Star Wars Outlaws Sounds Like Every Ubisoft Game, Just Without The Bad Stuff

Summary

Previews forStar Wars Outlawsare out, and each one I read leaves me increasingly perplexed. Some critics, includingour own George Foster, are saying that Outlaws steers away from tiredUbisofttropes and offers a new experience that mitigates the open-world fatigue so many of us are experiencing. Others say Ubisoft’s footprint is very apparent in how it blatantly mixes parts of its disparate series into one game, but to surprisingly positive effect.

It seems thatdespite Massive’s best effortsand the studio being “hyper conscious” of the Ubisoft formula, Star Wars Outlaws does feel a lot like Ubisoft’s other games. This is usually enough for me to discount a game entirely – I can’t even begin to express how tired I am of this studio and its impact on every game in the genre – and yet, the people who have played it seem to like it quite a lot.

Ubisoft’s Influence Is Everywhere

From what I’ve gathered, there’s a lot of Ubisoft DNA in Outlaws. George said that the combat and stealth mechanics are strikingly similar to that ofWatch Dogs 2, in the best way. I’m not sure how I feel about that yet, but he seems quite enthusiastic about the fluidity of Kay’s movements and how your partner/pet Nix is used as a strategic tool. Other previews have compared the game’s stealth to Assassin’s Creed, especially when Kay is hiding from patrols or security cameras in tall grass.

The infiltration of out of bounds areas has also been compared to Far Cry’s outpost takedown mechanics. You mark enemies with binoculars, take enemies down one by one while sneaking through the area, and making sure nobody sets off an alarm to draw in reinforcements. It all sounds very familiar and predictable, as a formula that’s been pasted into countless Ubisoft games and replicated in later open-world games.

The game has alsodrawn many comparisonstoNaughty Dog’sUncharted, because of the climbing sequences, andRockstar’sGrand Theft Auto, because of its heists and wanted system.

And Yet, It’s Very Much Not Ubisoft

I guess a game is more than the sum of its parts, because nobody seems to be all that upset about the Ubisoft influence. Despite having familiar elements, Outlaws seems to depart from the worst of the studio’s sins: the checklist game.Side quests and activities feel more organic, the world feels more alive, and it doesn’t feel like you’re doing things for the sake of working towards 100 percent completion of an area or the larger game. There’s emergent gameplay, which makes me hopeful that the minute-to-minute gameplay won’t feel as prescriptive and dull.

More importantly, there aren’t any of those awful map-revealing towers that became the default so many years ago. It was novel in the first Assassin’s Creed, when scoping out the surrounding area by climbing a building and perching on top of it was fresh – not so much in 2024. It feels like Massive has tried to iterate on the Ubisoft formula by taking the good stuff and consciously leaving out the bad, which is… a good thing? I think?

I can’t tell, yet. Even when you take the most annoying, overdone things out of an Ubisoft game, it’s still an Ubisoft game – nothing new or particularly innovative, just a well-executed version of something we’ve already seen before. All we can do for now is hope that the worst previews aren’t right about Star Wars Outlaws just being another empty calorie, mindless game.