Star Wars: Outlaws Hands-On Preview – If you’re like me, a Star Wars fan who grew up loving the franchise and someone who also plays a lot of video games, then you’ve likely played a fair few of the many Star Wars games that have arrived on PC’s and consoles over the last few decades.
What makes Outlaws different from the myriad of Star Wars games we’ve gotten before is it promises a different experience, one without lightsabers or Skywalkers. It’s the promise of getting to be a scoundrel, to live out what it might be like if we stepped into the shoes of Han Solo, or in Outlaws case, Kay Vess.
I’ve already previewed Outlaws for PSU, but that was only a hands-off look at some previously unseen gameplay to give us a better idea of what the game will play like. This time however, I’ve gone hands-on with Outlaws for PSU, and I’ve come away with a lot more to say about what Ubisoft touts as the “first open-world Star Wars game,” and every other promise it makes.
Star Wars: Outlaws Hands-On Preview – So You Want To Be A Scoundrel?
Getting The Little Things Right
First off, some housekeeping. I didn’t play this on PS5, I was technically playing on PC for this preview, but it wasn’t my PC. I got to spend about four hours with Outlaws while it ran on a PC somewhere in Montreal, and was streamed to my computer.
I didn’t have any major latency issues, the only thing was that graphically it wasn’t nearly as sharp as it would be if it was running natively. That’s all to say I won’t be speaking on graphics or its visuals in any kind of technical way, and that I can’t provide any insight as to how it’ll run at launch.
Moving on from what I can’t talk about to what I can, I can say that as I said in my hands-off preview, Outlaws has the look of the Star Wars universe nailed down.
My hands-on time with Outlaws only solidified those initial thoughts. I played sections on two different planets, with a bit of space and dog fighting in between.
Beginning on a new planet Toshara, my demo kicked off with a cutscene of Kay and Nix waking up after crash landing on Toshara. The first time I was on stick, I got to try out Outlaws version of Red Dead Redemption’s dead-eye mechanic and quickly dispatch three smugglers who were presumably part of why Kay and Nix crashed in the first place.
Then I met one of Outlaws new characters, got on a speeder and raced into Pyke territory to lose the pursuers. It was an action-heavy scenario, with big things happening, but I kept noticing the little things.
The sound of the blasters, the handling of the speeder, how fast the speeder felt, the alien but familiar in a Star Wars-way landscape of the planet. That is to say, the sand-filled area you land on in Toshara definitely feels familiar.
Even when you get into Mirogana, the capital city and core of the Pyke criminal syndicate’s power on Toshara, it feels akin to the kinds of criminal or backwater parts of the galaxy we’ve seen in a variety of Star Wars media.
The other planet I got to see, Kijimi, felt familiar because Kijimi was previously featured in Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker. The corner I saw of it seemed to just be recreated from what we saw in the film, and for what its worth also felt well done.
Granted, this is based on the short time I had with Outlaws, and the specific slice of it Ubisoft Massive had planned to show me, but I saw nothing but constant proof that the team has done a great job at getting the look and feel of Star Wars – down to the little details that really emphasize a strong atmosphere – right.
When it came time to fly into space, another thing that I was happy to see was a lack of loading screens between getting in the cockpit, and being out of the planet’s atmosphere.
Sure, a cutscene plays, but watching your ship actually enter space is a far cry better than watching a loading screen. Not everything can be No Man’s Sky, but a cutscene still gets the job done in making you feel like you’re travelling out to space.
Standard Gameplay, Star Wars Flavoured
As much as I liked the look and feel of Outlaws, those things can only carry a game so far, at least in big open-world adventures like the one Outlaws promises.
When you get down to the things you’re actually doing in Outlaws, what I played so far doesn’t really ring as unique.
The third-person cover-based shooting, the stealth missions you have to restart if you’re caught, the climbing and short environmental puzzles to make it from one place to another – all of it is a Star Wars flavoured version of something I and many other players have done in other games.
That’s not inherently bad, but it’s also not exactly good. It’s just bog-standard, and I’m already concerned about there being a heaping dose of repetitive gameplay beefing up the runtime of Outlaws.
I could be making much ado about nothing but hearing the same NPC voice lines as I was sneaking through a Crimsion Dawn-filled part of Kijimi from two different guards didn’t fill me with confidence that I’d be in for a unique experience everywhere I went in Outlaws.
At least this is my fear when it comes to the main missions. And granted, these fears are being held up by a four hour experience where I played a specific vertical slice of a much bigger game, and it’s very easy to be cynical about a Ubisoft game – even a Ubisoft Massive game – having lots of repetition in it.
But I wouldn’t have a reason to be cynical if Ubisoft had given me and plenty of other players reason to be with its history of open-world games falling into repetitive patterns that negatively impact the experience.
Potential, There Is
That being said, I’d argue that there’s more potential for Outlaws to be unlike previous Ubisoft games that may have felt repetitive than there is for it to feel like other open-world games or other Ubisoft titles.
The potential lies with the progression system, which is another thing it’s nigh impossible to get a grip of in the short demo time I had, but the structure of it is very promising to me.
See, unlike other games where you progress your character by gaining experience points and then spending those experience points in a skill tree, Outlaws doesn’t have a skill tree. It has skills you can improve and unlock, for sure, but it all happens more organically through gameplay.
To gain new skills and then better them, you have to find people across the galaxy who are experts in those skills. You find experts by keeping your ear to the ground, paying attention to the little comments made by NPC’s about who knows what, and who to talk to about different things and where to find them.
Completing missions for these experts, when you do find them, is how you progress different skills, and obviously you’re choosing which ones to progress whenever you like.
Having this in place instead of your bog-standard skill tree shakes things up quite a lot, because now not only is the path to upgrading your skills more interesting, there are so many more opportunities for the development team to interject more storytelling.
Quid-pro-quo, there are more opportunities for you to experience something unique and/or have a uniquely Star Wars-flavoured experience in a way that’s never been possible before, because of the game’s open-world focus and how this progression system weaves through that.
So You Want To Be A Scoundrel?
Just like when I got a hands-off look at Outlaws, I’m walking away from this hands-on look with a lot of optimism for the potential I see.
I’m also filled with plenty of cautious feelings and the negative voice in my head that reminds me there are so many trope-traps Outlaws could fall into. That same voice also reminds me that Ubisoft was the architect to some of those traps.
The open-world foundations, the wanted system (which I didn’t experience pretty much at all in this demo but I was cognizant of all the same), the progression system, the visual design and the attention to detail filling out the atmosphere all make me optimistic.
Stuff like the lock-picking mini game where you use the tool that R2-D2 uses as the answer for everything and it’s rhythm based is really cool to me.
Those are the kinds of things that have made me more optimistic after going hands-on with the game, the way I had hoped they would after my hands-off preview.
But until I get to experience the full game, I’ll remain cautiously optimistic, though more on the optimistic side.
Star Wars: Outlaws arrives on PS5 on August 30, 2024.
