Star Wars Outlaws: The Definitive Review

When Ubisoft Play Ball With The Big Boys And Drop It

If there’s one moment in the early game of Star Wars Outlaws that sums up the degree of fumble on Ubisoft’s part, it’s when you’re in your very first skirmish with the Empire and you knock a scout off his immaculately modelled and textured speederbike. Sitting there, still operational and ready to go, it transpires that you cannot ride it.¹ In nearly every example of the kind of game template that Star Wars Outlaws follows, abandoned vehicles are generally free to commandeer. Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3, that’s been a pillar of the fundamental contract with the player for open-world games with driveable vehicles. Indeed, many other Ubisoft titles abide by that same logic, so to have your vehicular options limited to one speeder and one spaceship outlines just how bafflingly uncharitable this game is and this, dear reader, is the one of fundamental conceptual mistakes that doom Star Wars Outlaws to mediocrity.

At the time of writing, Ubisoft has just announced a seismic restructure that closed studios entirely and cancelled several popular and much-anticipated projects. Coming off the back of convictions for its former Chief Creative Officer (psychological abuse, complicity in sexual harassment), the Vice President of its in-house creative direction enforcement department (sexual harassment, psychological abuse, attempted sexual assault) and one senior Game Director (just old-fashioned nasty bullying) in July 2025, it’s perhaps best to see Star Wars Outlaws as a product of the company’s internal turmoil and the negligent incompetence of its upper echelons.² As the case played out during 2024, Far Cry 6 floundered and drew accusations that the format was tired, Assassin’s Creed’s next entry gets delayed as its fortunes become an existential threat to the company, and Outlaws unwittingly becomes the company’s key Q3/4 saviour to maintain Ubisoft’s position as a AAA publisher.³ And yet, it was doomed to fail because of its fundamental disposition to the player’s relationship with the license; its broken application of the IP perhaps serving the egos of its creators rather than the audience.

Given the outline, ostensibly the closest you could get to a Star Wars GTA, the final product is both a grievous disappointment and an embarrassing squandering of perhaps one of the most dead-cert licenses to print money in the entire entertainment sector. Here is Ubisoft’s chance to lay out how its stock-in-trade machinery of action-oriented open-world third-person games could be conformed to any entertainment IP. It’s not just the branching trees of possible Star Wars spin-off sequels the template can accommodate, but the opportunity to prove that this kind of omni-game can adopt any IP dressing, and to do so profitably, while satisfying loyal fanbases. Given this ticket to fortune, Ubisoft fails partly by virtue of its conservatism, but also by a kind of egotistical overconfidence. A mistaken belief that its creative stasis represents a perpetual constant it can always extract revenue growth from, combined with a misjudgement of the quality of its creative vision.

It’s not hard to see why. The staff at the top include the directors of archly-misanthropic and cruelly mercenary lootershooters The Divisions and the narrative genius behind the archly-insulting Far Cries 5 and 6,⁴ joined by a head writer for the archly-mediocre Watch Dogs: Legion, aka How To Fuck Up A Pretty Good Idea By Clint Hocking.⁵ Given the weight of the license in hand, it would seem to be an act of corporate negligence to have given this lot the reins of a Star Wars game with the kind of budget that Outlaws must have enjoyed. What’s actually infuriating isn’t the trust in the above people, who are certainly capable, but the lack of excitement in the design. My early hours were filled with groaning at what I was being forced to do. There felt like a flimsy spell of false choice being cast over the player, presenting a game that on the surface looked more complex than it actually is. There’s a particularly galling smell of creative bankruptcy that emanates from the first map. The assets are great, the layout fine if unexceptional, but the content bland and lightweight. Much-vaunted features like a magic and invulnerable pet that can do things for you are relied upon as one as very, very few strategic options from the beginning to the end. Much like the mandate of one ship, one bike, there’s one style of play for the most part. This singularity, and the dogmatic commitment to it, is the fundamental flaw in Star Wars Outlaws.

There’s a real irony in the title being a plural when the game is so blinkered into one linear playstyle for the single, canned character you’re allowed to inhabit. This thinness is what gave me that sense of the creators being so utterly lacking in generosity. They won’t let you define a character in this universe, even though that would be amazing. They won’t even let you whip about on a speederbike, even though it would be trivial to implement. It highlights the maddening combination of creative arrogance and cowardice, or hubris and ignorance, that’s become my general sense of the Ubisoft AAA proposition in its darkening, post-reckoning years. As mentioned in my Splinter Cell lament, that series’ descent from principled espionage to sociopathic murdersim was emblematic of Ubisoft’s internal culture, and Outlaws is, hopefully, a terminal exclamation point.

