Reviewing the much maligned Star Wars Outlaws

Played the Prologue chapter of Star Wars Outlaws which came free with the new PC. This Ubisoft game is currently receiving much flak. So few people have bought it despite it being a Star Wars property that it's being blamed for the company's stock nosediving significantly since its launch.

Apart from complaints about poor gameplay, dumb enemy AI, and other glitches, the central issue most critics take with it is the ugly female avatar you play as. Normally, players would have little problem playing as a female character, as long as there's an option to play a male character as well (like Shepard in Mass Effect), but nobody wants to play an ugly female character. To be fair, I think Kay Vess, while no supermodel, is still kinda' like a normal, somewhat athletic everyday woman. For a game that involves a lot of sneaking around, it makes sense that she isn't an attention-grabbing glamourpuss, anyway.

As for the game itself, right off the bat there's a lot to learn about the mechanics of character movement, the use of your companion, um, animal, the puzzle minigames (which can thankfully be switched off), and character and equipment progression. I'm not used to sneaking-around games, and having to keep track of which buttons do what messes up my pathetic attempts to scuttle undetected from cover to cover, so I end up running and gunning instead. The game does allow for that option too, but it's punishing in the early stages given the rudimentary state of our weapons and gear. Like I wish I had found out sooner to just get into the unattended spaceship, instead of dying so often, fighting off wave after wave of armed guards. You don't level up from killing people, so there's no point being a hero, anyway.

Is it a bad game? It's frustrating, at times, but I'm having a masochistic kind of fun learning from my mistakes, and redoing scenarios repeatedly until I don't die and can move forward to the next thing. There are layers of complex systems to master (skill specializations, and faction reputation management, for example), and I've barely scratched the surface. After leaving the home planet, I'm carrying around some backstory, a load of guilt, a substantial bounty on my head, not enough pocket change, and perhaps a score to settle with the Rebel Alliance for recruiting me under false pretenses. The whole setup is intriguing enough to see where it's all going to lead, plus the promise of open-world exploration once the main campaign is complete.

I don't believe Star Wars Outlaws deserves the cold shoulder. People should give it a chance for what it is, rather than allow prejudice to excoriate it for what it's not, and not meant to be. To play it as a fresh new experience, and not play it to find fault with it and use that criticism to discourage others from playing the game for themselves. As it is, I hesitated purchasing the game because of the criticism it got even pre-launch, and I'm only playing it now because I got it for free. I think I'm having a good time with it.