I’ve spent about 20 hours in the past week smuggling my way across the galaxy in Star Wars: Outlaws. During this time I have come to several conclusions about this game but have been struggling to come up with a general sense of how I feel about it. The game has a lot of good and a lot of bad going on inside, so I figured I would sit down and just jot down some thoughts to see if I can figure out how I actually feel about it. What started out as a pros and cons list quickly evolved into a list of opposing opinions that somehow both support and contradict each other at the same time. Allow me to present to you, dear reader, the good, the bad, and the ugly about Star Wars Outlaws.
The Good: Star Wars
This is a good Star Wars game. I don’t mean that this is a good video game. I mean that this is a video game that feels like I’m living in Star Wars. It was this conceit that got me interested in the first place. I watched the preview videos of Kay Vess riding her speeder into Mos Eisley. I knew I would be coming into contact with the likes of Lando Calrissian and Jabba the Hutt. What I was not prepared for was how much this game feels like Star Wars. I believe that this is most successfully accomplished by the sound and the visuals. As I trigger an alarm sneaking into an Imperial Base, I am greeted with a cacophony of familiarity. The alarm sound I know so well rings, radio chatter from nervous storm troopers indicate my presence in the crackled walkie-talkie tone we are all familiar with. The clap stomp sound of the storm troopers entering the area to search for me feels directly lifted from The Empire Strikes Back. Droids scurry about to get out of harm’s way, an AT-ST swivels its head to look for the intruder, an Imperial Officer gets on the phone to call for backup. I look to the north and see a dropship approaching. It flies in the shadow of multiple suns as it lands, kicking up dust and sending personnel scurrying for safety. In these moments I would just bask in the wonder of the world they had created. This is what I signed up for. This is what I wanted. I was part of it, a living piece of the universe I have spent so much time enjoying over the years. It is these moments that propel me forward and keep me wanting to come back for more.
The Bad: Monotony
You know what I just described above? The romantic and terrifying scenario of invading an Imperial Base? The magic of that moment loses some luster when you are experiencing it for the 4th and 5th time. Where the Ubisoft open world formula falls apart for me is the monotony of the tasks being given. There is always a terminal to slice or cargo to pick up. That’s about it. The story based missions manage to set them apart from this somewhat but when it boils down to it, you’re doing the same thing over and over again. Now, in an Assassin’s Creed game I can do this and keep it relatively fresh for me due to the gameplay options at my disposal. Unfortunately, in Star Wars: Outlaws, monotony is not saved for just mission design. It is monotonous in its gameplay. You have a blaster and you can stealth knock out enemies. Those are basically your two options. The game tries to make this as varied as possible through things like different modules for your blaster that adjust the fire rate, one time use weapons you can pick up off of enemies, and stealth upgrades that allow you to more easily sneak through unnoticed. The reality is that none of these things really allow me to approach situations in any type of creatively satisfying ways. I think of the options given to me in an Assassin’s Creed game and they just aren’t here. I cant hack droids and make them do my bidding. Aside from explosive barrels, there isn’t much in the environment that I can use to distract or take out enemies. Even my pet pal, Nix, who you can use in battle, is kind of hamstrung into only being able to distract enemies or trigger explosions. For a game that asks you to raid a lot of bases and steal a lot of items, it doesn’t give you many different ways to be able to do so. Cane and Rinse contributor Ryan Hamann said that this game could have been a compelling immersive sim and since he said that I can’t get it out of my head. Give me Dishonored level variety in mission approach and this game could have been so much more. Unfortunately, it feels very limited in its ambition.
