So I rolled credits on Star Wars Outlaws today and I have come away from it feeling far more strongly than I ever expected.

I think, like a lot of people, I’d sort of written off this game at launch. I’ve grown fatigued with open-world games in general, and in particular with Ubisoft’s style of checklist-and-icon driven exploration, and it hadn’t done very well with critics either.

One unbreakable rule I have with games is “if Sam Greer recommends you something you have to at least try it”, and this hasn’t steered me wrong yet. Star Wars Outlaws is great.

It’s from Ubisoft Massive - the Division folks - and they seem to have really found a nice balance between giving you a big space to explore and not have the game drag on forever. Compared to your Ass Creeds and so on Outlaws is svelte - I wrapped it up in about 30 hours, and that’s with a decent chunk of the side stuff.

There’s a main story going on - which is really quite good, more on that in a sec - and simultaneously you’re doing all this stuff with the syndicates, who will ask you to do various jobs in order to gain reputation with them. Some of these quests involve pinching stuff from the other syndicates, so your rep goes up and down, and this actually affects what bits of the map you can walk into freely.

More interesting is how this actually intersects with the main story - it’s not an isolated side thing. I had a couple occasions where a main story mission was way harder because I’d pissed somebody off, and some where it was a cakewalk because instead of “sneak into this base and grab the thing” it was “go in there, say hi to Tony, and grab the thing and anything else that’s not nailed down”.

The story is set between Empire and Return, which is the perfect place to put a story like this. The Empire is still powerful but the cracks are showing, the Rebellion are around and crossing your path, and in the chaos there’s the perfect opportunity for the best type of story in games, which is a heist.

Nothing here is particularly groundbreaking even within the medium - “we’re assembling a team for a big job” is damn near monomyth at this point - but the way the characters are written, the way their motivations and pasts interact, all makes for great drama. I found the main character, Kay, to be particularly well-realised.

I’m not actually that big of a Star Wars guy. I think more than any of the individual films or shows what I love about it is the feel of it and its wide open plain of storytelling potential. The setting is huge, both in time and space, and it’s got such a particular look to it. That kind of “this tech is very advanced but it’s been advanced for so long we treat it like tools in a garden shed”. Love it.

Outlaws nails this. It looks - and, maybe more importantly, sounds - like Star Wars. I also love that they mostly resisted the temptation to have it chock full of egregious cameos; there are a few, which I won’t spoil if you care about that, but they’re all very believable within the context of the story. Glup Shitto isn’t in this one, though, sorry.

It’s gorgeous, too. I played on Medium settings (I like to play at 4K but my GPU does not) and even then it was really visually impressive. More importantly, to me, is that there are so many bespoke animations, little bits of flair the developers did not need to put in but did anyway.

If you try to get off Kay’s speeder when it’s in an awkward spot she’ll jump up on the seat and step off the back of it, something I imagine must require some horribly complex inverse kinematics witchcraft. There’s also an extremely long and bespoke animation for each street food dish you eat with Nix, which is entirely unnecessary, adds very little and I adore it. The game is full of things like this.

I think it’s a real shame that we’re unlikely to get a sequel. Often when I finish up a big game I’m just happy to be finished and move on, but I was genuinely a bit sad to be leaving these characters behind, and I think that’s neat.