3/5 ★ – ChucklesBiscotti's review of Star Wars: Outlaws.

The Hard 7 posse adds another to the ranks with Outlaws. There is a lot of half-baked ideas and slightly wonky mechanics, and even after the patches there's still plenty of bugs, but ya know, that's fine. It feels like a Star Wars universe, we're not trying to save the world just find our place in it, and it doesn't feel like every other Ubisoft game. It's still definitely a Ubisoft game and they just try to hide it really well, but the hiding works a lot of the time. You stumble upon intel, you find quests, you eavesdrop in ways that don't feel as annoying as in various ACreed games. It feels like you're discovering things on your own even if Ubisoft mechanics are at work under the hood mostly getting you to them. Still, it's cool to be out in your ship collecting random stuff and all the sudden that randomness gives way to a quest line that takes you on a run to another planet where you find a long-forgotten drone and yada yada yada. There's plenty of better open-world games out there, but I do think Massive has something here even if it's not all the way there. It might be one of those hidden gems eventually because there is a lot of fun stuff to be found here if you just wander around. Having a stealth mechanic with next to no indicators saying when you're out of stealth or anything like that is also another choice that most probably wouldn't make, but the jank plays to this game's favor to me in that sense. The stealth isn't refined, but it's also the main mechanic, so you sort of grow to love its silliness or probably lose interest. (Plus, stealth in video games NEVER makes sense, it's a totally video game'd mechanic by default because stealth would never play out like any video game in real life, but that's a whole other conversation.) Point being, an open world game driven by stealth is relatively unique, and even if it's not refined like an MGS5, it reminds me of stuff like Alpha Protocol where being slightly weird adds to the charm. It's a lovable Hard 7, and I hope more scope it out when it's cheap. Oh, and if you need another incentive, it's easily one of the best looking games of 2024.