“Fetch Quest, THE GAME!"
PC | PS5 | XBOX SERIES
HOW I PLAYED: I played Star Wars: Outlaws on PC via Ubisoft+ subscription. I played on my R7 7800X3D, RTX 3080 gaming PC with 32GB of DDR5 RAM. And I was able to play at 1440p on Ultra settings hitting mostly* 80-90fps.
STORY — 10/20
INTRO
Star Wars: Outlaws starts with a cutscene introducing us to the game's antagonist Sliro Barsha. It quickly establishes that he is NOT to be messed with and is a nasty guy... He has a meeting with some other underworld boss leaders (mob style) and out of nowhere just ends them all!
Then the game cuts to our Protagonist Kay Vess, our lovable scoundrel who can do NO WRONG! And is perfect in every way... except she is low on money and low on pet food for her companion Nix... who we need to feed as our first mission.
I mean... it's no 1-hour segment hunting a dear and chopping down your dead wife's favorite tree... but they can't all be bangers right? 🤷🏼
CUTSCENES
SWO has 2 types of cutscenes, it has pre-rendered cutscenes that play at pivotal story moments. And it also has in-game rendered cutscenes. There is a stark difference between the two and some of the character designs (mainly Kay Vess) look completely different. Almost as if they have 2 different design types.
Most if not all the in-game cutscenes are PS2 style where you are locked into dialogue exchange with an NPC to be handed your next fetch quest... I mean a very important mission!
There are also these flashback moments that Kay has with another NPC character in the game and I get what they were going for but all of these moments fell flat. And there wasn't enough of them or enough interaction with said character to earn the emotional payoff Ubisoft was likely looking for.
The dialogue written for the cutscenes and NPC interactions makes me think of someone who just discovered ChatGPT and used the prompt "Female Hero talks tough to Male antagonist". Then just hit copy and paste! The delivery of some of the dialogue was also totally unbalanced most times not matching the atmosphere or emotions currently happening in the game.
...Or was I mistaken that there WAS emotion happening in the scene? 😮
WORLD BUILDING
It's Star Wars, If you have seen any of the original 6 movies or any one of the Disney Era slop that has been released in recent years... the environments and world will be familiar. I didn't find much world-building other than getting my next fetch quest...*a very important mission from the next random NPC I decide to interact with.
OVERALL STORY
The story is almost beat for beat the same story as Forspoken...
- Angsty protagonist has had a rough go at life and struggles with their troubled past. But use their slick banter and street smarts to navigate their surroundings.
- Angsty protagonist takes on sketchy jobs in hopes of hitting the "Big score" to move out of their troubled life situation and move on to better things.
- The scores never turn out the way they are supposed to and always backfire on the protagonist leading them to further their bad actions and get further into trouble.
- The Protagonist is offered ONE LAST JOB that is too good to be true but will pay off BIG TIME so they can realize their dreams.
- The LAST JOB doesn't turn out as expected and history repeats itself.
The protagonist learns that it's not about the big score but your closest friends you have gained along the way. And teams up to take on the Baddy
The End...
The overall story in Outlaws feels like it was written by AI and further diluted by executive intervention. It follows all of the "modern stories" tropes as if it is copying its homework from a manual of "How to Write a modern story".
Take a wild guess at who any of the "bad guys" are in the story... and you will be right. 👀
GRAPHICS — 10/15
CHARACTER MODELS
I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room... the main character Kay Vess looks WEIRD! Almost every other NPC in the game looks normal or like some generic Star Wars character. But Kay Vess's face model looks like claymation at times. I don't know if it's just how the lighting hits her face while in the game but it looks off. Her character model looks totally fine in pre-rendered cutscenes, I'd even say she looks fantastic here! But in the game, it's just laughably bad at times. It doesn't help that Ubisoft's "Snowdrop" game engine has issues with textures loading properly so in MANY instances I would be staring at NPCs with low poly textures on their face.
ENVIRONMENTS
Digital Foundry PRAISED Star Wars: Outlaws for its graphical fidelity on PC with its hidden graphics mode. And there are some choice Environments where you can get some pretty nice landscape shots. But what subtracts for me is the seemingly bland color pallets. It all just feels bland and generic to me and very "painted by numbers". I definitely think the art direction here played it a bit too safe.
SPECIAL FX
We have all seen the explosion memes, and I thought that would be an isolated moment... but it's not. The FX in SWO are last console generation or worse bad. It just looks like they are missing a last final polish step and were just shipped as-is for timeline sake.
AUDIO — 9/15
AMBIENCE
I was genuinely surprised when I first started the game because it almost sounded like Ubisoft got the AMAZING John Williams to do the score for the game, or they used some iconic tracks from the original movies. But as it turns out it was actually composers Kazuma Jinnouchi, Wilbert Roget, II, and Jon Everist who did the scores. These are very close to John Williams and all sounded great, I just wish there were more of these amazing Star Wars scores throughout the game.
BOSS MUSIC
There are no bosses in this game, from what I played. It's basically like "Here is a mob of enemies", or "Stealth around this huge room full of patrolling stormtroopers". Very big letdown that there are no climactic boss fights.
SOUND DESIGN
The sound design was decent, what hampered the score for me was the random glitches where dialogue would get initiated and keep playing no matter the distance you were from that NPC.