The Good: Cast and Story
I really like the characters in this game. I expected to play as a confident and seasoned rogue based on the preview coverage. What I quickly found was that Kay Vess, the main character, has no idea what she is doing. She’s a perpetual fuck up, biting off more than she can chew and barely scraping by. This makes her so much more interesting to me. From the off, it feels like everything has stakes. Kay is poised to lose absolutely everything with every job she takes and this makes things feel important. Her vocal performance is incredible as you are able to hear the fake confidence in her voice, slightly shaky with nerves. It is reminiscent of many times in my life where I felt like I was in a role out of my own comfort zone. Couple that with sweeter, more genuine moments like when Kay and Nix share a meal together and you have a very relatable and believable character. While Kay Vess and Nix are a fun duo to cheer on, their supporting cast lifts them up in many ways. The faction leaders of each crime syndicate have lots of personality and are very fun to interact with. They make scoundrel-ish acts of theft and double crossing feel significant because you can sense how that personality might react to your actions. The experts from whom you learn abilities are a fun group of talking heads that are always interesting to talk to. The crew you are assembling for your big heist are all caricatures themselves, larger than life representations of Star Wars character types we are all familiar with. These characters make a good bunch of aliens and scoundrels to pal around with and keep the hijinks interesting.
The Bad: Factions
There are four main crime syndicates that you are constantly interacting with on these planets and they all hate each other. The game explains very early on that it will be up to you to maintain a balancing act to keep each of these factions happy while also simultaneously working for all of them. In theory, this a compelling setup. If I take a job from the Pykes to steal from the Hutts, my rep will go up with the Pykes and potentially down with the Hutts. If I complete the job without being detected, the Hutts will be none the wiser and my rep with them will stay the same. It seems to incentivize stealth and I was initially down to clown with this system. However, the game artificially creates road blocks with this system that continue to frustrate and confuse me. I can do one contract, do it clean without being noticed, and the scenario I painted above comes to life and I have pleased one faction without harming my rep with another. On some contracts, no matter what I do, at the end of the mission some faction is going to be displeased with my actions. The game does a very poor job at communicating to you that this is going to happen. Going into these missions makes me nervous because I never know how it is going to end up. Combine that with the monotonous mission style and I find myself compelled to take the safest jobs with the least risk, which is the most vanilla ass non-scoundrel shit I’ve ever said. My reputation with each clan currently sits at “good.” Not poor, not excellent, just “good.” Maybe if I took a stance and said “hey, I work for the Hutts, fuck all of the rest of you,” I would be having more fun, but the game will then become less available to me. If you have poor reputation with a clan you can’t access their shops, their card tables, their contract brokers, etc. So if I want to see all the game has to offer I have to play it safe. By playing it safe, I am forced to keep myself stuck in the middle, having no real friends and no real enemies. What could have been a compelling system has left me bored and straddling the fence. It’s a bummer.
The Ugly: Potential
It is so easy for me, Joe Asshole, to sit here and talk about the potential of this game. Hundreds of people spent untold tens of thousands of hours creating this for me to run around and be a Star Wars pervert and do all the stuff. I am grateful that this game exists and I am thankful that I am playing it. I’m going to finish this game soon and I will look back on it as a good time. However, this has the bones of something phenomenal. The world is compelling, the characters are strong, the conflicts are engaging, and the visuals are staggering. This has the framework of a masterpiece. Unfortunately, after 20 hours, all I can say is that this game functions best as a Star Wars diorama. You can go to Mos Eisley. You can visit Jabba the hut. Yesterday I rolled up to a Jawa’s droid shop and felt like Uncle Owen looking for a new R2 unit. It is a really good looking Star Wars playground for you to look at in awe. Unfortunately, my fantasy of being a scoundrel making her way through the galaxy not develop in an overwhelmingly satisfying way. There is still plenty here to enjoy and admittedly I am enjoying it. The main missions have been compelling and I want to see if Kay can land her big score at the end. It just comes up short in all of the in between moments. There’s a whole galaxy to explore but I don’t really see the reason to explore it. If the story sticks the landing, then it will have been well worth my time. Hell, it already has been worth my time. It has just been a little more Phantom Menace than Rogue One for me. I will not be explaining that statement.
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