Star Wars Outlaws aims to be the Han Solo simulator we’ve always wanted
As I walked down the stairs of the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles, the location of Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws demo event at Summer Game Fest 2024, my accompanying PR person asked me the question I’m sure she asked every reporter who walked down those stairs with her: “Do you like Star Wars?” A simple question, and yet a weirdly hard one for me personally to answer in 2024. Andor was a revelation, yet I still taste the ash of The Rise of Skywalker in my mouth. And so, when I answered “yes,” I forced my brain backward into remembering why I had ever liked Star Wars in the first place.
As a child, the Harrison Ford fantasy-adventure movies that played over and over in my household were not Star Wars; they were Indiana Jones. For that reason, when my 12-year-old self finally saw Star Wars — previously ignored in the Myers family household — I was flabbergasted. I already thought I had seen the coolest possible Harrison Ford character, and yet here was Han Solo, who was so much cooler that he destroyed my entire barometer for coolness. All future “cool” characters would hereby be measured against him.
As I told this polite, probably bored PR person that story, I realized I was summarizing how difficult of a situation Star Wars Outlaws actually faces. Imitating Han Solo’s coolness is no small feat, and Solo: A Star Wars Story unfortunately showed how difficult it is for somebody who isn’t Harrison Ford to pull off anything close to his alchemical coolness formula. At this point, the whole idea of an open-world Star Wars game in which you play as a Han Solo type is the pipe dream that dorks like me have been claiming they want for years (and it even almost happened once). That means the stakes are even higher — and the couple of trailers we’ve seen for the game have made it look fine, but not great.
Now that I’ve played three 30-minute chunks of Star Wars Outlaws, I have some hope that developer Massive Entertainment can actually pull this off.
When the demo loaded up,
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