PERFORMANCE — 5/10
FRAME RATE
The frame rate was ok on my PC, but I did run into a bunch of traversal stutter and random FPS dips, no matter my graphics settings. Also even looking at the Digital Foundries console review you can see this game struggles to run at any kind of performance mode, mostly sitting at low 50's for fps. This game has its moments, but there is nothing that should prevent it from running at a stable FPS on current gem consoles and without issue on PC.
Clip from Digital Foundry's tech review on consoles.
STABILITY
This is where the game really suffered for me. First, let's talk about the "Early Access" fiasco that occurred with Outlaws. For the people who shelled out $130 to play this game early, they were basically treated as alpha testers to an even buggier version of the game. Ubisoft released a performance and maintenance patch to resolve a lot of the bugs, which as a result NUKED all early access players save files and progress... Resulting in them having to replay from the start of the game.
That is atrocious and a terrible business practice on Ubisofts part.
I am playing the game a week or so after release and it is still VERY buggy. I encountered lots of weird bugs and glitches where I would fall through collision or one instance I was riding on a speeder through an open field and I smashed into random rocks that were floating in mid air...
There is also this random glitch that I recorded, where I thought I had made my way to a dead end, and could not figure out how to progress the mission I was on. Turns out the problem was that the way I was supposed to traverse was not loading in the scene until I used Nix to press a button. Check it out here.
GAMEPLAY — 22/40
CONTROLS
The controls are pretty standard 3rd person shooter controls, which is fine. I thought Kay controlled pretty decent. I am not a fan of the primary button layout where R3 is the "collect Items" button. But thankfully you can switch this in settings.
MECHANICS
I enjoyed the different blaster upgrades you can get throughout your play though. And unlocking or gathering items to upgrade Kay's outfit was cool. I didn't really enjoy how most everything is locked behind some kind of fetch quest...*a very important mission.
PACING
Is terrible... at no time are you on a linear story path in Star Wars: Outlaws. You bounce from fetch quest to fetch quest in the most annoying manner. I never felt there were real stakes for our characters, and I felt the major Star Wars cameo was so lazily thrown in the mix and was just comically bad. I really wish the story intertwined with the OG trilogy somehow... which would have made the story more impactful.
Does anyone remember Shadows Of The Empire on Nintendo 64? That game is in almost the EXACT same timeframe as Star Wars: Outlaws, and they did a MUCH better job of tying in that game's story with the OG trilogy, so much so that there was a book written for the story.
ahhhh those were the days!
UI/UE
The UI/UE was sleek, the menu system was very well thought out and easily navigated. I did feel some of the notifications on screen were a bit much. But you can change that in settings which is nice.
BOSS QUALITY
Again... no bosses in this game from what I can tell. You fight a Star Destroyer that has a health bar I guess?? But this was a MASSIVE letdown. Again I am going to compare this game to an almost 30-year-old game (ouch that hurts!) Shadows Of The Empire on N64. That game was also mission-based but also had some iconic boss fights that made use of your character's abilities and weapons.
The fact that a modern AAA game with 100's millions of dollars behind it and with the audacity to charge $130 has almost 0 boss fights... is just an insult in my opinion.
ENEMY VARIETY
abysmal, you basically have the same skeletal animation and AI mobs reskinned as either
- a Stormtrooper
- a member of the Pike clan
- a member of Jabba's clan
- a member of (insert clan name here) clan
And sometimes you have droids and the odd AT-ST here and there.
GAMEPLAY VARIETY
Your choices are
- Fetch quests *very important missions
- Riding around aimlessly on your speeder
- Riding around aimlessly in your ship
- Crawling through vents
- Awful stealth missions
- Mashing R2 to unlock safes
So technically is some variety, but is any of it fun? 🤔
REPLAYABILITY
If you REALLY love this story than you might wanna sit through it again.
BONUS — 2/4
There are some great accessibility options for color-blind individuals and some great audio-visual cue options. Great to see!
OVERALL — 58/100
Star Wars: Outlaws aka Fetch Quest, THE GAME! I am not going to sugarcoat this, for $130 this game embodies everything wrong with current game development. The writing is so generic and bland, they took a possibly cool character Kay Vess and just made her dull and predictable. This game lacks focus and clear direction and even with its at times stunning visuals it barely holds together as a "game". This does NOT feel like Star Wars in any way and that makes me sad. I know as of this writing Ubisoft shareholders are pressuring the company to go private due to the fall of their share prices... and honestly I think people in charge of this game rightfully need to lose their positions. You have lost your way as game makers and instead of taking the opportunity with a legendary IP to write an interesting and new story within the Star Wars universe. You instead chose to write the most bland unoriginal modern story trope-filled bantha fodder! How are you at all surprised that this game is not performing well?
Did you even play it?
I did... and I am not happy about it. 100's of millions of dollars to produce a FAIR game in 2024 is the worst Return On Investment ever... Do better Ubisoft.
TLDR: 58/100 (FAIR) Star Wars: Outlaws feels like a generic fetch quest simulator with a bland, trope-filled story and inconsistent visuals. The main character lacks depth, and the writing is uninspired. While the soundtrack captures some of the Star Wars spirit, the gameplay is repetitive with no memorable boss fights or enemy variety. Performance is shaky, with numerous bugs and launch issues. Despite a few bright spots like decent controls and some great landscape visuals, the game fails to deliver a compelling Star Wars experience
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