It's a good time for Star Wars games. Just look at the excellent Jedi Survivor and try to ignore the Battlefront Classic Collection. Conversely, it's really quite a bad time for titan of video game mediocrity Ubisoft- ratings of their formulaic, shallow grindfest games have been declining in recent years as even the most mainstream gamers get sick of their schtick, culminating in the absolute nadir that is Skull and Bones, their latest release. These two disparate halves finally come together in Star Wars: Outlaws, which debuted its first full-length trailer today and bills itself as the first open-world Star Wars game ever (debatable).
As one might expect from its two wildly different influences, the game appears to flip back and forth on a dime.
Revisiting the glimmering palace of vice that is Episode 8's woefully underused Canto Bight seems like a slam dunk for a game, but in the next second the player character is chased right back out to one of the barren desert wastelands Ubisoft uses to fill space. The player's cute companion quite transparently borrows Jedi Survivor's similar mechanic. The concept of story centered around being hunted down by bounty hunters is a novel one, at least as far as Star Wars games go, but the second control is handed back to the player it's all janky parkour and preanimated takedowns that fail to actually connect.
For lack of a better term, this looks like The Ubisoft Game once again, but with a Star Wars coat of paint- which is a real shame, because there are some good ideas here. Am I the only one still holding out hope for a Grand Theft Auto-like set in Coruscant?
