Star Wars meets Grand Theft Auto in stunning but patchy new heist

From there, the game’s main plotline follows a familiar heist movie formula, with Kay needing to head off across the territories – including to iconic Skywalker home planet, Tatooine – in order to assemble a crew and pull off the job of a lifetime.

But it’s everything around that primary quest that provides the true meat of the game. Your journal of tasks, side jobs, rumours and opportunities is constantly being filled as you explore, so if you’re not in a hurry to follow the narrative, you can spend hours just being a dirtbag, taking contracts from the local mob boss to infiltrate Imperial checkpoints and steal data, delivering contraband on your speeder, or fleecing the locals at the surprisingly addictive poker-like card game, Kessel Sabaac. It’s a lot like a PG Grand Theft Auto with no carjacking.

A lot of the actions you take will end up affecting your standing with the four major crime syndicates, two of which are headed by characters you may recognise from the films (Jabba the Hutt and Emilia Clarke’s Qi’ra).

It’s an interesting system because your reputation will affect some of the jobs and vendors you can access, as well as whether the syndicates will allow you in the areas they control or shoot you on sight. You’re frequently given opportunities to backstab for money, but you can’t be truly blacklisted; getting back in the good books usually just requires doing a few odd jobs.

Dealing with the Empire’s space cops is a little different, as crossing them will give you a Grand Theft Auto-style wanted level that makes it tough to get around and necessitates some hacking or bribing to clear. Thankfully, the stormtroopers are as incompetent here as they are in the films.

Exploring each region brings you to some incredible places, from the overgrown wreck of a High Republic cruiser to the familiar gleaming interior of Imperial space stations. But in between, the game can feel disappointingly empty, whether you’re blasting over sand dunes on your speeder or zooming around space junk outside a planet’s atmosphere. In fact, space exploration may be the flimsiest part of the game overall; dog fights with TIE fighters are fun, but there’s not much else to do besides scan for loot.

Kay’s best friend and partner in crime is a cute and clever critter called Nix, who arguably does the bulk of the work in any infiltration. Nix can scan the area for enemies, remotely activate switches, retrieve loot, pickpocket, distract and even fight. This is a tool set that you’ll be using a lot because a huge number of missions and activities call for you to be sneaky.

I have a bad feeling about this

I’m not a huge fan of stealth in video games generally, but the way it’s handled in Outlaws is emblematic of the game’s main problem overall. The game might be made up of wide open spaces, but it’s incredibly prescriptive in terms of how it wants you to complete missions, and it can be frustrating how often you’ll fail outright and be sent back in time a few minutes because of something outside your control.

Instant fails can happen because you were spotted when you were supposed to be in stealth, you raised an alarm when you were supposed to be quiet, or you wandered too far from a specific person or area. Combined with the tendency for platforming sections to take place over instant death pits, even if they look like normal terrain you can jump to, it means you should expect to see the loading screen that takes you back to a recent safe state quite often.

I did have some tense and exciting encounters that worked out exactly how I assume the designers of these systems had hoped. During an infiltration of Jabba’s Palace (one of the very few locations pulled straight from the films), I managed to sneak around undetected enough to sabotage an area’s alarm systems, meaning that when I stunned a Gamorrean guard and opened fire on his friend, none of the workers nearby could put the place on lockdown, and I was able to clear them all out. More often than not, though, I ended up frantically running about and eventually having to retry.

But even though many of the systems are frustrating (why is the hacking minigame just Wordle but with nonsense characters, and who came up with the rhythm-based lock-picking), there is something magical about the game that meant I often didn’t want to put it down.

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Many of the environments and skyscapes are stunning, and although Kay seems to have no personality or convictions besides wanting to escape the Outer Rim planets, it’s fun to inhabit a clueless scoundrel in this world. There are potential mentors you need to track down to teach you new tricks, which you then unlock by ticking off a list of feats, and there are heaps of gun and outfit upgrades to make or unlock. In the absence of a story to care about, that trademark Ubisoft “list of things to do” carries the bulk of the weight.

Ultimately, if you’ve ever desired a Star Wars underbelly take on Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed, Outlaws is likely to provide dozens of hours of entertainment despite some key elements being underbaked or unpolished.

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