CreatureCantina.com reviews Star Wars - Outlaws

by Bill Cable
on 2026-01-28, 10:56:46

In addition to being an accomplished artist, journalist, software engineer, and world-traveler, I'm also a gamer. And as a Star Wars fan, I end up playing all the major release SW games (at least the ones that come out on PlayStation... dang you KotOR). Given the mixed reviews, I held off picking up Outlaws until it went on Black Friday clearance. I started playing it over holiday break, and wrapped it up maybe a week and a half ago.

Having finished the main campaign, I can confidently declare that this game blows. It's not unplayably bad, but it's very close to straight unenjoyable. The descriptor I kept coming back to as I played it was "janky." No triple-A video game released under the Star Wars label should ever be this thoroughly meh.

I'll start by saying the graphics are actually really good. The environments are beautiful. The enemies are all really true to Star Wars. The NPCs are well-designed and animated. All of it is excellent except for, inexplicably, the main character. She looks like she's carved from a block of cheese. She has these razor-sharp features that are just jarring, and yet the textures look like Play-Doh. And it makes no sense because the flashback young version of the character looks perfectly fine. But the character you play... none of the facial expressions look right. I don't know how or why they decided to mess with the model the way they did, but it totally ruined her.

That wouldn't be a big deal if the gameplay was excellent. Sadly, the gameplay is where the game fails hardest. You basically have two different combat modes - dogfights in orbit and regular blaster fights on land. The space battles are just... serviceable. There's nothing egregiously bad about them, but they're not thrilling or engaging. The controls are stiff. You're basically just pushing full on up until you rotate to get a ship in the distance in your sights, so you inevitably overshoot and have to correct and lose half to the time to do damage on each attack. So the battles are sluggish and drawn out. But there's never any real reward to the battles. You fly in, blow up some ships until they stop spawning, then go land on the planet. There's no real point to them. And on one mission, I dropped out of hyperspace into a big group of guys I was trying to escape, and I ended up dying. When I respawned, that group of guys was just gone. I "escaped" by dying, and the mission was over. It made no narrative sense.

The ground combat is the lamest brand of cover shooting you could come up with. You have a standard blaster you can upgrade a bit, or you can sometimes pick up weapons your enemies drop (I never figured out what determined why some could be picked up and others couldn't). It was all cover, shoot, get hit, dodge or run around until your health replenishes, and repeat. The aiming was loose, so I always chose the "rapid fire" mode for my primary blaster, but then sometimes after I died it'd revert to single-shot mode for no reason, which was useless. The stolen weapons usually only had 6 or 8 ammo, so they were nearly useless. Enemy AI was inept. But sometimes all that could be avoided with stealth.

Actually the gameplay was aggressively focused on stealth. I get it, you're a "thief" so you should lurk in the shadows or whatever. That'd be fine if the stealth mechanics were actually fun. They're not. It's a mix of doing this slow, laughably-animated crouch walk behind walls and occasionally grass cover, and endless first-person navigating of air vents. Single-path air vents. I guess they're there so you can hide until the alarms stop once you alert the Imperials to your presence in any of the base infiltration missions.

I started playing Ghost of Yōtei after completing Outlaws and it's night-and-day the difference between competent implementation of stealth and incompetent. In Yōtei you actually feel powerful pulling off assassination chains after infiltrating a base. I think that comes down to the enemies actually being fairly observant. In Outlaws, to make up for the fact that the cover system is lame, they make it so the enemies have zero peripheral vision and can't hear a commotion immediately behind them. "A guy just got punched in the face 3 feet away from me? I didn't notice at all!" Not to mention how silly it is that 80% of the take-down animations involved Kay punching somebody in the helmet. Just a naked-fist punch into reinforced Plastoid armor. Talk about breaking immersion!

So stealth sucked. Combat sucked. The open world design was poor. You travel around on a speeder bike which sounds cool but the implementation is weak. They give you no HUD map, so if you want to go someplace you gotta keep switching back-and-forth because the roads are windy and it's never clear which way you need to go. The bike oversteers while being too fast, so it's aggravating. But then on wide-open areas the bike is too slow, and you use your boost for a brief speed-up before that recharges (which takes agonizingly long). So somehow they managed to make it booth too fast and too slow.

The side quests are tedious chores. There's little variety, and the rewards are meaningless. It didn't take me long to decide to ignore all the side quests completely and just power through the main storyline just so I can get things over with. There's a happiness scale among the 4 factions you work with, which basically determines if you can buy their best stuff or if they immediately shoot when they see you. I almost effortlessly bribed my way into good standing with all the tribes except the Pikes (screw those guys!). Doing the bare minimum I was able to finish the main story with very little difficulty (on Normal). I never felt like "man, if I'd only helped find that lost farmer that would have made this mission easier!"

The story was unoriginal with the requisite surprise betrayal at the end. The only real fun character was the assassin droid (a carbon copy of K-2SO's personality).

So to wrap up, I absolutely cannot recommend you play Star Wars - Outlaws. It's the worst attempt I've seen at a sub-standard Assassin's Creed game (by the people who make Assassin's Creed). Give it a hard pass.

PS: Anybody want a cheap copy?