Star Wars Outlaws Hands-On: A Bland Open-World Scoundrel Tale

When Ubisoft first showed Star Wars Outlaws, the fantasy of living like a scoundrel in a galaxy far, far away was enough to make even jaded players sit up. Kay Vess and her little critter Nix were meant to sneak through bases, blast out of trouble, rip across open terrain on a speeder, and talk their way past crime lords. Yet after spending roughly an hour with a pre-release demo, the impression was less "proper Han Solo simulator" and more like a by-the-numbers action adventure from a decade earlier. Even now, in 2026, that early snapshot remains a telling window into why the final product divided players.

The demo was split into three missions. The first involved environmental platforming and exploration, the second a stealth-focused theft, and the third an escape from a Star Destroyer into a space dogfight. The breadth of those activities was impressive on paper, and the nearly seamless transitions between them were arguably the coolest trick in the bag. But the actual moment-to-moment play often felt like an old Uncharted: Golden Abyss routine from 2011, right down to the yellow ledges and prompt-driven grappling.

In the first mission, Kay and Nix explored an abandoned grey structure—big metal walls, jagged edges, and the obligatory unexplained cavernous drop. The task was to power up an old reactor to escape. The path was a checklist of triple-A clichés: climb the yellow ledges, press the button when the grapple prompt appears, look left into a nook for a chest of crafting resources or credits. Occasionally Kay hopped onto a wall grate, slowly scrambled upward, then jumped to a platform that half-collapsed into a slide. The slide dropped her onto a speeder bike, and the seamless transition into the open world was genuinely the highlight. But the rest was a far cry from the fluid, acrobatic climbing of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or Jedi: Survivor.

The second mission dialled up the stealth, though it barely deserved the name. Kay needed to steal an item from a room with two floors, a balcony, and maybe half a dozen guards. Sneaking meant pressing crouch and sending Nix off to perform an admittedly cute distraction dance. Guards would say something nasty—"damn animals, we should skin them all!"—to make the player feel better about bonking them over the head in plain sight. There was little in the way of a real detection system. Bodies didn't seem to alarm nearby patrols. Triggering the alarm resulted in a few guards rushing forward and dropping after a couple of shots from Kay's ammo-less blaster. The item was then free for the taking.

Even the town section after the theft felt shallow. It was possible to look around Kijimi, the snowy planet home to the Ashiga clan, but not to interact with the handful of shops or stalls. A brief cutscene with the clan's Queen moved things along, but the world itself had all the interactivity of a film set.

The third mission was the weakest link. After a basic Wordle-like hacking minigame and some unnecessary stealth, there was a short gunfight with endlessly spawning enemies until Kay's ship was ready. Then came another almost-seamless transition into open space—more fluid than Starfield, if not quite No Man's Sky—and a brief escape from a couple of TIE fighters. The auto-aim system did most of the work: hold the left trigger to zoom in, nudge the stick, hold the right trigger, and the fighters were gone. A player could land the ship, wander through an arid smuggler town, and chat with another crime boss before the demo ended.

The comparison to Respawn's Jedi series was not flattering. Where Cal Kestis snapped his fingers for BD-1 to flip a health stim into his hand, Kay's animation was easy to miss. Where the grate-climbing in Jedi had rhythm and momentum, the platforming here felt like prompt-following from the early 2010s. And where Cal had a puckish charm, Kay's personality didn't get much beyond a shrug and a blank smile. Against the shadow of Han Solo, she was eclipsed rather than complemented.

None of this meant Star Wars Outlaws was doomed. The demo was early, limited in scope, and stripped of context. There was still time before the August 2024 launch. But the warning signs were hard to ignore. Approachable design is one thing; bland is another. In 2026, looking back, the game's mixed reception makes that hands-on hour feel less like a rough draft and more like an early tell.