The Ubisoft Game. Now with a Star Wars skin!
As someone whose been consistently disappointed by Star Wars games for many years, you’d think I’d have learned…. damn, I guess I’ve gone and given away my opinion in the first dozen-or-so words there!
I have to say, actually quite enjoyed Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor. And, despite Star Wars: Outlaws being a Ubisoft Game (and my opinion of Ubisoft games is… well, not high!), I was cautiously optimistic. Finally, we’d get to explore the seedy underworld of the Star Wars galaxy and live out our Han Solo fantasies. A game that would disprove the “a Star Wars game has to involve waving a lightsaber around” idea that apparently caused EA to cancel the Mandalorian game.
Oh well, never mind!
The Story
Kay Vess is a lovable rogue with a heart of gold and an adorable furry sidekick – because there are only a handful of character archetypes scattered throughout the thousands of single-biome worlds in the Star Wars galaxy. She is drawn into the underworld after a heist gone wrong – because there are only a handful of origin stories too.
With a bounty on her head, she must… urm… something! Presumably, earn enough to pay off the bounty or kill the man who put the death mark on her… Something, something, lovable gang of misfits… something, something, inevitable betrayal… something, something, family drama… Darth Vader will probably show up at some point! I wouldn’t know. I didn’t finish it! (Hey, I’m not a professional games journalist! What I am is a father, who doesn’t have time to spend on games that don’t absorb me!).
One of the many problems is that I just don’t find Kay particularly likeable as a character. We don’t really get to spend any time getting to know her before the story starts. Then she crash lands on a planet and immediately trusts someone she just met (who also doesn’t really get properly introduced) to repair her ship, just because they got into a firefight together. None of the other characters made a great first impression either, and things didn’t improve after spending more time with them. And its not just the writing. The character models are pulled from the deepest depths of the uncanny valley, the animations are stiff and they just lack personality.
On the bright side, her companion, Nyx, is at least suitably adorable. Although, I quickly realised that he is functionally a lot like the drones from the Division or BD-1, the adorable little sidekick character from Jedi: Fallen Order.
There is a key feature where you have to manage your reputation with three underworld factions. You try to do jobs and ‘acquire’ equipment from them without pissing off all the others. But, again, I just didn’t find it very absorbing, partly because none of the characters were really that interesting and I didn’t feel compelled to ally with or betray any of them.
The only characters I was interested in are the existing characters, but both Jabba the Hutt and Lando Calrissian are not in the base game and will be coming out as separate, paid DLCs, which is kinda taking the piss!
Gameplay
Hilariously, Massive Entertainment, who previously worked on the unbearably tedious Division games, came out and said, “It’s not a traditional Ubisoft game,” ahead of launch. However, despite their protestations, it’s a Ubisoft game!
Tell me if you’ve heard this before. You’re travelling in the open world, you come across an enemy base. You can hide in long grass and engage in basic stealth, lockpicking and using silent takedowns to thin out the crowd before things inevitably go to shit. At which point, you engage in mediocre gun battles with enemies that take a few too many hits before they go down. Oh, and there’s a lot of squeezing through narrow spaces for no fucking reason. And a large dollop of driving through beautiful but mostly empty and lifeless landscapes, sprinkled with some dubious platforming… Basically, it’s every triple-A ‘action-adventure’ game from the last decade. Oh, and apparently, there’s spaceship combat too, but I didn’t make it to that bit.
I will say this: they do at least give you the option to turn off the yellow paint that lazy level designers have been using to show you where to go in video games for years. The fact that it’s still obvious (80% of the time, at least) where you’re supposed to go just shows that it is unnecessary, and I wish more games would give you this option. I like the accessibility features, too. In a game like this, jam-packed full of different under-developed mechanics, it’s nice to be able to make certain things easier – or turn them off altogether – so you don’t have to engage with the less interesting features and can focus on the things you do enjoy.
It doesn’t feel too handholdy, either. I actually died in a puzzle because I didn’t shoot the two power cells that were powering the giant fan before trying to swing in front of it. Most games wouldn’t let you swing until you’d shot both cells, so I kind of admire them for that.
Having said that, I found that my experience was mostly blundering into things. Sometimes, getting into firefights that were impossibly difficult and getting killed. Other times, I’d stumbled into an imperial base by accident and chanced upon a secret entrance that led to my objective, but I didn’t feel like I’d earned it. I wasn’t succeeding through careful planning or strategising (or even Han Solo levels of dumb luck).
Once I got into the open world, it became directionless and wandering and… just not that interesting. In other words, a Ubisoft game! Having been outgunned so much, I wanted to take time to level up and get new gear before progressing the story, but it also felt like the story was rushing me off the planet before I’d really had time to explore it. The thing with giving the player so much choice is that it can lead to decision paralysis. Particularly when none of those decisions seem to lead to anything fun or interesting.
There’s also annoying adventure game logic. I was exploring a pirate base after I cleared it out, and there was a very obvious crack in the wall with a fucking spotlight pointed at it, which was obviously a secret. I noticed a guard nearby had dropped a grenade launcher, so I picked it up and fired it at the crack in the wall… nothing! I tried a few other things, including tossing grenades, but to no avail. So, I gave up and googled the solution. Apparently, you get an explosive upgrade for your pistol later in the game that breaks the crack in the wall. A fucking pistol upgrade will break it, but a grenade launcher won’t? And the game thinks I’m going to trek all the way back to the pirate cave for a ‘treasure’ that is almost certainly a useless cosmetic item that I won’t ever use? The game can think again!
Jank
I might have been able to forgive some of that if the game wasn’t so janky!
You walk up to a character to start a conversation, and every single time, Kay and/or the other person slowly turns round and shuffles awkwardly into position, leaving a long…. long… long, long, long pause before the talking starts. It feels unnatural and unpolished, and having characters moving around like high-school drama students who’ve forgotten their cues doesn’t help. Why not do what they’ve been doing in video games for ages and fade to black? Or do a camera cut to hide the characters being teleported into place? In fact, I know the answer. It’s to make the game more “cinematic”. But if you’re going to do the whole God of War (2018) one-camera-shot thing, you have to commit to it and do a much better job than this.
And it doesn’t end there. Half a dozen times, I’ve tried to slice a terminal or pick a lock, only to run around in circles to get into just the right place for the interaction prompt to appear. On one occasion, Kay got stuck spinning on the spot, and I had to reload my save. I’ve seen rats scurrying around a meter above the ground. I got the option to lean on a bar and “listen” to a conversation… in an empty room! I skipped the non-existent dialogue between invisible people and somehow acquired a password I needed for part of a side mission.
There’s just so much jank, which only adds to the feeling that stuff is happening more by accident than by any skill or intent.
Final Thoughts
We were promised that Star Wars: Outlaws wouldn’t just be “another Ubisoft game”, but it’s janky, bloated, oddly paced, and it completely failed to absorb me… you can finish the joke yourself!
Update: Apparently, they’ve appointed a new creative director and promised to overhaul the combat and stealth gameplay. But it’s too late. It’s a single-player, story-based game, and it had its chance. They should have play-tested it and polished it before they released it!
My expectations were pretty low, and it still managed to disappoint. I have no interest in holding onto it because nothing they can do now will fundamentally change the experience. And I will be a lot more weary of new Star Wars games in future!