STAR WARS OUTLAWS has a sneaky scoundrel that isn't afraid to go loud - gameplay preview

Star Wars is often drawn to some pretty black and white depictions of good and bad, it’s only very very good or very very bad, it's pretty rare that our heroes get a little bit greyer, the Disney+ series Andor and the now mostly non-canon expanded universe are the only examples that come to mind.

So that’s why it’s interesting to see a game where the scoundrel didn’t join up with the rebellion or at least for STAR WARS OUTLAWS, that’s my new hope.

I was recently invited to a preview of the upcoming third person action game from Massive Entertainment and here is what I saw.

Kay Vess our hero this time round, is a gun for hire odd jobs specialist who picks up work across the galaxy for some of the wretched hives of scum and villainy, stealing killing sabotaging, this sister isn’t in it for the revolution she’s in it for the money.

All the Star Wars stuff seems to be here, the third person action game looks pretty familiar for players of games like Horizon Forbidden West or even Uncharted in parts, with a fair helping of Star Wars Jedi Survivor.

Paired up with Nix your little critter who reminds me a lot of how we used BD-1 but with a bit more combat, there are a lot of stealth segments including stealing an artifact from a Crimson Dawn treasure trove or escaping an Imperial base.

It’s pretty clear that there is a way to make it through this game as quietly as possible, switch your blaster over to stun and you’ll see the famous blue rings that took down the princess from Alderaan which has a long cooldown to balance it out.

There are more physical attacks too, get behind a storm trooper distracted by your animal friend, and you can bonk them right on their plastoid lid.

Use a handheld version of R2’s little data spikey thing to lock pick a few doors, hack computers to complete your objectives sneaky sneaky seems to one of the ways to go.

but it seems perfectly reasonable to go loud as well, it’ll be interesting to see how much forced stealth gameplay there actually is, that’s can be a dealbreaker for certain players.

Using your default pistol you can blast away, or switch to an EMP like mode which is better against droids and shields or the stun mode or pick up an enemy blaster to mix it up.

There is spaceship dogfighting as well, take your ship the Trailblazer out into the black where somehow you can duke it out with the best of the Sienar shipyards with some fun looking arcadey space combat.

It also looks like there will be some exploration-based puzzle solving, one level shown Kay clambers through the wreck of a high republic era ship looking for a special part, activating multistage puzzles along the way, think some of the big temples and puzzles from Assassin’s Creed games and you’ll be close.

Tonally this game looks to be singing from the John Williams song sheet but we’ll just have to wait to get some hands on to see how much freedom we get mission to mission.

I'm intrigued to see how much freedom you'll have mission to mission, we'll tell you more when we actually get hands on with the game.