After 5 hours of exploring the galaxy and ghosting past Stormtroopers, Star Wars Outlaws is finally winning me over

Star Wars Outlaws didn't put its best foot forward when I played it at Summer Game Fest. That demo covered most of what you do in Ubisoft's next open-world game: sneak, hack, shoot, and fly. It was fine , but it was overfamiliar, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was experiencing Outlaws in the exact opposite way it was intended. I wanted so badly to hop on Kay's speeder and explore the open world a bit, but we were rushed through three linear missions on strict 20-minute timers.

Ubisoft flipped that SGF demo on its head at a dedicated Star Wars Outlaws preview event held earlier this month in Orange County. No on-screen timers, no segmented missions—I played nearly five hours of Outlaws, and a good chunk of that time was spent chatting up NPCs, taking on side jobs from factions that all hate each other, and full-sending Kay's speeder off the biggest rock ramps I could find on Toshara, a planet of deep canyons and desert brush where the opening hours take place.

My complaints about unchallenging shootouts, stiff climbing, and dumb Stormtrooper AI haven't changed, but I learned that Outlaws shares a notable quality with other Ubisoft open world games: no one aspect is exceptional, but when it all comes together, I'm having a really good time.

Job hunt

One of my favorite quests from the demo involved surprisingly little sneaking or shooting. It was a side job from the Pyke Syndicate, the dominant faction of Toshara's major city, Mirogana. I was hired to bring in a syndicate member who was caught planning a coup (he'd actually come up in an earlier story mission, a nice, natural-feeling bit of worldbuilding). The first stop was to track a co-conspirator in the city market, but I immediately got distracted by the glow of a Fathier race betting minigame. It briefly occurred to me that this was the same betting operation from that gross casino planet in The Last Jedi, and that maybe it's messed up to exploit these cute alien horses—I put a stack of credits on "Man From Naboo" and lost it all (instant karma).

Back on track to the market… is what I was for about 10 seconds before I spotted some loot through the window of an abandoned speakeasy. I Deus Ex'ed through a vent to get in, hacked a terminal to shut down an energy barrier, and pocketed a new trophy for Kay's speeder. Eventually, the quest's clue ("The agent is making comlink calls") led me to eavesdropping on a conversation in the busy market, and the development that my man was holed up in a space station in Toshara's orbit.

So I made for my ship and took off, triggering the seamless transition between surface and space that Ubisoft has touted in every demonstration of Outlaws, and rightly so. It's just a well-disguised loading screen, not a controllable sequence like in No Man's Sky, but it's a convincing and immersive detail that solves a problem Starfield's planet-hopping couldn't. Now in space, I enjoyed an uneventful flight to the station.

This demo cleared up something I'd been wondering about Outlaws—you don't spend all that much time flying around. I was always confined to a planet's orbit, a boundaried area that's functionally a hub of floating islands, and flying between them never took more than a minute or two.

The station had a cantina—the third cantina I'd visited in as many hours. I needed access to the restricted section in the back, and while I probably could've lockpicked a door or knocked out a few guards to get in, I opted to skip the theatrics and bribe the bartender. Finally I found my guy hiding in a storage room, and he made a last minute offer: Let him go, get paid double, and get in good with his friends at Crimson Dawn (a rival faction you probably don't remember from the Han Solo movie). I kept my word and turned him in, a choice that came with consequences later.

Gang war

Choosing a side tipped the scales on Outlaws' faction reputation system, a constantly shifting measurement of how much each of the four factions like or dislike Kay. Sticking with the Pykes on that last job increased my status to "Good," which came with a handful gameplay bonuses:

• Access: Some areas of Outlaws' cities, and even smaller settlements, are off limits to outsiders. I breezed through a couple jobs that would've been a little harder if I'd had to sneak in.
• Discounts: Faction zones have special vendors that offer unique gear and discounts to friends.
• Jobs: A menu says a syndicate is "more likely to give Kay jobs" when she's on good terms.
• Cosmetics: Clothing for Kay and Nix, skins for her blaster

It's a lot more involved than I expected. Almost every mission I played moved Kay's reputation up or down, either because I was hired by one gang to screw over another or prompted mid-mission to take a side in a turf war Kay has no stake in.

Such is the Star Wars "scoundrel fantasy," as Ubisoft and LucasArts have repeatedly described in interviews. Kay Vess moves through the galaxy in contrast to her straight-laced, annoyingly noble Jedi contemporary Cal Kestis. She'll solve problems for whoever has credits, cut deals with corrupt Empire officials, and won't flinch to shoot first. But sticking to the Han Solo blueprint, Ubisoft has been careful to instill Kay with a moral compass—she's not an assassin, wary of strangers but compassionate with her pet partner-in-crime, Nix. She's in it for money, but only as a means to escape the Empire's reach.