Reviews and community commentary at the time tried to draw parallels with Uncharted, but I sense something far more basic as the core inspiration. Even though segments feel like a serving of Ubisoft’s least-popular challenges, such as enforced and utterly joyless clambering sections recalling the worst padding excesses of Assassin’s Creeds, the general impression I got was that Star Wars Outlaws is Ubisoft doing its best to pressgang Traveller’s Tales’ Lego Star Wars into the Ubisoft template. It’s playing it that fucking safe. Only, Lego Star Wars lets you be lots of characters and drive lots of things! This is because Lego Star Wars is fundamentally a parody. It is not a vanity project from a team of fairly average videogame writers with the chance to assert themselves upon the Star Wars canon. I do suspect this is why the game is so obsessed with telling this one story about one person, but in combination with the risk-averse, meanly thin interactive design, actually creates a videogame that just feels old. And not old in the ‘reliably serviceable’ sense.

The game actually plays fine. For a stealth game, it’s laughably limited but with enough patience you can work through its challenges with the meagre tools provided. The game looks lovely, the Star Warsiness is very Star Wars, and is cod-Macquarrie to a suitably acceptable degree. However, artifice abounds. Your one, singular upgradeable pistol can shoot lethal bolts infinitely, but overheats. Yet the stun shot, which traditionally is less powerful than lethal, has a single shot that takes ages to recharge. This is fucking stupid, but it’s there to protect the overly-minimal stealth design. Otherwise there’d be no challenge, you’d never use Nix etc, but rather than feeling like sensible balancing, it just feels mean. Old. Unimaginative. Amateurish. Likewise the secondary weapons, which you collect from dead enemies. These last until the magazine is exhausted, so Kay just drops them! No recharging like the magic pistol. No opportunity to own or upgrade. Then there’s the upgrades for equipment and skills which are all tied to finding materials.⁶ Once again, fucking stupid in terms of the world logic we already know of Star Wars, which never once mentioned anyone needing to find 5 materials to become better at crouching. Further on, having Nix doing his thing on an Imperial space station and not being immediately exterminated as soon as he’s seen is, again, fucking stupid. Sure, when planetbound you could believe a little animal just wandered into your massively-defended high security camp, but on a space station it stretches credulity, even by Star Wars world logic. Do the Imperials assume he flew himself there in a little ship? Darker still, and far more damning, is the artificiality of the player’s impact on the environment. As early as the very first tutorial missions, I stealthed through a section with perfect takedowns on all the guards, reached a checkpoint save. Next bit, triggered the alarm. Load the checkpoint, yeah? Well, all those immaculately KOed guards were suddenly back up and patrolling again. The game had literally done an enemy reset! In the context of a modern stealth game, this is completely unacceptable. An insulting blunder of idiotic proportions, and proof for me that the fundamentals of the interactive design, of how the player is going to engage with the world and its content, has been lamentably under-developed.

To put the degree of failure that Star Wars Outlaws represents into context, consider that its peak on Steam is just 3,797 players. This is better than the AAAA colossus Skull and Bones, but disastrous compared to Rainbow Six Seige X’s peak - that game enjoyed 60k players in the last 24 hours. But that is multiplayer only, so how about another grand 7/10 luminary, like Assassin’s Creed Mirage? Well, that peaks at 7,837. And what of my much-maligned beloved forevergame, Ghost Recon Breakpoint? 14,335. That’s nearly four times as many players. Breakpoint peaked at 3,713 in the last 24 hours! Of course, Outlaws wasn’t on Steam for launch day, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. Games that have value build persistent reputations that drive long tails of engagement, and Outlaws is no old dog on the platform. It only arrived on Steam in November 2024! This was the game to command the biggest ever marketing spend from Ubisoft and yet, by any objective metric, it absolutely flopped. In typically wise fashion, Yves put this down to Star Wars being less popular than it once was. Because of course, it’s never his fault. Much like the culture of sexual and psychological abuse three of his senior staff were convicted for. Yes, I am going to keep mentioning that because it was a persistent culture of sexual and psychological abuse by senior staff and Ubisoft needs to remember that on a daily basis, even if its CEO considers the matter closed.

