Reviews for the Ubisoft-published Star Wars Outlaws are out, and it seems most reviewers feel fairly conflicted about it. While the game is averaging a fairly healthy 77 on OpenCritic, many critics are in consensus that while the game has its high points and nails the Star Wars vibe, the game’s flaws are hard to ignore in moment-to-moment gameplay.
Several critics, including our own Jade King, have highlighted that Outlaws stumbles when it comes to storytelling, and has a number of glaring mechanical and technical issues, indicating a lack of polish. While a disappointingly underbaked narrative and a one-dimensional protagonist unfortunately can’t be easily fixed after a game’s release, a lot of Outlaws’ other problems can. That’s why I think it might be a good idea to wait a couple of months before splurging on it.
Not to mention that open world Ubisoft titles like this are infamous for dropping in price pretty quickly these days.
Star Wars Outlaws’ Main Mechanics Don’t Work Well
One of the biggest gripes I’ve seen with Star Wars Outlaws is how, despite marketing itself as a stealth game, its stealth doesn’t really work. At times stealth can feel extraordinarily basic, putting you through the same motions again and again because you just don’t have all that many tools in your arsenal. Your alien axolotl companion Nix makes these sequences more interesting by distracting enemies and turning off alarms, but Outlaws doesn’t really do much else to make these sequences fun or engaging.
It fails to communicate detection and visibility well enough for stealth to be your primary approach, and most main missions have you moving through ventilation systems instead of finding your own way through. There’s very little flexibility here, and though you can unlock the opportunity to charm your way out of sticky situations when you get caught, it feels like any typical Star Wars scoundrel would start with those skills. The alarm also seems to trigger unpredictably, throwing you into gunfights when you’re trying your best to handle things quietly.
There’s also been a few complaints about the enemy AI, which doesn’t do anything to increase the stakes – enemies pretty much forget you the moment you disappear behind cover, and don’t seem to see or hear you taking out their buddies even when you’re mere strides away from them. That’s pretty painful for a game released in 2024, let alone one that’s supposed to prioritise stealth. Outlaws would benefit from a rework of its stealth system, and though this is a particularly big ask, it seems like the most important.
Enemy AI is a problem in combat as well. While critics have mixed opinions on whether Outlaws’ combat works well or not, several have noted that enemies seem to run all over the place with no purpose.
Also, the speeder isn’t great, which is a pretty major issue since it’s your primary mode of transportation around the game’s various open worlds. It slams into seemingly every tiny obstacle, bringing it to immediate standstills, and is generally difficult to control due to the vehicle’s characteristic speed and flimsiness. This seems like something that can (and should) be fixed in later patches, alongside other bugs and jank, like Kay inexplicably moving across entire encampments, weapons falling out of enemies hands and bouncing back into their grasps, guards getting stuck in the environment, mission prompts not appearing, dialogue audio completely disappearing, and more.
Will Star Wars Outlaws Be Fixed?
None of these things are individually game-ruining – after all, the majority of reviewers said that romping around the galaxy as a scoundrel was decent fun nonetheless – but they do combine to make Outlaws feel unpolished as a whole, which makes its high asking price much harder to swallow.
An unpleasant fact of the modern triple-A gaming industry is that games are often released unpolished and buggy, which largely serves to annoy players who pre-order games just to have them arrive in a less than ideal state. Cyberpunk 2077 is the obvious example, having been released so broken that it had to embark on a multi-year redemption arc just to gain player goodwill back. That game is significantly better now than when it was released, but it also took considerable resources and time to fix.
Also, No Man’s Sky, obviously.
I’m not sure that Star Wars Outlaws is going to get that kind of love and attention – most games don’t, especially if they get decent reviews. Realistically, most of its systems won’t be reworked, and certainly not as drastically as in famous examples of revamped games. We can probably expect the most annoying bugs to be fixed somewhere down the line, hopefully in an upcoming patch, and optimistically, the most annoying parts of these systems can be tweaked later.
But if any of these things are fixed, assuming Massive Entertainment is given the time and resources to do so, we won’t see them for at least a few months. I’ll be buying the game soon to play for work, but if I didn’t feel obligated to squeeze every bit of content possible out of this game in a timely manner, I’d probably wait another six months to buy it, maybe even a year, when the game is eventually discounted and many of its more glaring issues are fixed. If you don’t have gaming FOMO, I’d recommend you do exactly that.
5 Images
5 Images
Star Wars Outlaws
3.5/5
Star Wars Outlaws follows Kay Vess as she bids to out manoeuver the galaxy's deadliest criminals. An open-world action-adventure game from Ubisoft, it also features grand space battles and a deep story.
