I am tapping the '73% is not a bad score' sign.
Star Wars Outlaws—a title designed in a lab to make me erroneously insert a colon into it—has been out for just under a week now. You know what? It’s pretty good! A solid 73%, per PCG’s Morgan Park in his Star Wars Outlaws review.
It’s a similar score in other outlets’ reviews, too, which has translated to an overall Metacritic score of 75 out of 100 on Xbox, 76 on PlayStation, and 77 on PC. Ubisoft would have liked to do a little better, it seems. In a chat with GamesRadar, Outlaws’ creative director Julian Gerighty confessed to being a “little disappointed with the Metacritic.”
After all, he continues, “recognition from press and critics is very important to us,” but even without the game setting the charts on fire, Gerighty reckons “players are really connecting with what we did.” In particular, he thinks players have really taken to the game’s galactic exploration: “it’s brought me so much joy to see the incredible images being captured and shared,” which he says is proof that the game’s “virtual tourism” offers up “an experience like no other Star Wars experience before.”
Which is true! In Morgan’s review, he specifically called out Outlaws’ “ludicrously detailed cities I didn’t want to leave” and its luxurious eating sequences as highlights of a game that—in other areas—has a tendency to play things too safe. I’ll be honest, a solid 80% of the reason I want to get my hands on the game is to take a holiday in a galaxy far, far away.
But Outlaws didn’t quite commit to its more daring and interesting aspects enough to push it out of the 70 range (which, lest we forget, is not a bad score: Our review guide calls a game in the 70%-79% range “A good game that’s definitely worth playing”). Around all that interesting, Star Wars-y stuff is a lot of third-person action gameplay you’ve seen before: Vents, crouch-walking, main quests that adhere doggedly to certain structural formulas. A good game, but not a scintillating one.
Gerighty says that there’s still a “level of pride, happiness, and sense of accomplishment” among the game’s devs—and quite right too—and that he reckons it’s a game “that millions of people are going to play for years and years.
“We’re never going to stop improving it,” says Gerighty, before realising he’s writing a cheque his body can’t cash, “Well, that’s a lie, we’ll probably stop improving it, but today my mind is not on stopping improving it.”
Sounds good to me. If Outlaws gets a load of updates that double-down on the parts that make it interesting, I could see it becoming a Watch Dogs 2-style favourite among Star Wars fans. Even if not, it sounds like it provides a solid foundation for a great sequel. Just give us more scenes where we share a curry with Nix and fewer missions in hallways.
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