Star Wars Outlaws Review | The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly (PS5 Review)

Intro [Music] the Day of Reckoning is upon us as Star Wars Outlaws is officially here there has been a lot of talk about this game will it be good will it be bad or will it be somewhere in between well thanks to Ubisoft we've had Early Access to Star Wars Outlaw for the past week and combined we have spent over 40 hours with the game on PS5 After Rolling credits we have a lot of opinions on this game from graphics and performance to the story to the open world and to the gameplay and today we'll be sharing The Good the Bad and the Ugly in our official spoiler-free review of Star Wars Outlaws [Music] from the moment it was announced that we would be getting an open world Star Wars game I was incredibly excited and that's because I've always loved open world games and the exploration that they offer and even more than that I've always thought that Star Wars in particular is a perfect Universe to have an open world game I can't remember when I started that dream of having ground to space traversal ever since we speculated that would be a thing all the way back in the original Battlefront games and now with Star Wars Outlaws it looked like we were finally going to be getting the delivery of a lot of those things that this community has been wanting for a very long time and naturally there is so much excitement swirling around this game but that said this review is us being 100% honest about our takes on the game our unfiltered opinions on all of the different facets of this game like we said in the intro The Good the Bad and the Ugly we feel that responsibility to give you all an honest impression of our playthrough and that's exactly what we're doing here yeah absolutely I don't think I could say any better I think it's no secret that we've made a ton of videos expressing how excited we were about this game and its potential however with this review we feel that we have a responsibility to each and every one of you to give our honest opinions about our experience with this game influenced by nothing else but our time holding the controller and actually Graphics & Performance playing the game and I think the best place to start this review Andreas is with the graphics and performance yep I think that is the perfect place to start and I want to caveat this entire section and frankly this entire review of this game by saying that Nick and I played on the PS5 and we played on an early access build of the game without any day one patch that said we cannot offer any opinions on how this game runs in full on a PC or how it even runs on Xbox for that matter in terms of performance our experience is solely based on the PS5 and that said our commentary on graphics and performance are heavily impacted by the platform as I think the first thing that I kind of want to just clear the air with here is that this game does have performance issues on the PS5 it is a clear step down from the graphics and performance that we experienced in Early Access with the souped up PCS that we were playing on but that said it has not fully detracted our enjoyment of this game but there are some clear graphical deficiencies on the PS5 that I hope will be addressed at some point but of course there's no promise that they'll be addressed at some point so I just want to make sure that we are very clear about that right at the beginning yeah absolutely I think it is very clear from our experience and just our conversations with this game that the graphics and performance were by far the biggest point of contention for us it was the biggest source of frustration and disappointment across our playthrough of this game and for us the build that we were playing on we had two options for the graphics for the visuals it was either the quality mode or the performance mode and the performance mode was obviously targeting that 60 frames and the quality mode actually did favor 40 frames so it wasn't a 30 frame Target and that was actually a nice change of pace I think that is something that I would like to see more devs teams do going forward now with just the power of these consoles of course it's not as powerful as those souped up PCS but if we can have more quality modes that Target 40 frames I think that will be just beneficial for everybody and while we started our playthroughs on performance mode on the 60 frames we eventually ended up switching to almost exclusively the quality mode I think it's safe to say that we spent about 95% of our time throughout this game through the 20 plus hours each playing this game on quality mode and that is simply because the frame rate boost that you get from performance mode on the PS5 is simply not worth the Fidelity loss that you get switching from the quality mode to Performance because while we were playing on performance mode honestly in more of those open World areas of toara and yaniva things tended to become very blurry and just very smudged and it just was not a very good looking experience and although it did look good in some of the more contained areas such as Mirana looked really good or mea on AA even on these planets that had these issues it just wasn't worth that sacrifice and we ended up having to play in the quality mode so if you were one of those people out there who favors more of the higher frame rate you might find this as a source of frustration for you when it comes to the console version or at least the PS5 version of Star Wars Outlaws that said with the quality mode on I did find the frame rate to definitely be lower than performance mode but it was at least a steady frame rate I did not find there to be many drops in frame rate the one thing that I did notice was the Fidelity was constantly sacrificed and it looked like this game was not well optimized for the PS5 it looks like there is definitely beautiful art in there somewhere but it is not being properly rendered in because of how it's running on the PS5 for example on Tashara there are these puddles of water and larger bodies of water as well that are surrounded by Tall Grass that's blowing in the wind and when you look at this scenery it is just completely smudged it looks like there's all sorts of artifacting going on it looks like almost a watercolor painting the way that it's like smeared and blurry in a lot of areas and this is very notable especially when you're you're traveling over water and for planets like AA that have large bodies of water it is really noticeable and sometimes downright hard to look at but that said this game as you'll see with a lot of the different subcategories here that we're going to be talking about there's a good side and a bad side to it so for example the graphics there are definitely some downsides but there are some areas in this game that do look really good and they still look very good on the PS5 for example I can recall back to seeing the twin sun setting over Jabba's Palace and I had to take a screenshot of that and send it to Nick because of just how good it looked