Star Wars Outlaws was provided by Ubisoft for review. Thank you!
It's no secret that Star Wars Outlaws got off to a rocky start when it first launched back in August 2024, but now we're a few months down the line and plenty of updates have come in, how is Star Wars Outlaws faring now? Well, I'm pleased to say that a lot of the problems that people had with the game seem to have been improved. That being said, there are still a few things that I got frustrated with during my playthrough.
In Star Wars Outlaws, you play as Kay Vess, a down-on-her-luck thief who is always looking for her next big score but instead just gets herself into more trouble. After a job goes wrong, you're thrown into the criminal underworld, where you'll need to balance your reputation with various criminal factions and build your crew to pull off that final big job.
Kay is a fairly likable protagonist, and Humberly González does a great job of making her quite relatable with a streak of arrogance. She often feels out of her depth in the situation, which is refreshingly realistic for a protagonist.
As you're assembling your crew, you'll visit various planets and inevitably, all potential members of your crew are in some sort of trouble on each of the planets, requiring you to fix their situation so you can recruit them. It does get pretty tiresome by the third crew member, but what can you do? It'd be a bit boring if you just showed up and recruited them immediately!
These planets are fairly large once you land on them, several kilometers across for each, although a fair amount of them are empty spaces with places of interest being highlighted on your map. The planets you visit represent various biomes, such as desert, forest, urban, and snowy. The planets are based on more obscure Star Wars planets, with the exception of Tatooine, usually only shown briefly in the newer films or in some cases, created just for Star Wars Outlaws.
You can also fly around in space above the planets, although this part of the game seems to be more of an afterthought, and while there are some minor quests to do here, almost nothing storyline-related happens in space.
Then we have the stealth mechanics, which have been the constant victim of criticism levied against the title.
As of Update 1.50, I had no issues with the stealth mechanics. Sometimes, the enemies seemed to patrol somewhat unfairly, giving you little choice but to fight, but this was rare. Although stealth is heavily encouraged in the game, fighting is often an option. Enemy line of sight seems to be as you would expect for a Ubisoft title, and the mechanics still share a lot in common with other Ubisoft open-world games such as Far Cry, giving you a limited time to eliminate enemies in the area before an alarm is raised and reinforcements arrive.
The shooting feels pretty solid, with your main weapon being a customizable blaster pistol. As you progress through the game, you'll get additional modules that fit and add more firing modes and ammo types to the gun, making it highly versatile. The feedback from the gunplay is pretty good and enemies don't tend to be bullet sponges very often, so you do get some sense of power from your weapons.
When in free-roam, the game plays out like any other Ubisoft open-world game, but it feels far more focused when doing the main quests, often playing like an action-adventure title where there is one linear path through the mission you're on. This usually takes place in an interior of significant size and is not part of the open world map. I much prefer this way of handling key missions.
However, there are some irritations I found with the game, with some that feel like bugs and others that just feel like poor design. The chatter between guards sounds disjointed as if the game chooses random voice lines for them to say and another random line to reply with, which can become irritating and feel cheap. Climbable surfaces in the game aren't marked and it isn't always obvious what you can climb, leading to some confusion. Yellow paint would have been much appreciated in these spots..
Then there's AI, which has pathfinding issues. Particularly when AI uses speeders, it seems to struggle greatly. If you're being chased while on your speeder, sometimes other speeders hunting you down will just ram you and bring you to a stop or randomly stop in front of you, and it feels like the AI is just getting confused. In one side mission, I was tasked with eliminating incoming enemies who were arriving on speeders, but when the mission didn't end, I was confused until I realized two enemies were stuck on their speeders 200 meters away because their speeders had collided with each other.
There are also some instances where objective markers are unhelpfully placed. Some quests will guide you to one objective marker and then another before leading you to the final destination, but others will just waypoint the final destination and leave you trying to figure out how to reach it. The game really could have done with a "breadcrumb" system where a trail or arrows were put on the ground for you to follow, as sometimes it gets very confusing on where you have to go.
Visually, Star Wars Outlaws looks quite good, with some excellent reflections and lighting. But this also has a drawback. The game forces ray-tracing upon the player, meaning if you have a non-Nvidia GPU, you might experience some severe performance issues. On my AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, I played the game on the lowest settings at 1080p with FSR3 on Balanced, and I still got dips below 30FPS on one of the planets and, very rarely, below 20FPS. So, the performance is far below what I expected, almost certainly caused by the game's forced ray-traced reflections and lighting.
So, is Star Wars Outlaws the travesty everyone made it out to be? In my opinion, no, at least not now a few updates have been released. It's a solid action-adventure title that takes it a bit easier on the open-world elements compared to other Ubisoft games, and I mean that in a positive way. With decent gunplay, some interesting if under-used faction relationship mechanics, and a serviceable story to push it all along, I recommend picking up Star Wars Outlaws if you find it on a good sale.
Unfortunately, Star Wars Outlaws runs poorly on the Steam Deck, likely due to enforced Ray-Tracing. Although you can get the game to boot and "play", the performance is just unacceptable, often in the mid-20s and occasionally dropping below 20 FPS even with no action on the screen. Star Wars Outlaws is a game you'll have to skip playing on the Steam Deck.
Star Wars Outlaws has a ton of accessibility options, including Presets that allow you to quickly change several options at once, including the difficulty of the game, assistance with Quick Time Events, whether you need to hold a button or whether it toggles, and disabling of camera shaking effects. You can also adjust the size of the HUD, high contrast modes, subtitles/closed captions, and colorblind filters.
Star Wars Outlaws might have had a rough launch, but many updates have been applied which make it a decent and enjoyable experience. There are a few rough edges here and there, but if you can get past those frustrations which you're hopefully now aware of if you've read this review, then you'll be able to enjoy a brand-new and shiny Star Wars adventure.
Sadly, the forced ray-tracing means the game cannot run at an acceptable level on the Steam Deck, so you'll need a more powerful device to play this one.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Star Wars Outlaws is a fun but flawed open world adventure, but forced ray-tracing makes it unplayable on the Steam Deck.
