20 - Star Wars: Outlaws (PC 2024) - BEAT - I was cautiously hopeful for this game, as it's the type of Star Wars game I've wanted for many years now. It's not about any of the expected Star Wars fan favorite characters, it's grounded gameplay without all the Force/Jedi stuff, and it's open world. I think the game nails most of that pretty well. Got the right tone, the characters are good, they nailed the setting. You feel like you are in Star Wars. Kay Vess is a fun lead, the crew you build up that'll lead to an eventual heist I liked, Nix and ND-5 are bro's, that's all great stuff.
Where the game falters is in it's gameplay and bugginess. Gameplay leans heavy into the stealth aspects, you can duke it out in missions that don't require stealth, but you are a thief, stealth is preferred. Combat is fine, Kay is equipped with a multi-blaster weapon, but I really would've liked to instead have the options of like caring whatever pistol I wanted and then a rifle on the back. I don't need her to be the Doom Slayer and go Rambo on everyone, but little blaster that doubles as a tool is kinda blah. She can pick up blasters off the ground, but they have ammo and will run out. She also has one of those powerup attacks, lets her auto target in slow-mo, basically Cassidy's ultimate from Overwatch. This is actually the only thing that can be used while on Speeder, because for some reason, you can't ride and shoot normally for some reason. They have the camera put to the tight turns, but you don't need the tight turns with mouse. It makes me think they just ran out of time for Speed combat, so you just get quick boosts of adrenaline and you spam her auto-attack.
Enemy AI is not great, it's functional, but bland, most AI doesn't do much other than go into cover or push forward. Death Troopers actually feel like they have something to go on, but you are rarely fighting them. Space combat is basic too, it's not bad, but it's fine.
Lots of bugs too, mostly visual glitches, it gets bed on Tattoine where there's lots of lights flickering and on the swamp planet, the main town ground would get super weird. This can be sorta fixed by turning on Ray Tracing, but RT tanks the frames, so I didn't like to use. I feel like it got a smidge better with the update the other day, but not much. There's also lots of goofy bugs I saw ND-5 twice in a cutscene, lots of weird stuff with him in general, not much gamebreaking, but I think this game needed another 6 months of polish and beefing up aspects of the game.
The open world is simple, but solid, like I know people want to rag on it for being another Ubisoft open world game, which it is, and normally that would be bad, but I think it's like OLD Ubisoft open world games, like Far Cry 3, AC: Black Flag sorta Ubisoft era. There's no levels to grind, you aren't having to climb towers constantly, you get these nice hand made areas to explore, there's 3 land open world zones and I think 3 space zones to explore, so there's just enough to do with feeling abhorrently huge, there's lots of clothing to find that offers bonuses, but I just dressed in whatever looked good as you don't need to wear it for the stats. I beat the game and did a bunch of side stuff like maxing out two of the gangs rep in 25 hours. I assume it's about 40 to 50 for completion sake, which is very reasonable nowadays.
So it's that split, where they nailed everything they need for the story, setting, and characters, but the game itself is mixed. It's probably not far off from what Jedi Fallen Order was like, where they did a lot right, but it had jank and slop that kinda undercut stuff. Can't compare it to Jedi Survivor yet as I haven't played it, but will soon. I would say if you are a Star Wars fan and you want something dealing with the underworld, no Jedi, this game is decent, I'd just wait a little while for it to patch itself up and go down in price. I'm hoping it gets a sequel, I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't though, as I think there's so much room for improvement and I really want to see where else they go with it.