to me this game has moments where it does look graphically very impressive but there are certain areas of this open world that simply struggle on the PS5 yeah I got to say when it comes to the graphics and performance of Star Wars Outlaws it was by far the most confusing area of this game for me because I felt like I was always in the spin cycle with when it came to this game because like you said there are areas of this game that look absolutely beautiful to the point where you want to pull out the photo mode take a picture and send it to your friends and then there are other areas of this game that look almost early PS4 if not late stage PS3 era and it's just really confusing because it just makes you not sure how to feel about that and I feel the same way about the performance because when it comes to the frame rate I felt like in performance mode it was a pretty consistent and stable 60 frames now of course we are not technical Geniuses like I don't know if that's true but at least it felt like it was always remaining around 60 FPS and when it comes to the Quality mode I never experienced any sort of frame rate drop throughout the 20 plus hours like it remained a very stable and consistent experience so that was really nice that was a big bonus but on the other hand there were glitches I did suffer a crash so there still were some performance issues but again this was a Early Access build before any sort of day one patch and it's the kind of stuff that you come to experience in those preview builds of games but just very hit or miss when it comes to the graphics and performance of Star Wars Outlaws to the point where it was just very confusing and a very like we're not sure how to feel about it just given what was going on from moment to moment so just a very weird experience when it comes to this game on the PS5 but one thing Andreas that I think we are very sure of and that is the quality Story of the story in this game yeah I I want to be very general here because of course this is a spoiler free review of Star Wars Outlaws but I will say that the story of this game was a redeeming quality for me and for those of you who are curious I would estimate that the story would take about 15 hours to complete if you were just chugging through the golden path of this game for me I threw in uh a lot of side content and it took me about 18 and 1/2 hours to finish the story with all the side Endeavors that I I went on and then I put an extra like five or six hours on top just as I was screwing around in the game after credits rolled but I did take away positive things from the story and what was the real driver of that for me were the different characters involved in this story most notably Kay I think Kay is a very appealing protagonist I think she's excellently voiced by umly Gonzalez she shows real character development throughout the game and I found her to be a very compelling character and I found all the characters around her to be very authentic and compelling there were of course some pacing issues which we've seen in Ubisoft games in the past and that is present here as well but that said I don't feel like they detracted from the overall experience I think this game at its core is telling a very fun Heist story and I had fun with that and I enjoyed it and I felt that hook throughout the story I will say there is some cutscene Funk that particularly did not sit well with me like the presence of some pre-rendered cutcenes that just didn't look like they homogenized well with the rest of the game like the characters in the pre rendered cut scenes just looked a little different than they did in engine and that broke the immersion for me and I I felt like that was odd just an odd creative decision but by and large I did like and enjoy the story and I want to see more from from K going forward yeah I think you hit the nail on the head on a lot of points here for me it took about 16 or so hours to complete the main story of this game and that included some messing around with some side content and I know they've said that the golden path for this game is about 25 to 30 hours but I do think it is more in that 15-hour range we did play on the standard difficulty we didn't change anything so perhaps if you tune the difficulty up it will jump towards more of that 20 plus hour experience just with having to redo certain areas because there is a challenge to this game in certain areas but I do think if you lower the difficulty it will come in at an even lower time and I agree with you completely Andreas my favorite part of this story and what I think makes it work so well for me personally are the character moments and I absolutely loved so many of the different characters in this game and the characters that you come across and the interactions that they have with each other and the relationships that they build and by the end of this game I just absolutely love K I think umly Gonzalez like you said did a phenomenal job I really did like the voice acting across the board in this game and she was the shining example of it in this game she did such a great job and I agree with you I really would like to see more of kvest going forward I hope that we get to see her story continue in one way or another whether that is a sequel to Star Wars Outlaws or perhaps in a liveaction project I just think that umly deserves to tell more of case story going forward and I just really do enjoy that character and I think a lot of people are going to resonate with her and her character the one other character that I want to highlight here that can kind of be forgotten and lost in the shuffle is NYX and I feel like NYX is a real one two punch along with K and seeing their relationship as well as nd5 I feel like they make a good complimentary cast of characters that I found to just be interested in throughout this game like I really liked and enjoyed their Dynamic yeah me too by the end of it I just loved that relationship that ND and K have they're just great compliments towards each other their personalities are just so different but they just work so well together they're a great Duo and the one final thing that I want to touch on here is music and score this is something that I always try to take note of in a game and that said I think the music throughout this game was very well done everything from the score of the game to the different tracks that were composed and that you can select in the jukeboxes in the different Cantinas in this world I felt like the music does a great job of setting the tone for a lot of the different worlds because we do have different biomes and we we'll talk about this in the open world that they've really brought together a very colorful tapestry of different worlds in this game and the music permeates that entire experience and I really Vibe with the soundtrack in general sound design throughout this game that said again there are some audio bugs throughout the game that were very annoying to say the least just noises that were happening that wouldn't shut off I really do