Star Wars Outlaws Review - Missing The Mark
On Akiva, Kay and Nix dig into a fruit that, when the chef cuts into it, bursts open with dozens of flies that had been growing inside it. What’s unnerving to me happens to be a delicacy for Star Wars, as Kay lets Nix happily lap up the fluttering bugs while she leans in to begin nibbling the fruit. It’s a very different scene from the food stand on Toshara, where I watched Kay and Nix gobble down roasted street corn. Both moments, however, are full of love, and looking back on them and the other food vendors in Star Wars Outlaws, I appreciate how they briefly delve into an aspect of Star Wars we’ve really never seen before: the street food scene. This is Outlaws’ strength: the moments that give you a glimpse into what it’s like to live in the Star Wars universe for those who aren’t fighting a galactic civil war or training to become a space wizard. But they are so few and far between–for as much as Outlaws is a decent action game, it regularly delivers unsatisfying narrative payoffs and misses the mark when it comes to rewarding gameplay choices.
In Outlaws, you play as Kay Vess, an up-and-coming mercenary who finds herself becoming an outlaw after a job goes poorly and a high-stakes bounty called a death mark is placed on her. To escape the bounty, Kay finds herself thrust into the position of putting together a crew to break into the near-impenetrable vault of the man who wants her dead–without any money, he won’t be able to pay for the bounty hunters on her tail. Her attempts to put together the perfect team take her across the Outer Rim of the galaxy, always accompanied by the latest in Star Wars’ long procession of Weird Little Guys, the adorably axolotl-like Nix. In her adventures, Kay regularly comes into contact or conflict with four criminal organizations–the Pyke Syndicate, Crimson Dawn, the Hutt Cartel, and the Ashiga Clan–as well as the Rebel Alliance and Galactic Empire, the latter of which is hunting down the former following the events of The Empire Strikes Back.
Even ignoring the obvious shortcoming–Kay is yet another human protagonist in a sea of Star Wars games, movies, and TV shows that also feature a human protagonist–Kay is just not that interesting. A common narrative throughline for Outlaws is that Kay is aimless and doesn’t know what she wants for her future, not even having any plans for how to spend the millions she’ll have once her crew has stolen from the man who wants her dead. The other characters like to remind Kay about this a lot, which in turn acts as a frequent prompt to the player that you’re embodying someone with no apparent aspirations or goals. That’s a character who’s hard to relate to and even harder to write for, as is evident by the lack of any clear arc to Kay’s story. There are moments where the game seems to posit that the story has changed Kay, but there’s no build-up to any of them and so they ultimately feel narratively confusing or sudden and unfulfilling. When the credits rolled, I wasn’t convinced that Kay had actually undergone any sort of personal growth. The Kay at the end of the game largely talks and acts like the one at the beginning, save for an appreciation for her new teammates (and I’m still unclear as to why she likes them). And if the main character hasn’t grown at all, then what were the past 30 hours of story for?
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