Outlaws' rep system makes a good first impression. It's not uncommon for player choices to steer a story in games, but it's rarer to see that standing simulated in real-time and modify how you approach a mission. An early mission gave me the choice to steal a blaster part from the Pykes or Crimson Dawn. Since I'd just got on the Pyke's good side, I was able to stroll right into their turf and swipe the part with almost no security. That was a cool feeling, but I question if it'll still be cool the sixth or seventh time that scenario comes up. I also wonder if Kay's reputation will have any long-lasting outcomes. None of the story missions I played seemed dependent on faction allegiances, and even when my standing with Crimson Dawn was "Poor," I was still able to accept sidequests from my named Crimson Dawn bud.

Sneaking mission

One pleasant surprise of my extended time with Star Wars Outlaws was discovering how much of a stealth game it is. Yes, you can blast your way through most encounters, but I spent my demo ghosting past Stormtroopers, triggering distractions, and knocking out the occasional gangster. In the early chapters Kay could only take a handful of shots before going down, and healing vials weren't plentiful. Taking on two or three troopers was no problem, but any more and I usually wiped back to checkpoint.

I might've been inspired to pick more fights if Outlaws' combat was fun. In a firefight, aiming Kay's blaster felt stiff and overly reliant on aim assist (I played on controller). Nailing headshots was easy to the point of boring, and Stormtroopers made no attempt to take cover for flank Kay. They mostly just stood still next to one of a dozen explosive barrels on every battlefield.

There's an unmistakable sluggishness to the action—like Uncharted playing back at half speed. Kay's modest sprint, lackadaisical melee takedowns, and a limp self-preservation instinct from enemies failed to get my heart pumping. I'm hoping that some of this can be explained by the demo environment—it's possible difficulty was dialed down to make sure anyone could finish it. But from what I've seen those YouTubers who put together cool stealth kill montages have their work cut out for them making Outlaws' combat look exciting.

I had way more fun playing Outlaws like I would Watch Dogs, or to gaze further up Ubisoft's stealth family tree, Splinter Cell. In a time when stealth is treated more like a feature than a genre all its own , Outlaws emphasizes avoidance by limiting Kay's offensive options. Her heavy movement is a drag in combat, but it makes sneaking more engaging. Crouch walking is slow enough that I was encouraged to stand up and scurry past guards at a greater risk of being seen. I appreciate that Ubisoft has exercised restraint with the blaster's stun mode, too. The stun shot can knock out a guard from a distance in a pinch, but it's on a long cooldown, so you can't just stealthily drop bodies like Solid Snake with a tranq gun.

The scoundrel fantasy

At the center of Kay's toolkit is Nix, a constant companion with his own dedicated button. Nix serves a similar function to your phone in a Watch Dogs game—he can be commanded to press far away buttons, set traps, sabotage alarms, and even pickpocket keycards from guards. Maybe his most flexible skill is playing dead. By looking where I wanted Nix to go, I could pull a guard's attention away long enough to sneak past a gap or hack a door.

Speaking of hacking, I'm an instant fan of Outlaws' takes on lockpicking and computer "slicing." Kay picks locks using the same twisty key device that we always see R2D2 open doors with, but Ubisoft has gamified that tech into a quick rhythm minigame. As the concentric circles of gears rotate, you listen for beeps, remember the rhythm, then repeat it a few times to beat the lock. Slicing is even better—in a stroke of borrowed genius, hacking in Outlaws is basically a miniature version of Wordle with symbols instead of letters. Toward the end of my demo, I followed a quest that led to a slicing tech upgrade that unlocked a harder version of the minigame with more symbols.

Outlaws' little touches make it easy to look past some glaring flaws, but with just a month out from release day, it probably isn't going to make a clean landing. I tripped over a few annoying bugs in my demo, the most noticeable of which was completely busted lip synchronization in cutscenes. I doubt that wonky combat will meaningfully improve before primetime, too.

But I'm on board with the stuff that matters most to me: sneaking, questing, and exploring. I even want to know where Kay's story goes. The one cutscene I saw that featured the game's main antagonist, a real jerkwad of a mid-level bureaucrat, suggested he isn't hunting Kay because she poses some special threat to the Empire, but because she stole his favorite ship.

That's the sort of petty revenge I can get behind, especially as a break from the self-seriousness of recent Star Wars side stories. In almost five hours of Outlaws I didn't see a single character I recognized from a movie, and nobody invoked the Force. That alone makes it the most interesting Star Wars thing happening right now.

Star Wars Outlaws isn't far far away anymore: it's coming out August 30 on Ubisoft Connect and the Epic Games Store. As usual for Ubisoft, a Steam release will have to wait.