hope that these things will be polished going forward with either a day one patch or subsequent patches but I did encounter a hand full of audio bugs throughout my experience and hope that those are cleaned up because generally when the audio is working well it's very good so Gameplay now as we shift towards the gameplay conversation of this review where I want to start is with one of the features that we absolutely enjoyed and loved about this game and that was the expert system and then that is simply because it truly felt like a breath of fresh err for an open world game just getting away from a skill tree where you just have skill points and you're staring at a menu instead massive is now able to replace that system with more gameplay experience with more missions as each expert has a dedicated mission to unlock them and get access to their upgrades and abilities and one thing that I really love about these expert missions and these expert abilities is how the abilities that they upgrade for K are really contextualized by the expert themselves for example we know that Lano kisian is one of the experts in this game and the abilities and the upgrades that he provides to K and his little pathway I don't want to call it a skill tree because it's not but his little pathway of abilities that are upgraded via ingame objectives is very in line with who we know Lando is as a character and I absolutely love that you see that across the board with the experts and the expert system and the one thing I do want to say for you guys as you're getting your hands on this game if you get your hands on this game pay pay attention to the expert system in this game because it provides very valuable and critical upgrades as you progress throughout the game honestly I wish I would have paid more attention to it throughout my gameplay CU I think it would have helped me get through some areas a lot faster or just a lot easier and there are also some abilities for say the Trailblazer some movements like there's a lot of stuff locked behind this expert system so you definitely want to get that knocked out early in your playthrough I 100% Echo that sentiment because the one thing about these experts is they are predominantly optional you don't have to do these to finish the story of the game in fact a lot of them you don't even have to meet to finish the story of the game but it would be in your best interest because I actually had fun doing these and like you said Nick they actually have a practical use in game now I want to move on to the next system that we've talked at length about and that's the reputation system this is something that after playing our 4 hours early access with the game we were very excited by this system and now is a great time where I just kind of want to check in about whether or not this system lived up to the hype or whether we were maybe a bit misled with how it went for me personally I'm happy to report that I really enjoyed the way that the reputation system works in this game I feel like it it's just as advertised if not a little better than I was expecting because for example I immediately made my bum rush to gaining excellent reputation with the Huts because as you guys know I love the Huts I wanted to get the Sabine red Mandalorian armor inspired cosmetic item for getting the maximum reputation with the Huts as soon as possible I did that and I was very pleasantly surprised by my journey to Excellency with the huts and on the way there I loved this little detail that once you reach excellent you're able to freely walk into Jabba's Palace and I thought that was so cool it really made the grind to excellent with the Huts worth it and it made me really curious about how that grind would be for the different syndicates and Nick I know you went all in on Crimson Dawn so happy to to learn about your experience too yeah it's very clear that the reputation system is the foundation of the gameplay Loop in this game it is the most important system in this game it drives everything and I absolutely loved it for all of the reasons that you said in more Andreas I love that you get to pick a faction that you want to you don't get to join but you get to be a part of I truly felt by the end of it that I was a member of crimson Dawn by the time that I had reached Max reputation I had built up a rep with them I was part of it they were recognizing me in different areas they were offering me special jobs and it was worth it for me because my favorite cosmetic item in this game was the Crimson Dawn outfit I absolutely loved it so grinding my way towards that outfit it just gave me something to to strive for and to achieve to getting that cosmetic item I absolutely loved it one thing that we did not realize from our preview is just how important it is going in the other way we talked about all of the things you can gain from it but it is also a system that you need to pay very careful attention to we talked about how it is a very cerebral system and you need to be very careful in every choice you make I don't think we realized in our very brief hands-on experience with the game just how important that is because if you guys allow your reputation to be absolutely decimated to the lowest level with one of the syndicates they will send hit squads after you and they border on being absolutely annoying to deal with in the open world to the point where like every time you go out in the open world they will come after you I at one point had upset the Pikes to that level and every time I steep foot outside of a city there was a kill Squad of Pikes going after me and they would not stop until I got my rep back up with him it was not one of those things where like in GTA where you get wanted you die you're wanted level goes away it's all good no you are still in bad with that particular Syndicate and they will just continue to send waves after you in the open world so you almost have to drop everything that you're doing in the moment and go fix your reputation with that Syndicate to get them off your back and like that's really cool that you can put yourself in such a bad spot but at the same time it can be incredibly annoying if you're trying to focus on something else so it is just something that you guys want to pay very careful attention to but the reputation system absolutely lived up to the for me I love this system I love that it is a core mechanic of this game and I think it is such a great thing to do with all of these various syndicates and I love that you get to just pick your favorite Syndicate to grind towards and become a member of it was really cool now speaking of GTA of course guys The Wanted system in Star Wars Outlaws we did trial it we did test it out in this game and it is honestly fun to deal with there was at one point where I started just going and committing pretty much acts of I guess Imperial terrorism against different Imperial checkpoints on toar just trying to get to the death Troopers and it was a lot of fun it was challenging I did get to the max wanted level the death