## 2026-07-26 I have been on a bit of an [[Ubisoft]] Open World Slop kick lately. **Assassin’s Creed Origins**, **Immortals: Fenyx Rising**, **Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora**…you name it, I’ve put three hours into it for some reason. But of all of them, the one I’ve continued playing is, weirdly enough, **Star Wars Outlaws**. This game has no right to be as good as it is, I’m pretty sure. I went in expecting less than nothing, and yet now I haven’t been able to stop playing it. The game stars Kay Vess, who isn’t a Jedi, a chosen one, or anything of the sort. She’s basically Han Solo, if Han Solo sucked at the one thing he was good at, which is being a rogue. After a run in with some rebels that serves as the game’s tutorial, you land on your first major planet and start doing the usual Ubisoft open world stuff. Except, not really. I think that’s what’s made this game stick compared to other open world games of its ilk. The loop it’s put together is extremely well done. Rather than run from one marker to the next, intel is what helps you explore each planet. You might find a data pad in a Hutt base that tells you about a speeder that crashed into a well, which you could scrap for upgrades to your own vehicle. But all you have to go off of is that it’s somewhere near the fork of a river south of town. Maybe you hack into a terminal and learn about the locations of three key cards to open a cache with goodies in it, but one of them is in a bandit outpost. And you can’t get into that outpost until you upgrade your splicing tool. That’s another cool aspect of **Outlaws**’ loop. Kay has no Force to tap into, and she’s a novice at everything she does. Rather than traditionally leveling up and assigning skill points like most games, instead Kay has to find experts across the galaxy that help her get better, faster and stronger. After a meaty quest, you’ll get access to that expert’s upgrades — sort of. Each skill requires you to actually do things in the game to unlock them. Some of it is simple, like getting enough materials to upgrade your health. but others are more complex. To give my speeder the ability to bunny hop, as an example, I had to get in the air for 60 meters without bailing. Getting an upgrade to my smoke bombs required me to do stuff like stealth takedown an imperial officer, among other things. It sounds tedious, but I actually really enjoy the concept. It encourages you to go out there and play the game, as opposed to grind from one point to the next. Plus the loop feeds into each other. Go out to outposts and towns, do your thing, unlock stuff, and repeat. It helps that the upgrades and gear you can obtain are substantial and interesting: less “2% pierce resistance” and more, “this charm lets you fall off cliffs and not take fatal damage.” The other major mechanic in **Outlaws** is the Syndicate system. There are four Syndicates — basically mafia factions — in the game: The Pykes, Crimson Dawn, Hutt Cartel, and Ashiga Clan. You’ll find yourself aligning and betraying them regularly, which affects your reputation. A good reputation with a faction lets you saunter into their bases, get deals on their goods, and unlocks special items the better you get along. The worse it is…well, you can probably guess. Your reputation with the various factions will constantly be in flux in this game. There is no “good route” here, and if you’re like me and find it difficult to betray people, you’ll find yourself changing your tune pretty quickly. It’s just business, after all. Everything from completing syndicate contracts to sharing valuable intel can improve your reputation with a Syndicate, but it isn’t always that simple. In fact, it rarely is: helping one faction is likely to decrease your standing with another, so it’s important to take into consideration what you want. It likely wouldn’t be the smartest move to piss off the Hutt Cartel while you’re on Tattooine, their home turf. And maybe you want to side with the Pykes over the Crimson Dawn because you want their Imperial Disguise, which lets you walk around an imperial base undetected (you do want this, it’s fantastic). It helps that the moment to moment gameplay feels great too. It’s relatively simple, but I think that’s fine for a stealth game, of which there are agonizingly few these days. Kay’s pet and partner, Nyx, is kind of the star of the show when you’re out questing, given they can do…basically anything you want. Distracting and attacking enemies, stealing items and weapons for you, disabling alarms. Nyx is unironically GOATed, and you can upgrade him too, which is sick. All of these aspects combine to make a game that’s been hard for me to put down. Rather than be exhausted by “Checkmark Syndrome” I’m instead excited to see what the next expert I’m going to meet is like, or what the jacket I got intel on will do to change my build of Kay. You may have noticed I have next to nothing to say about the game’s story. That’s because I’ve barely made any progress! I’m too busy exploring. Maybe I’ll have more thoughts on that as I get to it. Otherwise, I’m having a grand old time with a **Star Wars** property, which hasn’t happened since the **Jedi Survivor** series.