So, Star Wars Galaxy, the open world Star Wars game everyone wanted to be good. What did we get? A mediocre semi open world game plagued with bugs and fundamental broken mechanics and systems.
First thing I notice is the way they have decided to make the skills system. You unlock new skill cards by completing milestones. Basically you have to "kill 5 of these guys" and "do this 3 times" to unlock a skill. You also have to find important persons in order to unlock the cards in the first place. There is no experience system what so ever, so going off track to explore or do side missions is essentially completely useless.
And just to get this out of the way, when you die, you lose cash. I lost almost 1k from one death. I haven't played a game in a long time that have such a stupid design. Especially not in a game that rely on you having cash to buy items you need to upgrade your blaster, speeder and ship.
The graphics are OK, anyone who says anything else have either not played the game, or base their thoughts on compressed YouTube videos from people that have not touched the graphics section. In the settings you find anything from upscaling, to raytracing. Running the game in ultra settings works fine for most parts on my 4080 super. Only once (20 hours )did I run into a issue with major frame drops, though the game did literally stop working and kept my GPU running at 100%. Other than that, the game seems to OK optimized and can only get better from there.
Gameplay
Well, like stated above, there is really not much to do other than the main missions. There is no excitement to wander off since there is nothing to win other than parts you can sell and some small cash. All of this you also earn doing the main story line. There is next to none random encounters and those that are just repeats from saving small settlements from raiders to kill stormtroopers and steal their treasure.
The missions you get sent on are extremely linear and follow a very narrow path with typical copy paste format we know Ubisoft for by now. There are some missions that are heavily stealth oriented where you will fail if you get caught, and some missions where you can do as you please as long as you follow the linear map design. This is where the open world ends, the main missions. You are following the same basic premise by looking for yellow colored marks where you can climb, a branch with a yellow marker you can use to swing, a air ventilation shaft to crawl through to get to the next room, everything conveniently placed to traverse the map with a shortcut at the end to easily escape when you get the intel.
Honestly, the most fun in this game is the minigame when unlocking locked doors and chests where you have to time your clicks to a set of sounds, unlike the standard method most games use now. Compare that to the slicing minigame that is just pure luck if you get the right combination. There was no thought behind the slicing mechanic.
Sneaking... Well, lets just say that in Star Wars Outlaws, Stormtroopers not only shoot bad, they are completely blind, as are the rest of the enemies. This might be due to a difficulty setting, but on normal you can sneak right past ones side and they don't notice you, you can do a sneak takedown 3 feet from another enemy and they don't see or hear you.
I won't even get into the space gameplay as it is not there. You can travel to space, shoot some pirates, pick up some loot. There is nothing to do and it's essentially just added to give you the lightspeed animation when you jump to another system.
The games save feature is another problem, it uses auto save, so far so good. Thing is, its auto save checkpoints can be so far apart that you can be forced to replay up to 20+ minutes on sneak missions. There is no way to manually save once you entered a mission area. It's a horrible outdated feature and should be patch away ASAP. Manual saves ftw!
Nix
Nix, your loving companion is probably the best part about the duo. You can use him to steal from NPC's, distract them and attack them. Now, Nix does not take down enemies, he distracts them by jumping on to their heads giving you a short moment to either rush a second enemy to take down and then take down the enemy Nix is holding or just rush the the enemy Nix is holding. Anyway it gives you a opportunity to take down two enemies at once. Nix will also sometimes help you with takedowns if you sneak up on someone, a small animation will show Nix grabbing onto the enemy's arm, dragging them down and Kay will them knock them out.
Nix can also fetch items far away, sabotage alarms, blow up barrels, distract cameras, push buttons, lower ladders and more.fun fact; aim your blaster at Nix but don't fire, he will do a trick for you.
You will also use Nix for several puzzles throughout the game.
Verdict
It's hard to think that this game came from Ubisoft who have games like Assassin's Creed and Farcry in their repertoire as open world games, and the studio Massive Entertainment who made the latest Avatar game. The "open world" in Star wars Outlaws is small and honestly a joke compared to the other games. The skill system is annoying and side quests and random encounters are pointless.
I cannot recommend anyone to buy this game for the price they are asking. If you want to play the game because you're a Star Wars fan and want to experience the characters and lore, I'd recommend signing up for Ubisoft+ for one month and then just cancel the subscription.
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