Troopers came after me they started sending like Tie fighters to monitor the area they never went after me but they were flying overhead you definitely feel the Imperial presence when you get the Wanted system and those death Troopers man ooh they're scary they will uh they'll get rid of you real quick yeah if you mess with the Empire to a certain degree they really don't mess around and speaking of that I think that's a natural segue into the combat for this game and particularly the combat AI because I know there was a lot of chatter about the AI leading up to this game whether it looked terrible from our Early Access gameplay or whether people thought it would not pass muster in an extended game play through for me by and large I didn't have too many issues with the AI that said it is not perfect there are issues that do pop up every once in a while where you do notice why is this person behind a rock shooting The Rock and not shooting at me and and why is he stuck there like there are things that pop up but the whole point of dealing with the Empire is they bring this strength and numbers approach with them where it's the fact that there is a ton of Storm Troopers coming at you with the death Troopers thrown in there with all the other forces being thrown at you that piles on and becomes overwhelming it's not necessarily that any one Stormtrooper is like a Commando or anything and appears very intelligent and is moving in like a very intelligent manner it's really how they overwhelm you that can actually make this game legitimately challenging because I know a lot of people were concerned is this game going to be too easy and for me personally I found this game to be a solid difficulty level it's not going to be a Souls born experience it's not that game and we always knew that it would never be that kind of game that said there are certain stealth sequences in this game and certain combat sequences in this game where if you bite off more than you can chew it can get out of hand very quickly and it can really be a difficult thing to get through and you have to be careful about when to pick and choose your battles that said I do also want to talk about the stealth sequences of this game because I think that goes hand inand with the AI the stealth is a little inconsistent at times because sometimes you know you'll be walking right in front of someone and they can't see you and then other times you'll be behind a wall and someone will see you across a field and through a wall and that inconsistency can make the stealth challenging in ways that it's not supposed to be challenging right like stealth sequences can be challenging that's totally okay but there are some times where that level of inconsistency makes the stealth sequences in this game a little hard to approach from a design level but that said those issues are not too common and only really made me frustrated every once in a while I felt like this game on a combat level was very fair yeah this whole system of the combat system and the stealth mechanics in this game really are just another one of those very confusing points for me because I'm not afraid to say that I think that there are times where the AI is incredibly stupid they do really stupid stuff like you said you can almost walk in front of them while going through stealth sequences and then there's another moment where they see you through a wall 5 miles away like it's very confusing it doesn't make any sense but what I will say for combat what I did enjoy about it and I'm happy you brought up Andreas it's not a Dark Souls game it's not trying to be a ghost of susha game this is not a very intricate combat system but it is a fun combat system I had fun with it I enjoyed running around with K's Blaster I enjoyed the sound design of it I enjoyed how Punchy it was I liked how there were the Sparks that flew off when it hit something like the visuals of the combat is really fun but it is a runand gun type of game and yeah it can be challenging when they overwhelm you with numbers and it can be at times almost too easy on the normal difficulty mainly driven by how stupid the AI can act sometimes and one thing I do want to talk about in regards to the combat we know that you are locked into just case Blaster as your primary weapon and you can pick up weapons around and one thing I did enjoy about Cas Blaster was how modular it was we knew it was modular we knew that there was a normal shot and then like an ion shot and a power shot but within those categories there were also subcategories so there were like nine total categories where the pow shot could have three different types of fire rate and then the ion shot had three different things that you could do with it and then the normal shot had its normal shot and then like a rapid shot and a power shot so it is it a very incredibly modular Blaster that K has And in regards to the weapons around the world I really enjoyed that system because they almost act like a Lifeline sometimes where like you said you will be overwhelmed and then you can pick up in the1 and just clear the room otherwise you're pinned down there's not much you can do with your blaster and you're going to die and then all the sudden that e 11 is there to save you and another thing that was incredibly helpful in situations like that is NYX I really did enjoy Nyx in this game he actually was a very helpful companion he wasn't just there for like moral support like companions are in other video games he was actually a very useful mechanic that I used a lot especially in those combat sequences where you are pinned down and you know if you stand up and try to go grab a back to vile because you need health or to go grab one of those weapons you're going to get killed you could send Nix to go get it for you so he was very helpful in those combat situations but he also was incredibly helpful in the stealth situations because you could use him to take down multiple enemies at once so if there was an area where you needed to take two people down at the same time you couldn't just take one down without alerting the other you could send Nicks after one of them distract him or attack him and make turn him like a little face hugger from Aliens while you took down the other one and then took him down so it was really nice to just actually have a very usable companion in Ni in this game now moving on to the next area of gameplay that I want to talk about I really do want to start off with the ship gameplay most notably the Trailblazer the one thing that I will say about the Trailblazer is I enjoyed the different areas that you can upgrade the Trailblazer because there are about six areas that you can upgrade you can upgrade the Weaponry how fast the ship goes and then the defenses of the ship as well and I really did enjoy how they weaved the story sequences into some of these upgrades we have seen one of those where you do a mission for a Jaa then you unlock the laser turret on top of the Trailblazer and then there are some other ones in there that are tied into