Star Wars Outlaws might be a little too close to Uncharted for its own good

digitaltrends.com:

This story is part of our Summer Gaming Marathon series.

The Star Wars video game universe is expanding once again. Set to release on August 30, Star Wars Outlaws is Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment’s take on a new type of Star Wars game. It’s a traditional Ubisoft open-world game with shades of Uncharted layered in between its sci-fi action. More crucially, it’s telling a fully unique story in the Star Wars universe. It’s clear where its inspirations draw from for better, and certainly, for worse.

Set between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows main protagonist Kay Vess, an outlaw scoundrel embarking on a series of quests to make it in this cutthroat galaxy. It’s a strong concept, letting players live out their lives as more of a Han Solo figure instead of a Jedi. But after a recent hands-on demo with Outlaws, I’m not sure that the potential is paying off just yet.

Not-so-uncharted territory

Clearly drawing inspiration from the Uncharted video game series with its climbing, gunplay, and quippy characters, Outlaws feels a bit like a relic of the past. Granted, it’s hard to get a sense of a game like this in one sitting. This could just be a difficult game to show a small vertical slice of when the bigger picture could be more interesting. However, the three sections I played left me wanting more.

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The first section saw Kay and her trusty alien companion Nix working their way through a broken-down reactor. I walked from room to room as the floor fell out from under me. Yellow grates showed me where to climb, and I slowly made my way to the bottom of a massive hole to turn the generator back on. After turning it on, Kay remarked that she would need to climb back up to get what she came here for. After more climbing, I finally reach the room, go to