OK, so it’s not a movie, but I have been playing Star Wars Outlaws. I say ‘playing’, because I just stopped playing it to trade it in for something else. Here is why.
I have a PS5 and have it downstairs on my big TV. My office has a rather good PC, but I don’t like to play on it, as this is where I work. I do like to relax while gaming, so I like my big sofa and to just chill.
Sometime this year, I bought Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey for £25 for the two. I have played both before, Origins about 3 times before. To me, they are the best of the Assassin’s Creed games. For me, Origins is better, but I was playing through Odyssey again.
I have loved playing Odyssey again. People have said it’s not really an AC game as there is no hidden blade, but I like it. The open world has loads to explore and a good story. Even all the side missions are fun. Just to finish the game off, I also purchased The Fate of Atlantis DLC and had fun with it.
I had completed the game, over 100 hours of game play and it was time to move on to something else. I found Star Wars Outlaws in a second-hand shop and bought it. There was no way I was paying £70 for it when it first came out.
First Impressions
There are mixed reviews about the game. A friend at work had it and he said he’d been playing it, but not massively enjoying it. He said that is starts off dull and gets better as you upgrade.
I start the game and overall, I’m just non-plussed with it. The mechanics are clunky, it seems you can only have one weapon and it’s just dull. Not to be deterred, I plough through the opening.
Coming from AC, the game was just slow. In AC, you jump over something, you just do it. In Outlaws, it seems to be an effort. It’s like it was mocking me because of my age and how I can’t move fast in real life.
Kay
Kay is the main protagonist in Outlaws and she’s ugly! In Odyssey, I was playing as Kasandra, although being tough, was an attractive woman. Some of the 100 hours I had played was finding nice outfits for her. Don’t judge me.
Below is an image of Kay and the actress who plays her.
Why? Why can’t we see hot women in games anymore? If I were Gonzelez, I would have been annoyed. You can’t customise Kay, apart from her crappy clothes. You’re stuck with that awful haircut and the gormless look on her face.
Kay is also a terrible character. There are times when she has to talk her way into, or out of, somewhere and she’s just a moron. You know how Han gets on the comlink in the Death Star and says:
“We’re all fine here now, umm, how are you?”
And he winces as he says it? In this, Kay talks like that to everyone and it’s just embarrassing. I’m guessing she gets more confidence later, but from what I saw, she’s just pathetic.
Sneaking Around
Again, I have to compare Outlaws to AC, but the sneaking around is just annoying. While crouched in Outlaws, you move at a snail’s pace. Fine, I don’t need to sprint around, but I kept wanting Kay to just bloody hurry up!
The other thing about sneaking around was that if you shoot one guy, everyone on the entire planet seems to get alerted! OK, that’s a little exaggerated, but honestly, it was so annoying that one tiny sound, you got found out.
Maybe this was the point, I don’t know. In AC, you could take out a guard, hide the body and you’re done. Here, it’s not like that at all. If you take someone out, they stay there, you can’t carry the body or anything. Once one person is alerted, you’re screwed. I found that if one guy attacked, I was dead within a minute.
I played so many areas over and over, just to find the correct path to sneak in. It got really boring.
Where Am I Going Now?
I don’t need things spelt out for me but give me a hint on where to go. There were so many times I had to look up on YouTube on where to go, it got really annoying.
On one of the main story quests, I was completely stuck. When I looked on YouTube, I saw that you had to shoot some Storm Troopers. This was completely against every other mission. Again, this really annoyed me, because 1. there was no hint on how to do it and 2. it was completely opposite of every other mission!
A lot of the game is open world; happy days, I like sandbox games. However, when you get inside somewhere, it’s very, very linear. There is nowhere to go apart from the path you have to follow.
Climbing
In AC the fastest way to somewhere is from point A to point B. You can climb over anything; you can scale vast walls and nothing really stops you. This is not the case with Kay. I imagine she would struggle walking up a staircase.
The amount of times I found myself driving around somewhere, looking for a way to get in was beyond ridiculous. You would drive to a waypoint, only to spend about 10 minutes looking for a way to get in there.
The Mini Games
There is computer slicing and lock picking, but the ‘mini-games’ were just annoying. One of them was a ‘hit the button in time with the music’ one. I would only ever get this by accident.
I love how the creators of the game made it so you get to turn the mini-games off. I’m guessing they knew people wouldn’t like it and just want to turn it off. I know I did.
The Final Straw
Having my mate saying it got better, I ploughed through, until the last mission I played.
The spaceflying was OK, but I didn’t really look forward to it. I had a mission where I had to chase a ship and again, it was pretty dull. I had to find some cargo, that turned out to be a person.
You get onto a space station and rescue the guy. As you free him, he says about his boyfriend and I was done. Call me homophobic, call me whatever, but having an openly gay character in Star Wars was enough for me.
The disc came out of the console and it’s ready to go back to the second-hand shop for something else. I play games to escape reality, not to have it shoved down my throat.
And just to mention, yes, I know there are gays in Odyssey, it was set in Greece after all. I’m also very aware that all of the AC games are fantasy, but having gay characters, in ancient Greece, wasn’t ramming home the politics of today.
Also to mention, we all know that C3-PO was gay, but only in voice. Most of that was because of his accent, but he never had a boyfriend.
Overall
Star Wars Outlaws is just not good. It looks beautiful and the graphics are amazing, the set design and whatnot, but overall, there’s just nothing of interest to it. I couldn’t stand Kay and couldn’t change her. Everything you do in the game feels laboured and clunky.
You had a little helper, Nix, who was there to sell toys. I think this thing would help you move through the game, but it was just annoying and I would completely forget it was there. On the plus side, you can pet it, that’s what all games want, right?
I feel sorry for all the graphic designers, the digital artists and the programmers who put so much time and effort into a game which just isn’t fun to play. I like to play a little word game on my phone and it’s far more fun than Outlaws.
It also doesn’t feel like Star Wars. Ok, there are no laser swords, but that’s a big part of Star Wars. I like smugglers, but there isn’t enough of a story for them to carry me through this entire game. There isn’t even any Star Wars music.
I’ve decided I’m going to watch a play-through and see what the rest of the story is like, but apart from that, don’t waste your time on Star Wars Outlaws.