the expert system where you can unlock different maneuverability options for the Trailblazer and I just found that to be a very creative way to upgrade the ship this is a definite step up from say Jedi Survivor where there was no customization or upgradeability for the Stinger mantis in that game so this is just a welcome inclusion to this game that said I would not expect anything to the degree of customization or upgradeability in Starfield where you can make an entire ship the Trailblazer is the Trailblazer and that is it there are some different skins that you can apply you can change the fuel of the ship that will make the contrails different colors but other than that the ship is is what the ship is and the combat is relatively unremarkable it flies just as well as you think it would and the game playay is relatively uncomplicated this is not a squadrons type experience it's not War Thunder it does its job and that's about all I can say about it yeah the best way I can describe the space combat in this game is it is like a more sophisticated Lego Star Wars the Skywalker Saga experience married with the mechanics and controls of Starfield it's it's very robust if you want that go play Star Wars squadrons you're not going to find that in Star Wars Outlaws now one other vehicle I would like to talk about and perhaps one of the more frustrating parts of this game is the speeder I did not love the speeder I did not love the way it drives it's very janky it honestly almost has a mind of its own when you call it there were moments where it would just show up on the other side of the area where I was standing or it would Circle me almost like taunting me or it would run me over like the AI for that is very weird it's very finicky and honestly I just didn't have a fun time driving the speeder around especially like if you would jump off of something it was like when you hit the ground you would cause an earthquake and the camera would just shake and just a very janky experience with the speeder in this game yeah this is something that I've already addressed before after our Early Access I didn't particularly care for the way that the speeder controlled in Close Quarter environments with tight turns I felt it was very floaty even though I understand it's floating physically off the ground because it's a speeder but it felt like not tight on the controls which I didn't care for and I was hoping that you'd be able to upgrade that because I saw that you can upgrade the steering which I did but I still felt like it was very floaty and also this kind of ties into the performance of the game but sometimes there's pop in when you are traversing at high speeds for example I was riding my speeder in Tatooine and a bantha appeared right in front of me and I slammed right into it and fell off my speeder not good don't like those kind of things they're very annoying especially when I'm trying to get from point A to point B with like a timer on or something and also that kind of goes hand inhand with navigation as well particularly on AA when there's windy roads I feel like this game could have benefited from a mini map when you're using the speeder particularly in some more windy environments like AA the speeder doesn't really climb certain environments well it gets hung up on rocks and just gener really felt like a clunky experience to me and I think it is one of the low lights for this game unfortunately yeah I completely agree I did get very sick of having to constantly check the map on AA to make sure that I was going in the right direction it was just so windy and it wasn't very obvious I know they went for a more minimal UI but I think this is one of those experiences that could have benefited from some sort of onscreen GPS or just a little more guidance along the way or perhaps we're just incompetent but I think we're on the same page when it comes to this and then the last bit of gameplay that I very briefly want to touch on is the platforming and general traversal for me this game is very similar to say the Uncharted series when it comes to platforming I found the platforming sequences to be very similar to Uncharted there were sometimes where I was frustrated by different traversal segments where I felt like the jumping wasn't as accurate as I wanted it to be or k wouldn't grab onto a l when I thought she should but I found some of the other platforming segments to be very impressive and large set pieces and it was really welcome to see that Uncharted scale of traversal in a Star Wars Universe because I love the Uncharted games and I really do think that that's a flattering comparison for this game yeah I think that is a great comparison it does have very similar traversal mechanics as Uncharted 4 to be honest just with like the rope that you can use to swing around in the hook I really love that mechanic I found great use out of it and I just had fun swinging around from area to area when you had to it was it was a really fun mechanic there now moving on to probably Open World my favorite part of Star Wars Outlaws if anything this game just for the open worlds that it provides it really does fulfill the fantasy of giving you a tourist in Star Wars feeling they did a really great job of constructing authentic Star Wars worlds in this game and I use that word authentic very intentionally because Nick earlier in the review you said they did their homework when they were designing this game when it came to Star Wars and that is so true you can tell there were countless hours ensuring that the different areas of this game had that Star Wars authenticity to it and that's everything from the details throughout the environments to the NPCs that populate them speaking everywhere from complex hes to droids speaking binary or whatever they're speaking I thought it was really interesting and really fascinating to keep exploring new environments because I never knew what I would uncover and I just think back to for example getting to Tatooine for the first time and seeing the scale of Tatooine and how large it is I crossed Tatooine in about 4 and 1 half minutes on my speeder which does go relatively fast and I could not wipe the smile off of my face when I was going around Tatooine at first I think this really is the most movie accurate depiction of Tatooine in a video game we've ever seen full stop no doubt in my mind I really love what they've done with Tatooine everywhere from exploring abandoned moisture Farms to going through the streets of mos Eisley this game really brings it when it comes to the open world and that alone is what will bring me back to this game and why I'm kind of obsessed with Outlaws right now and why I want to keep going back to my PS5 and exploring more areas of these games yeah I think the open world and the side missions that you can do with it and exploring around these planets is by far the best thing that Star Wars Outlaws has going for and the thing that I love the most all of the lore that's packed into it all of the NPC conversations that you have and the references