Star Wars Outlaws Thrives in Its Rewarding Open World | Push Square

pushsquare.com:

As part of last month's Summer Game Fest season, Ubisoft allowed press to play Star Wars Outlaws for the first time in a demo made up of three different parts, each designed to justify the game's core pillars. Reactions were quite mixed — unfavourable comparisons to PS Vita game Uncharted: Golden Abyss were drawn — so leads at Massive Entertainment spoke of a more comprehensive media playtest that would reveal all the connective tissue between those three teasers.

Fast forward a month and change and Star Wars Outlaws now occupies a very different, much more promising space in our brains. Having played four hours of a new demo that released the shackles and allowed us to explore its open world to our heart's content, it's just not possible to imagine the game without it. The open world of Star Wars Outlaws is what brings everything together. As a whole, when allowed to roam freely, pursue side quests, and converse with aliens, those missions of the first demo are just a bonus. This is what Star Wars Outlaws is really about, and it's overall excellent.

The newest demo — which we played via live stream on PC — was broken up into two pieces: for three hours, we toured Toshara, and then sixty minutes were spent on the city-focused planet of Kijimi. The former is what puts the game back on the map, as the decently sized area beyond its city walls promises secrets, fun exploration, puzzle solving, and races.

Unlike so many past Ubisoft games, your map won't be automatically littered with icons; you make them instead. As you explore the cities and outposts of the world, you'll unlock side quests and points of interest in a drastically more natural manner — like overhearing conversations or finding datapads. That mission then receives a marker on your map, with a fog of war making the journey to it still one full of mystery. You can find even more Intel (the in-game name for the side quests) along the way or an upgrade for your blaster, speeder, or even entire spaceship.