Star Wars Outlaws Review

Star Wars is in a strange place. It began as a dedicated film and left an enduring mark on the industry. Today, it is more of an ongoing collection of television shows on Disney’s online subscription streaming service. Thankfully, the video game side of Star Wars still represents the kind of experience I personally want from one of my favorite childhood franchises – one that I only check in on every few years for a big, bold, blockbuster adventure. Outlaws does not fully live up to the excitement of only getting to see a Star Wars movie every few years, but when you meet it on its terms and recognize that it is making a concerted attempt to re-examine the elements of Ubisoft games that we find increasingly exhausting, then you will find one of the more fun Star Wars experiences of the last few years.

Comparable Star Wars video games are great at placing a lightsaber in your hand or putting you in an X-Wing to emulate the more explosive elements of the films, but Outlaws is the best at just letting you hang out. Exploring its large open areas on your speeder bike or simply walking around the densely populated back alleys of its wretched hives of scum and villainy are where I had the most fun. Outlaws excels when it leans into its Star Wars mood, and you can just stand and listen to all the impressive Star Wars noises happening around you.

When you do actually have to do something, Outlaws delivers some compelling action and character moments. Kay Vess is a familiar Star Wars archetype, but not one we’ve seen truly explored in a Star Wars video game since Shadows of the Empire. Playing as a character who can’t afford to support the Rebellion, but can still see the villainy in the Empire’s evil ways is refreshing, and I appreciated her dedication to herself and her pet-companion, Nix. She doesn’t trust anyone, often for good reason, and I enjoyed the story moments when she was proven right.

The attempt to extend that into player choice by choosing which factions Kay sides with is less successful. The highest compliment I can offer for that mechanic, where helping one faction might ding your relationship with another, is that I could see what the team at Massive Entertainment was going for, but when everyone you potentially work for is a villain, you don’t like any of them, and you can really only play them against you and not each other, it’s hard to be compelled by your choices. The “reward” for who you end up siding with most at the end of the game was also so small that I had to look up the tiny moment online to confirm it after watching the credits.

Thankfully, Kay’s mainline story is more compelling than the faction relationships and I liked learning about her familial relationships and why she ended up in her predicament to begin with. It didn’t take long for me to care about Nix as much as Kay does and their relationship with the droid, ND-5, ended up being a stronger highlight than I expected. I hope I am able to go on more adventures with Kay and pals in the future.

My early hours with Outlaws’ gameplay felt surprisingly stifling. The introductory moon, Toshara, looks like an open-world game (and it is), but I felt constricted by not being able to take any speeder I saw or climb any cliff I needed to. Speeder bike crashes out in the open also felt lifeless and awkward. But once I started working with the game and not against it, I found the advantages and came to appreciate them. You can’t steal any vehicle because you have your own speeder bike and spaceship that you upgrade and grow to love. And the open world is not the space where you go and get lost. It’s where you appreciate stunning Star Wars vistas between missions. In this way, Outlaws feels unique and different from other open-world games, and specifically open-world Ubisoft games. I admire it for that reason.

The act of leaving a planet to enter space is also consistently thrilling. You can see The Matrix of it all where cutscene transitions move you from planet to open space and where loading screens are being masked, but the important part is that it feels seamless. You can skip those transition cutscenes, and I would when I was eager to get to the next mission, but I rarely did just because the emotion of traveling from one planet to another was so well executed that I was happy to embrace it.

Shooting in space and on foot are both just above passable, but neither are gameplay highlights. Moving through space feels good and I liked docking at different space stations, but dogfights feel perfunctory and on-rails. The third-person shooting also feels just okay, and I was grateful I could use Kay’s blaster to get myself out of trouble when I tripped alarms, but I had more fun using the game’s light stealth gameplay to lurk around. I prefer Kay as the sneaky smuggler than the shoot-from-the-hip space cowboy, but I appreciate that Outlaws allows for both, and doesn’t punish you for switching between them.

The video game side of Star Wars is in a good place right now. Kay Vess and her companion, Nix, are both good additions to the Star Wars canon and I appreciate that her role in the larger, ongoing story is zoomed in and more personal. It’s difficult to be bothered about the whims of warring Jedi and Sith when you’re just trying to make sure you can buy dinner for you and your pet and play a surprisingly in-depth minigame to consume it. Moving between planets and wandering Outlaws’ dense cities is where the adventure shines, but shooting your way through your current gig so you can make it to the next is also compelling, if sometimes a little simple.

This 2025 review reflects our thoughts on the game’s current state at publishing. As such, post-launch updates were factored into the final score.