and just hearing them talk about events that you know and Love from the Star Wars movies but how it would sound in an in Universe conversation was just incredibly exciting and really fun to listen to I really did love exploring these planets I love tattooing I'm right there with you Andreas that was one of my favorite moments from this game it's probably my favorite planet in this game followed probably by kajimi I think kajimi is incredibly impressive on a graphic standpoint on the PS5 and I want to use that to just say that I think this is also what made me so frustrated at times with this game is for how cool this open world it is and then when you get those graphical limitations or those graphical problems and it just doesn't look really good in certain areas or you have those performance issues it was just so frustrating because somewhere in there there is a really good Star Wars open world game there is a really good Star Wars experience you can see the love and passion that the massive team put in and the research into the Star Wars lore if you love Star Wars I think you're going to absolutely love exploring around this open world and just getting lost in what the world has and when you're getting lost in it and then you just come across those graphical limitations or you get hit with a performance bug as often as we did it just makes it really frustrating and really hard to just accurately pinpoint your feelings towards this game absolutely and performance issues really are prevalent in certain locations more so than others for example Tatooine is one of the better running areas of the game kajimi runs very well in this game but there are areas on Tashara for example that have a lot of tall grass and water where it does not look good at all on the PS5 and again I want to make sure that we're being clear this is on PS5 with Early Access so could improve could not don't know and then aka which is just covered in water because there are these rivers and lakes that run throughout aka the rain on AKA is one of the most notable features of that planet and I really love the design of AKA I love the different artistic details that went into creating this world I love mea but there is kind of this shroud of funk when it comes to the optimization on PS5 where you have all this artifacting and the water doesn't look great and it looks very smudged on AA and it really does take me out of the Star Wars tourism experience that I am enjoying having in certain areas of the game when there is that Fidelity drop in others now another feature of the open world we've kind of talked about a little bit about how you can go up into the local space areas of these planets is of course that some of these planets do have space stations that you can explore and they're nothing special they're pretty similar in the way that they're laid out they do have unique characteristics but it is just another cool area that you can access throughout your time with this game now one thing that I think shocked us a little bit was these were not necessary or required or even forced on you in the main story these are more driven by side missions and especially Syndicate Miss that you will get but they are just cool things to go experience just fly up into the local space of Tashara and go land on its local space station and there's a whole world going on there there's a Cantina and people you can talk to and listen to and it is cool but it it is not an incredibly robust system but a nice addition I definitely was impressed by the one space station that I spent some time in I thought it was a really thorough level of detail on the space station and I love just sitting in the hangar Bay looking out at the planet that I was in orbit over and then also just throughout the space station I was impressed by the size and the fact that there's a whole Cantina in there I didn't make it to the other space station I know there are at least two in this game but other than the two space stations or or if there are more I'm not sure there isn't much going on in space and that was honestly something I was a little disappointed by I know in Starfield we had various different moments where say a ship would pull up to you and have some moral dilemma and that looked like it was present in this game here and there but just not to the degree that I was hoping for like I was hoping for more instances where say like a star destroyer would pull up and I know those are like big expectations for this game but in the open world I just didn't really see anything to that scale happening and I didn't see too much going on in space and space kind of felt like an area that I was just trying to get through to go to one of the other open worlds in this game so not really a point of emphasis on the open world for me I will say one thing that I really did enjoy doing in the open world was throwing myself into these Random Encounters there was one random encounter on Tatooine where there was a small little village being attacked by Pirates I was just driving by they asked for help and all of a sudden I was fighting off waves of pirates in this small little Tatooine town and protecting the locals that was really cool and same thing in space it was really fun to just be flying around in space and then all of a sudden you just stumble upon this epic space battle between the Empire and the Pikes and you get involved and you help the Pikes out but one thing I will say from these Random Encounters especially the space ones again it's that reputation system comes into play with some of these Random Encounters and honestly sometimes discourages you from getting involved because you know you might see a battle between the Pikes and another Syndicate and you know if you get involved you're going to hurt your reputation with one of them so I was actively trying to avoid hurting my reputation with the Pikes because of how bad it was and I didn't want those hit squads being sent after me so anytime I could get involved and the Pikes were involved and I was going to go against them I would actively choose to not get involved so that was a little frustrating but at the end of the day that was probably more my fault for letting my rep get that low now an open world wouldn't really be much of an open world if it weren't filled with activities and that is one thing that this game has in abundance there is so much to do throughout these worlds there are many different Collectibles side missions Intel there's even some Legends out there and Legend quest lines that are really interesting and I can't wait to dig more into as I keep playing this game my sense is that I've played the game for over 20 hours at this point I could probably easily spend another 20 hours digging through all this game has to offer there's so much here like for example I spent like 5 minutes just feeding Nicks in this game sitting at different food areas and then sitting down having a meal with NX and one thing that I enjoyed about this activity was that feeding NYX actually upgrades NX and gives