Star Wars Outlaws May Fulfill That Galactic Scoundrel Fantasy

ign.com:

Some of the more interesting Star Wars content in recent years has nothing to do with Jedi and Sith. While their iconic push-and-pull of good versus evil has been a great framework for games like the Star Wars Jedi series, honing in on the life of a scoundrel gives us the opportunity to see life in the galaxy from a different perspective. That’s the impression I got after getting hands-on with an hour's worth of gameplay with Star Wars Outlaws, the upcoming third-person action shooter from Ubisoft and developer Massive Entertainment.

It’s rough around the edges as of however old this build was, but exploring the galaxy as protagonist Kay Vess and getting into dirty business in this three-part demo was refreshing, even though a lot of its gameplay felt familiar. The best representation of this was a mission that started inside an Imperial base and sent me to sneak my way around to activate controls to move a cargo shipment, opening the way to steal a ship for a getaway. After knocking out some guards and hacking into some systems, I got into a shootout with Stormtroopers as I waited for the cargo to move into the ship I was going to steal.

Kay isn’t exactly a force of nature and has to get scrappy, which meant well-placed shots, using cover, and commanding her little merqaal companion, Nix, to lend a hand were required to make it out alive. Kay’s blaster has a lethal and EMP-style modes, plus a one-shot knockout on cooldown, but she can also pick up enemy weapons for more firepower. Putting this all together was pretty challenging, but after making the escape I was then in control of an Imperial ship and getting into dogfights in space, channeling some of that Star Wars Squadrons energy into Outlaws.

I then returned to the desert planet Toshara in the city of Mirogana, where the criminal underworld thrives, for the finale of this story mission. All of this happened seamlessly, moving from one thing to another at a brisk pace and encompassing all the aspects of what it