Star Wars Outlaws really clicked for me in hour 11, or maybe it was hour 17

Early stealth missions were putting me off, but then I made some key discoveries and had a crucial serving of Duradan soup.

Star Wars Outlaws. All screenshots in this story: Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft (captured by Game File)

Life is short, time is scarce, and I used to scoff at people who qualified their recommendation of a new role-playing game with the caveat that you couldn’t appreciate its excellence until you’d played at least a dozen hours.

But as a person who has played Ubisoft’s new open-world game Star Wars Outlaws for 25 hours over a 10-day stretch, I am here to tell you that it takes a long time—maybe too long?—to get a grip on what this new adventure is going for.

Some of that may be the marketing, which promoted Outlaws as a Star Wars scoundrel fantasy, as if we were going to be playing a Han Solo type who shoots his enemies first. 

Not really. Or at least not for the bulk of the game.

Instead, Outlaws is much more of a spy game. There’s a lot of sneaking around as you control protagonist Kay Vess through her adventures in an underworld far, far away.

Did you ever see that brief part of Return of the Jedi when Han Solo is quietly creeping through the forest moon of Endor? You’re doing a lot of that in Outlaws. Lots of crouching behind boxes, waiting for the moment to scoot past gangsters and stormtroopers. 

I also attribute some of my delayed appreciation for Outlaws to a bold decision by development studio Massive Entertainment to ditch traditional skill trees for a more subtle upgrade system that requires players to explore. That change makes for a more surprising game. It’s harder to predict how Kay’s abilities will develop and, by extension, how the kind of stealth challenges that are abundant and off-putting early in the game may become easier if a player makes some key discoveries. 

What if I told you, for example, that one of the most impactful (and optional) abilities for making Kay better at sneaking around is obtained by drinking soup on a specific planet? It’s true!

One other reason I think it took me some time to warm to Outlaws: It’s an open world game, the kind of adventure I enjoy the most when I’m just wandering through it, ignoring any pressure to roll credits.

When I play these games, I’m eager to get past narrow, funneled intros so that I can diverge from the main quest and go anywhere. That happened about 11 hours into my time with Outlaws, and has made for a better subsequent 14.

I’m hunting for the game’s idiosyncrasies and finding some terrific stuff.