NX new abilities and I thought that was a really cool addition that I never would have expected from this game especially with how peculiar the QuickTime sequences are they're a little funny but I just thought that added some elements of tourism in these open worlds and again there's so much to collect and do there's shops that you can go and buy things from whether it be the Jaa or local merchants or the different exclusive rep tie-in shops and Merchants like there is no shortage of stuff to do for this game and it's really bringing the value in that area for sure yeah I feel like I've barely scratched the surface I've put 20 plus hours into this game and I feel like I will easily spend another 20 30 if not more hours trying to do 100% this game like I'm I'm not even close to being at 100% with this game I felt like I was running by so many different opportunities and one thing I do love about the design of this open world that is very different from what you see in other Ubisoft titles is it doesn't hold your hand in that regard you know there's no tower that you can climb to and it just shows you everything on the map you don't see everything on the map a lot of what you are able to do in the missions you unlock is just what you randomly stumble upon from exploring you hear it in a Cantina or you listen to a conversation or you go stand at the bar and the bartender tells you something like you pick up on these things by exploring this game incentivizes you to run around the cities to run around the world to explore to get involved and I think that is a really nice change of pace and works really well in an outlaw story and works especially well in the Star Wars Universe with the different biomes and planets you can explore so that is one thing that I did really love about the open world and another thing I actually did enjoy we didn't get to experience this in the preview build but I did finally get to play the mini video games and they were actually a lot of fun they're very like retro Throwbacks and they were honestly kind of challenging and I was kind of addicted trying to get a high score on them so it was just a nice little bonus on top of Sauk I had a lot of fun playing Sauk and the faier racing was probably my least favorite of the mini games but still really cool that you can just like throw your credits in and bet on faier racing just like a really cool in Universe reference if anything yeah I'm really glad that you touched on the mini games Nick and I really just want to comment on saach here again I'm so impressed by saac in this game I think it's something that some people are just going to get lost in and spend so many hours playing I was also very surprised by the different upgrades to subach where you can up your odds of getting good hands and doing different things like there are a handful of different upgrades to make you better at subach that you can learn from the expert system in this game and I I was very pleasantly surprised by that moving on to our next area of this Customization game that is the customization I would say that the customization in this game is Just as advertised for me the impression that I got from the Early Access is exactly the impression that I'm walking away with after spending this amount of time with the game and that is that K has a very basic customization system that's just three options it's her top it's her holster and it's her bottom that's it uh the one thing I was curious to learn about is how many different options there were throughout playing the game and after 22 hours with the game roughly I collected about 9 different tops for K and some of them I really do like but I'm hopeful that there are other tops spread throughout the world the one thing I will say is when I went up to Merchants sometimes I was looking in different areas for more options cosmetically for K and I was hoping that there would be like a region specific option like say go to Tatooine and get a Tatooine themed attire 4K and I just felt like that fell a little short for me like sometimes I'd go up to a merchant and there would just be no options for cosmetics and I hope that there's more of that going forward and that all of the Cosmetic options in this game aren't just locked behind a pay wall in the UB store I'm really hoping that there's more here for players and then of course there's also customization available for Nix which is a very basic customization where you kind of just change nyx's headpiece I had the lobot headpiece on him the entire time and I thought it was cool cuz it like lit up and then there is basic customization for the ship speeder and Blaster as well in this game but nothing too notable they're just Collectibles that you find throughout the world that you can then apply to your ship speeder and Blaster accordingly and there are also of course some appearances and customization options there that are tied into the reputation system that do make it a good incentive to participate in that system yeah we've been getting a lot of questions about customization over the past few weeks and I just want to be as transparent as possible it is not a very robust customization system in this game it is it is very simplistic it's very basic it is exactly kind of what we were expecting and if you were looking for a more robust customization system you're just really not going to find that in this game and I know that's going to disappoint a lot of people but we just want to be honest with you guys that's how it is it's very simple now that Verdict we've touched on all of the different facets of this game of course it's impossible to get at everything here because the one thing I will say about Star Wars Outlaws is it offers a lot there is a lot in this package there's a lot to do there's a lot of different features this game is really offering a lot of different things and different experiences for different players but that said here we just want to wrap up our Impressions with just our general verdict on this game maybe provide a score Nick why don't you go ahead and take a stab at it yeah this is incredibly difficult and something that I've been fighting internally for the past week and it's just really hard to pin down because I think this game offers a lot of really good stuff I think it offers some occasional great stuff but at the same time I think there's also some stuff that is quite ugly in different areas of this game to be honest with you so I think objectively this game is probably a seven out of 10 I think if I completely took the Star Wars IP out of it if this was just some random sci-fi game and I did not care about the IP involved at all I think this game would be a high 6.9 to a 7 for me just because of the graphics and performance issues that really hold back some areas of this game because I think somewhere in there there can be a really good open World Star Wars game down the road I do think if you are concerned about the graphics and performance if that is not something that you can really Overlook on Console specifically