May the Creed be with you

It's funny, looking back at Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor, how I laid into them for stitching together too many under-done features. I should've known that Ubisoft could put them to shame.

Star Wars Outlaws is a spacefaring take on the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Tom Clancy's The Division framework: it's got parkour, stealth, shooting, brawling, lockpicking, hacking, driving, crafting, sidequests and collectibles and minigames, all sprinkled throughout multiple open worlds. It's ... a lot.

Stuffed to the brim with mechanics and content, Outlaws is an enormously complex production which, bluntly, falls far short of its ambition. It does deliver a compelling "core loop" though, if you can get past its rough spots.

Storytelling, unfortunately, is not part of that compelling loop. Though Outlaws puts significant effort into opening cinematics setting up its plot, and a playable prologue that establishes protagonist Kay Vess, that plot is almost immediately lost in unfocused chaotic tangents; and that protagonist is utterly pathetic. Kay keeps trying to pull off "charming scoundrel" like Han, but is such a bad bluffer, and is so generally helpless, she comes across more like a young Luke -- awkwardly out-of-place in the galaxy, constantly falling into traps and getting shot at.

Most of the Outlaws cast is one-note or less, characters who're defined by a singular recurring trait - like Ank who wants to explode everything - or whose backstory is relegated to a couple paragraphs in the Lore menu. There's no one really interesting to root for, or against, except for Kay's cute helper-slash-pet Nix; and the trenchcoat-clad droid copilot ND-5, who demonstrates more relatability and growth than any of his organic colleagues.

What I'll give Outlaws credit for, though, is its thematic world-building. Although it's hard to pin down any single "Star Wars vibe," this game does nail the aesthetics of seedy cantinas you'd expect Han to hide in, crowded street markets that The Mandalorian might lurk for intel, back alleys where Cassian Andor would happily make a clandestine deal. The game's detailed environment art and ambient NPC chatter really sell its locations; these iterations of Canto and Kijimi are more memorable than in the movies.

As for what Kay does in those engrossing locales, i.e. the gameplay, well. It varies.

Sneaking is supposed to be Kay's primary tactic - stealthily taking down guards, ducking into vents to avoid detection - but the rules feel frustratingly inconsistent. Sometimes an NPC hears you knocking his co-worker out, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes bum-rushing an enemy will alert the whole base at once, sometimes it won't. Sometimes Imperial patrols eventually give up searching for you, sometimes they never do!

And despite the game's overall complexity, Outlaws doesn't provide all the stealth tools you might expect, like hiding bodies or dual-takedowns -- so in many situations, where a camera can't be disabled or when two guards are patrolling together, trying to remain undetected is a real crapshoot. It's a good thing that a post-launch update remove forced stealth, 'cause otherwise I think a lot of missions would be borderline impossible.

Meanwhile, gunfights tend to be overly punishing, especially early in the game before you've found health-boosting equipment; enemy fire just does too much damage too quickly. Most of the time, it still seems like the game "wants" you to avoid combat instead. But! there's a fix for this: turning the difficulty down to the Story level.

I'm an unrepentant fan of this game's fights in easy-mode, where instead of fleeing stormtroopers in terror, Kay can sprint up to them while shrugging off blaster bolts and then punch their fuckin' lights out. It's silly and stupid and I love it.

Space battles - yes, space battles! - are an unexpected bright spot in Outlaws. Chasing pirate fighters and TIEs through an asteroid field, leading your laser blasts into their trajectories, dodging missile lock-ons, targeting a warship's shield generators in a strafing run; these dogfights aren't exactly a challenge, but they do feel like a high-potency injection of X-Wing or Rogue Squadron nostalgia.

(It's a bit of a shame that more advanced piloting techniques, like 180-turns, aren't available until you've navigated a convoluted tree of ability-unlock requirements.)

And then there's the speeder bike. UGH. Jerky turning and acceleration that keeps flinging you into walls, it can cruise over some hills while crashing full-stop into others, the summon/call function is even more disobedient than Roach! I was dumbfounded each and every time the call button brought it a few steps too far from me, into a spot which restricted speeders, and I couldn't get on it.

Missions and challenges with the speeder were some of the most aggravating parts of this game -- and its fickleness is emblematic of Outlaws's general execution problems. Like the wonky stealth mechanics, like the not-visually-clear Uncharted-esque climbing surfaces, like the labyrinthine city maps full of dead ends which make compass markers un-usable.

Like escort missions where, by the time you're warned that the target is too far away, it's no longer possible to catch up in time; mission failure is inevitable.

Like the times when you can choose which syndicate to support, getting a reputation boost with them, but - sometimes - you'll lose rep with another syndicate with no heads-up.

Like when you're doing a time-sensitive smuggling run, then walk too close to a story mission objective, railroading you into that mission and force-failing the run -- which penalizes your syndicate rep!

So much of Outlaws is unpredictable, player-unfriendly in a way that seems unpolished and unfinished. That's not a huge surprise, given just how many different systems and how much concurrent complexity is crammed in here. Despite Ubi's tens-of-thousands workforce, and a morbillion dollar budget, I don't know that even a Cyberpunk-style multi-year rescue effort could "complete" it.

Nevertheless, when the difficulty's turned down so you don't need to worry about getting shot, and when you're not stuck in annoyingly half-baked climbing paths or speeder races, there is real fun to be had in this game's open-world exploration and upgrade journey. Scouring world maps for equipment to improve your ship, unlocking new abilities through its "Experts" sidequests, continuously mixing things up with sneaking into vaults and hacking locked doors and blasting down Imps, all the while soaking in its rich, evocative environments.

At its best, Star Wars Outlaws delivers the same kinda-janky fun-as-hell empowerment experience that I loved in The Saboteur and Red Faction: Guerrilla. It's far from perfect, but I can put up with a dull story and messy feature-creep to get the opportunity to remotely detonate grenades in a trooper's pocket.

Better than: Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Fallout 4
Not as good as: Middle-earth: Shadow of War, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
And, I'll argue, better than: Red Dead Redemption 2 because, even though Kay's story is a joke compared to Arthur's, some of the mechanics and activities in Outlaws are actually fun.