I got a chance to sit down and play Star Wars Outlaws at the 2024 Summer Game Fest. During our 90-minute playthrough, I snuck through gang hideouts, tiptoed through an abandoned ship in search of wreckage, and fought my way through orbital debris in daring space combat. Star Wars Outlaws’ Corellian hound-cannibalizing universe is teeming with character, is deadly fun in short bursts, and frankly, is one of my most anticipated games of the year (despite a few big question marks).
Manage Cookie Settings
My hands-on preview session was split into three different missions, and I’ll start with the best and work my way up from there. But first, I’ll start with the foundation of Outlaw: You play as Kay Vess, a galaxy-traveling gunslinger who, relying on wits and agility, mostly does it alone. You’ll sneak into places uninvited, stealing stuff as you go. When the alarm sounds, you’ll scoot around corners, taking out thugs and gangsters with your trusty blaster. Controlling Kay Vess is a joy, and it’s the glue that ties the entire game together.
But Vess’s kit is pretty basic. You have a few consumables, two blaster modes for regular shooting and counter-electronics, and a stun skill. Of course, that plus your own abilities is enough. But with Nix, things get a lot more interesting. You can use them to mark your surroundings, distract enemies, and even temporarily disrupt them. On her own, the experience in Outlaws might seem bland, but with Nix, it’s really enticing. They’re like eagles in Assassin’s Creed games, I guess, but more fun to use.
The most memorable Outlaws experience is the “Relics” mission, where you have to infiltrate a gang hideout and steal a relic belonging to a mysterious faction in town. The mission begins with you approaching a fortified building and then finding your way inside. This makes for some really rich stealth gameplay – you can sneak through various vents, you can take down guards incognito, you can break locks, you can hack computers. It’s typical third-person stealth action, but it’s done well, and there are enough Star Wars features to make it transcend Did
Although you can perhaps After getting in and out without any real gunfights, I admit that I messed up the bag a bit and accidentally alerted a guard, knocking him out after he started calling out for his friends. The good news is that even if you do mess up perfect stealth, the game doesn’t devolve into a bland gunfight – a la Far Cry. Instead, those sneaky little paths and tight corners immediately become avenues for counterattacks. It’s also true that even here – long ago in a galaxy far, far away – waist-high bunkers thrive and become safe havens for you and your weird space dog. I guess some of that is universal.
If it’s pure, thrilling action you’re looking for, I think Outlaws is a little weaker when it comes to showing off your prowess than when you’re crouching. That’s not to say it lacks merit — I had a lot of fun sliding across the ground and grabbing other powerful weapons like blaster rifles, snipers — and even a Gatling gun — but I feel like the game works best when you try to be as quiet as possible. That’s not to say the game is bad — look at Dishonored. It’s an excellent game that can be loud if you want, but the real experience comes when you play it smartly.
In fact, this aspect of the game really shines in another mission I played, False Flag. In this mission, you make a hasty and adrenaline-filled escape from an Imperial space station, fending off waves of troopers while getting the fugitives aboard your ship. As you can imagine, this showcases the intensity of face-to-face combat. You can’t really run out and shoot a bunch of lads – you’ll get blown to pieces! Instead, you’ll be popping your head out of cover, taking down stragglers and shooting red barrels (or the Star Wars equivalent) to turn the tide. You also have this ability, no doubt inspired by McCree/Cassidy in Overwatch, that allows you to tag multiple enemies and quickly shoot them. It’s pretty cool.
The mission climaxes with a dogfight against several starfighters. It’s not particularly complex: you have a blaster that can track enemy pilots, and a lock-on missile on cooldown. It’s certainly fun to fly around, and it’s great to fly over space junk, but don’t expect Star Wars Squadrons here. This space section acts as a pseudo-open-world area. You can fly freely, speeding between landmark areas and even surrounding planets, but from what I can tell, there’s not really much there. If you decide to land on a planet, you get this nice moment as you fly through the atmosphere toward your chosen destination. Sure, it’s a hidden loading screen. But it’s cute. Better than the Starfield way of doing things, anyway.
Both this mission and the Relics mission eventually let you wander the streets of two very different, absolutely stunning hubs. In the Relics mission, it’s a cold, cobblestone urban sprawl where you can walk down narrow alleyways that act like the blood vessels of the entire settlement. Robots chop and serve food at street stalls, and people sit at crammed tables and chat. At the end of the false flag operation, you land in a smaller, but equally affluent town. Remember how Uncharted did it? Here, speeders roam the streets, a random alien fixes his car in a hidden garage, and you can wander into this seedy sprawl, which is packed with taverns offering rumors, work, good conversation, and, of course, some danger.
Outlaws does a great job of building a crime-ridden, densely populated Star Wars world in a way that I don’t think many other Star Wars games have managed. I just wanted to walk the streets, look around, and explore. In the Jedi Knight series, the linear structure encouraged you to backtrack and clear your way. In Outlaws, its open-ended structure pushes you to immerse yourself in all the tiny details around you. It’s intoxicating – rich as bourbon, and equally gorgeous. On top of that, the game’s graphics are so beautiful that I couldn’t stop sipping on this intoxicating tipple.
The third mission, which takes place on a wrecked ship, was the weakest section of the demo. It requires you to traverse a linear ship, flip a few switches, and do some platforming. I don’t find platforming–which is simply jumping between moving parts of the environment–to be particularly engaging in Outlaws. There is a grappling hook, and sure it helps a bit, but it seemed more like a gimmicky way to get from A to B than an actual tool I could use. The music is great, and the level itself looks great, but I wasn’t as invested in it as I was in the other two sections.
There yes Star Wars Outlaws has some major problems, though. The biggest problem is the open world itself. I and other previewers were able to see a large open space across a bridge in the “False Flag” level, but couldn’t actually get there, even though it was only a short flight away. As I was about to cross over, the demo assistant in charge of the space station felt Disturbance of force and asked me to go back in. I was caught and decided not to take any chances in case there was a big trap door opening underneath me. [please note: he was actually lovely].
This game is ultimately an open-world experience. I’ve seen elements of it that have been carefully curated. The missions I played were culled from the game’s spiraling, player-driven gameplay. For example, after you escape the crashed ship, you’re supposed to hop in your speeder and zip away, but for me it came to black. If these open areas were filled with interesting stuff, that’d be ideal, but if they’re like the outer space section I played–a moment where I was flying around an abyss without much interaction–then there’s reason to be concerned. I can’t point to any of them right now, but it’s something to keep an eye out for in future gameplay reveals and announcements.
Then there’s progression. On your ship, you can customize your outfit and blaster. The blaster itself seems to have an additional unlockable firing mode, which was greyed out in my preview, and you can also change its appearance–though I wasn’t offered other options. As for your clothing, each piece comes with passive abilities. These can be chest, belt, leg, and amulet slots that affect stats like reload speed. I don’t recall picking up a new outfit, but there are chests hidden around the levels that might offer such a reward, and I talked to an old guy on a balcony who said some bandit-like guys stole his amulet, so take your pick. Appearances, it seems, are about more than just kills in Star Wars Outlaws; they also affect your DPS.
Star Wars Outlaws looks to be a major cinematic milestone for the Star Wars franchise and one worth getting excited about. I’m hoping that with some of the mystical elements it throws in to match the level of quality on display in this demo, it’ll be a real hit. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this game, and while there are aspects that I don’t think are particularly groundbreaking, it does make a real contribution to the IP that I think fans will enjoy.
Ubisoft had a lot to prove with its first foray into the Star Wars IP, and I honestly think this was a diamond formed under that pressure.
Star Wars: Outlaws will be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on August 30.