again this game might just be stunning and Beautiful on PC and I hope it is for those people but I'm not willing to say that this game is always stunning and Beautiful on PS5 if that is something that will bother you I would suggest waiting for a few updates I would suggest waiting until perhaps you know once those story DLCs start rolling in and we get those updates in I think this game has the potential to be at that eight or n level objectively but I do think there is a lot of work still from the massive team to fix a lot of the issues in this game so objectively for me this game is probably a 7 out of 10 I could argue maybe a little higher just because of how much I love star War like if I allowed that Star Wars bias to creep in I would probably allow it to go a little higher but I I just cannot do that in good faith towards being honest with my feelings of this game but I will say despite that I did have a lot of fun with this game I just love Star Wars I loved getting lost in the universe if that is what you were looking for if you were looking to just get lost in the worlds of Star Wars and run around and explore and get to know these characters then I think you will have a good time with this game it's just it's a really confusing experience honestly Andreas I'm really conflicted about how I feel about this game yeah I definitely feel that complexity with my reaction to Star Wars Outlaws because if you will have played this game and then told me that it is a seven I would trust you if you played the game and told me that it was an eight I would trust you if you told me that this game was a 10 experience for you you know I might buy that from you because there are times of this game where it's a six there are times in this game where it's punching to like a nine even like a 95 there are times where it's a strong eight and it's kind of confusing going through the different areas of the game and different areas where it kind of props you up and then pushes you down for example for me personally I was most excited to play on Tattooing in this game Tatooine alone would have been worth the price of admission for this game for me because I loved the opportunity to explore tatooing in an open World triaa gameplay experience and this game delivers that but if you were somebody that was playing Star Wars Outlaws and were most excited to explore for example cantonica you would be incredibly disappointed because one of the things that I really didn't like about this game is other than a few scripted story involved sequences for Kanto bite you can't go to Kanto bite in the open world for this game and that was disappointing for me and there are different things like that that are kind of spread throughout the game that we've talked about whether it be Graphics or pre-rendered cutcenes or AI there's little things that kind of take this game from being the great game it could be and kind of pushes it into whatever area you sit with this game what you were expecting and whether you'll get out of it what you're taking with you and for me personally as someone who loves Star Wars I will be taking like a seven to an eight experience out of this game because I love Star Wars but I totally understand if you are somebody who is not that tied into the IP doesn't really care as much about exploring Tatooine and is just looking for a good quality well-built AAA game experience I would not blame you for pinning a six or seven on this game with the way that it runs on the PS5 right now so I just totally understand the complexity of emotion that you're talking about Nick when it comes to this game that said I'm going to keep playing Star Wars Outlaws I've played it for 20 hours I'm probably going to play it for 20 more might even platinum the game because I personally love having an open world Star Wars game on my rotation this for me is what I imagine a lot of people look at Hogwarts Legacy is being like where you know it wasn't the technical Marvel of say a god of war or something as graphically impressive on PS5 as Horizon forbidden West but for people who were looking for a game to explore Hogwarts it scratched an itch that they were looking for for a long time and this game scratches a lot of itches for me that I've been looking for for a long time like it's got the ground to space traversal been looking for that in a Star Wars game forever it does that been looking for an open world Star Wars game where I can explore Tatooine and explore from the Lars Homestead to Mo sizely to the judlin Wast and Beyond it does that and for that reason this game will probably settle in that seven range for me but I will continue to play it and really enjoy my time with it yeah I think somewhere in there there can be a great Star Wars open world game but I don't think it is quite there yet I don't think it is a great Star Wars open world game yet I think it is an okay to good Star Wars open world game right now just because of all those issues and I can kind of EMP empathize with both sides of the argument and I think that's what makes me so conflicted I could totally understand someone looking at this game and being like look this looks like a broken experience that is not for me I'm not touching this game and I would totally understand why that person would feel that way and at the same time I can see someone who's like I just love Star Wars I love this IP and I want to get lost in the world for 40 50 hours so I want to play this game I totally get that because there are times where I feel just like that it really was a very confusing and conflicting experience for us guys I know that might not answer your questions clearly I hope we provided as much information for you guys going into this so that you guys are as informed as possible as to whether or not you feel you should purchase this game if you guys have any additional questions please leave them down below in the comments and we will do our best to answer as many of them as possible in either a comment or perhaps a video down the road we really are just trying to provide you guys with with as much honest information as possible only influenced by our actual experience playing the game so we're we're doing our best for you guys to answer as many questions as possible also if you're new to the channel we would love to have you as always and the way to do that just go down below this video hit that little subscribe button the Bell notification right on next to it it'll notify you every single time that we upload we are closing in on 30,000 subscribers for those of you who have decided to join the lunar Squadron family whether recently or over the last few years or you've been with us from the beginning we just want to say from the bottom of the hearts thank you very much we appreciate every single one of you we could not do this without you guys so we really do appreciate each of you anyway guys that is going to do it for us for our Star Wars Outlaws official review thank you all so much for watching and as always we will see you all next time [Music]