There is a perspective that can be taken where Star Wars Outlaws is perfectly fitting for the modern Star Wars mode. That being mostly vapid, mediocre entertainment leaning so heavily on the goodwill of its IP that the only thing of real value is the basic audiovisual experience and the presentation of the IP itself - as found in the Kennedy/Abrams sequels and the lesser-loved TV series. Outlaws finds a certain kinship perhaps with the sloppier and badly-conceived peers like Obi Wan or The Book Of Boba Fett. And of course, as with so many other Star Wars videogames, it only serves to degrade and cheapen the Star Wars universe. What’s interesting to note is in terms of both movies and TV, the entries that gained the most praise from critics and viewers alike weren’t those conservatively gunning for universal audiences and broad appeal, but the riskier, tightly-focused Rogue One and Andor properties. The ones that chased the adult enthusiast. I mean, I’ve heard people who weren’t even Star Wars fans proclaim Andor as one of the best TV series they’ve ever seen. Thinking of how a Ubisoft open-worlder could support a Rebel spy concept flies so much closer to the things Ubisoft used to be really good at that it makes you question why the hell it went for an interstellar scoundrel idea in the first place. Especially when that interstellar scoundrel is functionally Han Solo without ever admitting it’s just trying to be Han Solo, as if Han Solo is the only kind of interstellar scoundrel the Star Wars universe could support. I have legitimately read that as a defence of Outlaw’s lack of charity; Han Solo only had one pistol, so that’s why Kay does. You can probably guess my reaction to that kind of logic.

Given Ubisoft’s current fortunes, we can safely assume that for now at least, Star Wars Outlaws will be the only Ubisoft open-worlder to draw on that IP. Given Ubisoft’s current output, we can safely assume that’s actually a good thing. I don’t have much experience of EA’s recent games, because I don’t do multiplayer (apols to the Battlefronts) and I fucking hate Jedis. This means that the pinnacle of Star Wars videogaming remains, for me, the X-Wing series. I’ll grimly plug away at Outlaws, but I already know I probably won’t finish it. It’s just too shit. A friend of mine, who was reviewing across three or four mags at his peak, remarked that he could tell a bad game from how quickly he stopped seeing the assets as the developers wanted the player to see them, and instead was just seeing the matrix underneath. Polygons intersecting polygons to change numerical values. I have to say that this idea haunts me as a kind of videogaming dementia from playing too much mediocrity. Worryingly, I found the matrix pushing through Star Wars Outlaws at a very early stage. I’ll grant it some charity, though, and persist until I bore of this slop,⁷ despite the constant reminders of how little charity its creators offer me.

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1. I can’t quite say it’s as monumentally insulting as ejecting Admiral Akbar to die in space so Leia can Mary Poppins herself back to safety, but it’s real fucking close.

2. This case should absolutely infuriate us all. It was years of this shit, week in, week out. It was underreported when it first emerged and the sentencing was underreported when it happened. As with David Cage's court case for workplace bullying, it seems the games media is happy to champion the virtues of 'me too' inclusivity and anti-abuse rhetoric, but stops short of seriously condemning the perpetrators of abuse and more importantly, the companies and the managements that protected them. As with Rockstar's union-busting and tax avoidance, these should be black marks that are eternally associated with the brand and brought up constantly.

3. Interestingly, Guillemot's proclamation that Skull And Bones was a 'AAAA' game in February 2024 exposes perhaps some of the internal anxiety about the decadence and senescence of the Ubisoft open-worlder. Knowing that Outlaws was gunning straight for 7/10 territory and that Skull And Bones would be heading there with it, Guillemot opted to take a grandstanding over-estimate instead of telling the truth. An odd act of almost Trumpian proportions, but then this is a man who didn't notice his CCO was an awful, abusive bully for over ten years, so maybe we can chalk it all up to undisclosed cognitive deficits too?

4. I have written an extensive piece on how incredibly awful the narrative of Far Cry 5 is but can't bring myself to post it as it contains a lot of talk about the conspiracy-theorising separatist/accelerationist US far right of the 1990s and fuck them or giving them any oxygen whatsoever. Suffice to say, Ubisoft's handling (read: sensationalist exploitation) of the subject is offensive in the extreme. But I will email it to you if you're bafflingly interested enough to care. Far Cry 6 disgusted and bored me far too much to even bear writing about, such were the depths of its depraved trivialisation and exploitation of real-world tragedy, oh and making a joy-filled mini game of one of the world’s most reviled bloodsports.

5. Ubisoft's great malaise, its creative paralysis of sorts, seems to begin with Watch Dogs: Legion, which is great concept caught in an infuriatingly silly story and a poorly-devised setting. It was the game I gave up on to embark on my feverish romance with Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.

6. Again, the greatest game you’ve never played, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint has a great system for owning and upgrading weapons. Get a blueprint and you can personalise and upgrade, but the weapon is functionally great from the off. Upgrades are more about pride and completionism rather than adding actual functionality, as found in Star Wars Outlaws.

7. And it’s not even AI generated!