Star Wars Outlaws has recently joined PlayStation Plus and I’ve recently grabbed a subscription. Admittedly, mainly to play MediEvil 2 and Undead Nightmare but I decided to give the Ubisoft title a go.
Outlaws has always been on my radar but was pushed away due to the negativity surrounding it on launch. This is in addition to the fact that I always have a backlog of other games that interest me more. I was quite excited to play it, given that I haven’t enjoyed a Star Wars game since Battlefront II released its big celebration update in 2019.
This is not a review and merely my first impressions. This is based upon immediately starting the game and also playing for a couple of hours.
One of the issues that presented itself was, for some reason, an abnormally large UI. There was so much visual clutter due to the size that I immediately had to jump into the accessibility settings to reduce subtitle text, background colour, chromatic abberation and more. Not a huge game-breaking deal I thought, but an annoyance nonetheless.
BUTTONS, BUTTONS EVERYWHERE
Looking past that, once you get into some gameplay, the entire game is filled with button prompts. Want to climb? Button prompt. Want to jump from a ledge? Button prompt. Want to stealth attack an enemy? Button prompt. This is where my main issue lies with Star Wars Outlaws. It feels like it wants to hold the player’s hand consistently to the point where everything begins to feel linear. When Kay jumps from ledges (using the button prompt), the animations seem like she magnets from a start point to an end point. This is the same with things like climbing walls.
It feels like Ubisoft took inspiration from games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider and decided that they believe players are too dumb to perform their own actions. It’s extremely jarring and off-putting feeling like I am playing Star Wars Outlaws in a way that’s been put on rails and forced to follow.
I’m unsure why Ubisoft has gone down this route, seeing as they have the pinnacle of parkour titles under their belt. In any case, it’s causing me to struggle to want to continue playing.
