtly give away how their hand is going. Even the dealer droid is beautifully animated, scooping up chips and cards after every round. I left the Sabacc table behind early on to focus on the story, but oh man! Best believe I want a lot more time there.

Don’t Sleep On Sabacc

I also want more space battles, more combat styles, and more mission variety, but I get it. I understand why the experience is so focused. Kay Vess is a scoundrel and a thief. Giving her a second gun or any serious fight skills would be disingenuous. I do wish that throwing grenades didn’t involve a submenu in the heat of battle, however. Grenades are for surprise attacks only! Trying to chuck one mid-fight is just a slower way of reloading your last autosave. Oh, and the crafting system feels more obligatory than interesting. It’s just an extra layer of mechanical abstraction that doesn’t fit the character or the rest of the gameplay.

Outlaws is an excellent Star Wars game. It’s also aggressively not for me. I felt tangible disappointment whenever a new mission required quietly infiltrating an enemy base. But I also recognize that the systems at work here are well-crafted ones. The enemy AI is fun to learn the limits of. You have multiple ways of quietly taking out guards. Most bases have alternate routes for infiltration. The grenade system is awful, but combat is otherwise tense and engaging. There’s all sorts of little activities like speeder racing and gambling. If you’re looking to live that scoundrel lifestyle in a galaxy far, far away then this game is made for you.

***A PS5 code was provided by the publisher***