Star Wars Outlaws could be everything I’ve ever wanted from a Star Wars game

When I think of Star Wars games, while there are major differences across the board, they all seem to fit a pretty specific niche. You play as a Jedi or Sith, running around with your lightsaber cutting up clones, stormtroopers and the like, and maybe you get the odd unique boss fight. Maybe there’s an upgrade system that lets you force choke people, or shoot lightning. If you’re lucky, you might even get to fling your lightsaber and watch it come back to you like a boomerang.

What I’m saying is that as good as many of these games have been, they begin to feel a bit samey after a while. Star Wars Outlaws, on the other hand, promises to be a breath of fresh air.

The game’s protagonist, Kay Vess, is far from the Jedi and Sith of other games, being a scrappy young thief with a moral compass that can be fairly easily swayed by the number of credits on offer. Between her ethically dubious career as a professional outlaw and her endless supply of witty quips and one-liners, she very much feels Han Solo-esque, something which I was on board with from the start. She also comes with a little pet, an axolotl-esque creature named Nix (more on them later).

My preview begins with Kay landing on the planet Toshara, a dusty world scattered with loose vegetation and the odd settlement. Immediately after landing, I meet a mechanic named Waka who’s brought a few bandits on speeders with him for me to take out – lucky me!

The main way of dealing damage in Outlaws is Kay’s trusty blaster, with your standard shooter hallmarks all here – hide behind cover when you’re under fire, pop out when the enemies are reloading and blast some heads for some quick kills. One major feature Outlaws adds, however, is Adrenaline Rush. After being under fire for a certain amount of time, your Adrenaline bar will charge, letting you activate Adrenaline Rush. This freezes time, letting you mark nearby enemies before popping out and taking them out in style.

As you progress through the game and pick up various materials, you’ll be able to upgrade your blaster by adding new configurations. Your standard module fires plasma bolts, perfect for taking out enemies, but you’ll quickly unlock ion bolts too, which are more effective against droids and shields. For the moment though, all I’ve got is the default blaster, so it’ll have to do.

Enemies dispatched, I turn my attention to Wako. As a thanks for saving his life, he generously offers me a discount on fixing my ship. Unfortunately, I am flat broke, so he points me towards the nearby city of Mirogana where I can find Gorak, an underboss of the Pyke Syndicate.

Syndicates are factions, and are the alpha and omega of questing in Outlaws. You’ll come across their bases in certain settlements where you can head to pick up various side missions. From my time with the game, it seems as if most of these missions are centred around getting one over on the other factions, which will be incredibly important. 

If you were disappointed by the fact you could join any and all of the factions in Starfield, then Outlaws is the remedy to that. You have a reputation with each faction in the game. Get on their good side by completing missions and screwing over the other groups and you’ll earn perks like access to their base, unique shops, discounts and access to unique rewards and upgrades. On the flip side, make a certain faction too angry and not only will you lose access to their bases, but their minions will actively try to kill you if they catch you out and about too.

Once I reach Mirogana, it becomes clear that Gorak isn’t the type to have an audience with random strangers willy-nilly, and he’s especially angry once I mention Wako’s name, but luckily, the rival Crimson Dawn Syndicate needs something stolen from Gorak’s base and Kay is exactly the person for the job, and so in I sneak.

When you’re out in the open, going guns blazing with your blaster is all fine and dandy, but when you’re infiltrating an enemy base, stealth is your best friend. Kay is equipped with a whole host of handy trinkets to get her in and out unseen. Your hairpin doubles as a lockpick to open doors and sneak through vents, staying out of sight. And if you do find yourself with no choice but to fight, you’ve got a sneak attack that will down an enemy in an instant.

This is a good time to return to Nix, Kay’s companion. More than just a cute face, Nix is a major part of Kay’s kit when it comes to stealth sections. Nix can be used to attack or distract enemies, letting you close the distance and finish them off, but can also be used to interact with parts of the environment, letting you trigger switches in areas you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach, and can even steal from NPCs, delivering you credits or, depending on who you’re stealing from, weapons or grenades. And yes, you can pet them.

After a couple of missions spent sneaking around enemy bases for the Crimson Dawn, I’m tasked with heading out to a nearby settlement to steal from a Pyke cache, and that means hopping back on my trusty speeder. Based on my time with the game, the planets of Outlaws are surprisingly vast. And while it takes me a minute or so to get used to the speeder’s controls, once it clicks I can’t think of a slicker way to traverse the planet.

Another mission down, and my Crimson Dawn informant sends me off into space to hack an imperial computer to frame the Pykes, and with my ship now fixed up, we set off. Coasting through a sea of wrecked ships in orbit around Toshara, a group of pirates decide they want to be my first victims and a dogfight begins. Space combat is fairly simple – roughly aim towards the ship you want to fight and a targeting system will lock on, letting you fire your lasers and missiles at them with precision.

Once we land on the imperial ship, cue another stealth mission. I wasn’t able to finish this entire mission because it was soon time to head to a later section of the game taking place on the snow-covered planet of Kijimi. By this point, Kay has acquired quite the following, with several members added to her ragtag heisting crew.

This is where I think Star Wars Outlaws is really set to come into its own. Something I’ve always loved about the Star Wars universe is the sheer diversity of races, each with their own unique alien cultures. Exploring these different worlds and working for a variety of Syndicates, you really gain a feel for each one. Where Mirogana was an outpost controlled by the vicious Pykes, the ‘conflict’ on Kijimi, so to speak, had a more sinister undertone, with the Syndicates feeling more like religious sects than gangs. Unfortunately, my time on Kijimi was short. That being said, I saw enough of the planet to make me genuinely excited about what other worlds there are to explore. 

Star Wars Outlaws has seen some criticism levelled towards it following the release of its trailers and gameplay footage, but as someone who has got their hands on the game, I can say that it really is something to look forward to. It’s shaping up to be a big game with a huge amount of content to explore, and while I’m excited to really dig deep into Kay’s story, it’s the prospect of exploring the world that has me hooked. Star Wars has been neck-deep in lore for the best part of five decades, and this is finally an opportunity to dig into some of the lesser-known aspects of a galaxy far, far away.