Star Wars Outlaws Hands-On: A Galaxy of Systems, Not Scoundrels

I have been trying to figure out what 'scoundrelly' means in a videogame, and after my latest hour with Star Wars Outlaws, I still do not think this is it. Within minutes I had climbed around rectangular arrangements of yellow handholds, shot at stormtroopers over equally rectangular cover layouts, and collected seven out of ten pieces of scrap with Star Wars flavour text that unlocked some sort of item recipe. My chibi Chewbacca sidekick Nix wiggled and booped bellies to distract Imperials while I snuck behind them. Then I got discovered, panicked, and murdered everyone before one of them could reach a terminal and summon reinforcements. That last part is the closest the session came to feeling scoundrelly.

I also crept through vents, shot slightly out-of-view power nodes to open doors and elevators, abseiled from precisely placed grappling icons, and hurried through collapsing derelicts that blew up according to an obvious script. Hacking a door meant matching a rhythm minigame; hacking a terminal meant guessing the correct sequence of glyphs. I pecked a few TIE Fighters to shrapnel in the Trailblazer starship and zipped across a desert on my speeder. Between all that, cutscenes showed Kay, a plucky young smuggler who has double-crossed a galactic crime syndicate, trying to bluff her way past old associates. She talks constantly, announcing every next waypoint as a note to herself, but she has minimal stage presence. Watching her stall for time felt less like Han versus Greedo and more like somebody complaining her way out of a parking ticket.

If this is meant to be scoundrelly, it is scoundrelly by spreadsheet. There is nothing flamboyant, roguish, or improvisational about the loop so far. It has more sides than the average Ubisoft blockbuster, including an open world broken across multiple planets ruled by different gangster families, but I could not find a single standout feature beyond the fact that it is a Star War.

The Places Are Better Than the Jobs

Massive's knack for location design kicks in the second you enter one of Outlaws' cities. There are skeevy locals lounging against walls and bars, gossiping about sabaac or whichever crime boss is in charge. Glitchy holographic ads flicker overhead. Ship traffic rumbles past. Industrial vapour gusts across walkways while a rich stew of noise spills from heaving drug dens and marketplaces. It is not as mesmerising as that first step into Night City, but the ambience was enough to lure me away from my waypoint more than once.

The problem is that everything you do inside and around those places is at best formulaic and at worst undecided.

Nix Deserves a Raise

Combat feels unsure whether Kay is a Hannah Solo, a sneaky escape artist, or Thomasina Clancy. My dashing but modestly upgradeable pistol aside, I could temporarily grab chunkier on-map weapons such as force-shielded heavy blasters and charge-to-fire sniper rifles. Nix could fetch those weapons while I cowered in the shrubbery. He could also yank the pin from an enemy thermal detonator, and nobody ever noticed in time. Or he could pounce on a trooper's head and tie them up for a few seconds.

Nix is quietly the MVP because he functions like a Division drone in axolotl clothing. Between his assists, headshots, and ion ammo overloading personal shields, I mowed down battalions of Stormtroopers with relative ease. But I do not think Outlaws really wants me to do that. The gunfeel is hesitant and deliberately short on flair: it is just pouring blaster bolts into health bars while opponents blow around the layout barking combat lines without much ceremony or style.

System	What I did	How it felt
Combat	Headshots, shield overloads, Nix assists	Hesitant, health-bar admin
Stealth	Nix lured troopers, I sneaked	Dutiful and forced
Platforming	Grapple icons, collapsing floors	Predictable stagecraft
Ship combat	Blasted TIEs, hacked Imperial arrays	Underwater dodgems

Stealth is similarly dutiful. Nix lures Stormtroopers out of position with a reliability that feels forced even by Stormtrooper standards, while I scurried toward terminals and hatchways. The corridor platforming bits are uninspired pieces of stagecraft where you can often predict the cadence of rubble falling or walkways crumbling. Spaceship combat at times feels like driving dodgems underwater, with stop-start acceleration and open-world contrivances such as Imperial arrays you can hack to make all pursuing pilots forget you exist.

A Scoundrel Cannot Be a System

I think all of this will add up to somebody's idea of a good time, especially a Star Warrior who has not played a Ubisoft game for a while. The mechanics may be bland and unwilling, but they are an adequate delivery mechanism for the setting. What I doubt is whether an open-world shooter can recreate the specific energy of Harrison Ford's Han Solo. Han is a mix of clown and cowboy: courageous and crafty, but fundamentally a faker who relies on luck, charisma, and Chewbacca. You cannot really plot that out as cover-hugging tactics. The closest anyone has ever gotten is Uncharted. I hope MachineGames fare better with Solo's brother-from-another-genre Indiana Jones.

Star Wars Outlaws is probably a fun weekend with a family-sized bag of chips. It is just no scoundrel.