I initially played this on Ubisoft Connect when it originally came out in August, paying for one month of Ubi+ and gaining access to the Ultimate Edition, but I still wanted to buy the game on Steam and play it again, simply because I found the game delightful, worth a replay, and I wanted to be able to give it a review on Steam where I can give my two cents on this game.

Star Wars Outlaws is, by all practical measures, a good game. Not Game Of The Year contender, but if you're into open world games, or if you're into Star Wars, it is absolutely worth your time. Unlike other Ubisoft open world games that all follow a familiar formula, Outlaws decides to buck the trend and make something that feels different and also more authentic to the universe it takes place in.

For instance, unlike other Ubisoft games, there are no towers to climb to unlock sections of a map, and there is no level-gating that stops you from exploring certain areas. As soon as you leave the starting planet, you have access to the entire rest of the game. And the way you obtain new abilities is not through grinding XP, but through finding experts in certain fields, and having them teach you new abilities. A very refreshing new way of getting stronger, that I personally haven't seen very often in games. There's also nothing in the game that resembles the classic Ubisoft collectathon items, like the hundreds of feathers in Assassin's Creed, or the little statues in Far Cry. There are a few climbing puzzles scattered across the planets that each have a unique collectible for completionists to obtain, and getting them all rewards you with unique cosmetics for Nix, your little animal companion.

As for the story itself, it serves the gameplay well, but it does feel disjointed in the middle, as you are tasked with retrieving a team of specialists to plan and execute a multi-million credit heist against a crime boss. Each of these acquisitions can be done in any order, so the game cannot rely on you retrieving them in a specific order and write the narrative around that. I can draw a few parallels to Mass Effect 2 in this regard, which is structured similarly, but where Mass Effect 2 has a LOT of squad mates to get, the team in Outlaws only has three. Each of them is located on each planet you visit, and each of them have their own little story with its own twists and turns, which is completely isolated from the rest, as a consequence of the game's structure.

That being said, the beginning of the game and the end of the game are very well structured and plays out like a classic Star Wars story. If you're familiar with the wider canon of Star Wars, you will find a lot of things to appreciate in this game, from familiar characters, planets, and settings, to factions, props, events, and allusions to things happening elsewhere in the galaxy. It feels like it fits into the existing universe almost seamlessly, and as a Star Wars fan, that is an absolute delight. If you intend on playing this game, and you haven't had much experience with Star Wars, I at least implore you to watch the original trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi) and Solo: A Star Wars Story, as this game draws *HEAVILY* from these four films.

The gameplay itself focuses mainly on three major aspects: Stealth, third person shooting and puzzle-platforming, with some space combat and speeder traversal sprinkled in for good measure. Both the stealth and shooting has been lambasted in many other reviews, but Massive Entertainment have since release been hard at work restructuring the stealth and combat to feel more fair, and less arbitrary. At launch it was very difficult to perform stealth well, as you didn't have a good indication of whether or not you were being spotted, and many stealth sections were instant-fails upon discovery. This has since been removed and better indicators have been added to enemies to show their status. Similarly, combat has been reworked to better reward good aim, and letting you carry heavy weapons around instead of forcing Kay to drop them as soon as you crawl up a ladder or into a vent. With the 1.4 update which launched along with the Steam release, I'd say the game is in a good spot now when it comes to its gameplay.

Visuals and sound design is top notch. I have nothing to note here other than it looks and sounds spectacular and fits perfectly in line with how I imagine the world of Star Wars to look and sound like. The ambiance, the chatter, the music from the cantina jukeboxes, it's all right on the money. All the aliens both look and sound right, the blasters look and sound right, the roar of the speeder engine, and the space ship thrusters are just right, the storm trooper radio chatter, etc. etc. I cannot stress enough just how great a job Massive have done with the feel of this game. It feels genuinely authentic to the world of Star Wars, and nothing feels out of character. Even the voice of the BX commando droids is the same one as the one from the Clone Wars TV show.

As for negatives, I definitely have some grievances regarding this game:
First of all is the forced Ubisoft Connect launcher that the game insists you play it through, even though it's on Steam.
Secondly, the price. Dear lord, even at the 25% discount it launched with on Steam I still consider it far too steep a price. You should not EVER pay 90+€ for the full video game, let alone the 130€ Ubisoft demands you pay for the Ultimate edition. And honestly, do not bother with the Ultimate Edition, the Gold Edition gives you the base game and DLC pass for the game anyway, you don't need those extra cosmetics, there's plenty of better ones in the game anyway. had it launched at a 60€ standard price, with a 70 or 80€ Gold Edition, I would consider that a fairer price, but Ubisoft had to do a Ubisoft I guess.
Third point is a couple of gameplay related issues, mainly bugs: I had one crash-to-desktop in my second playthrough here on Steam, and one point where the store menu for a vendor didn't load, and softlocked my controls so I had to Alt+F4 out of the game. I also experienced a series of visual glitches while riding the speeder, and there are a lot of voice lines that are either said out of order, or on top of each other, so it's hard to hear what they're saying. Luckily these bugs were few and far in between, so they didn't sour my overall experience.

As a final point, I will say that the game's main story can be beaten in about 20-ish hours, but if you're going sight-seeing and completionist, you can easily spend 40-50 hours in the game and not be bored.

A very VERY hearty recommendation from me.

When you launch the game, it gives you a warning that this game contains depictions of extreme violence, including against children, and boy does it not pull any punches. As you start the game you're tasked with locating your little daughter's best friend, who you find within the first 5 minutes of playing hanging from a tentpole, strangled in his own intestines, and mutilated beyond recognition.

Make no mistake, the world these characters inhabit is incredibly cruel, unjust, hostile, and grim.

Laika: Aged Through Blood is what the developers call a "motorvania"; a metroidvania style game where your main method of traversal is a motorcycle that you control in the same vein as the Trials games. It does add in the ability to shoot with a variety of different guns that you find across the world. The controls take some time to get used to, but most of the early game takes its time to teach you all of the basics. How to accelerate, how to tilt your bike, how to parry incoming projectiles, switch direction, shoot, reload, and more.

It's also a metroidvania in the standard sense that as you upgrade your bike with more equipment, you gain access to more and more of the map. The game also allows you to upgrade your weapons so they allow you to fire more shots between each reload. On top of that there's also a cooking system where you can cook temporary buffs like increased resource amounts, wider magnetic range, etc.

The art style of the game is beautiful and also utterly relentless when it comes to the depiction of a truly lawless, barren, hostile, post-apocalyptic world. No punches are pulled, no holds are barred. Several characters are missing various limbs or look grotesquely mutated from radiation poisoning, and when you shoot the enemy birds, they explode into a cloud of guts and viscera (which is also the primary currency of the game). The landscape is littered with enormous carcasses of formerly majestic creatures, and the rest is either a giant wasteland, a landfill, abandoned facilities, depleted mines, shipwrecks, or similar.

The story is what I can best describe as depressive and bleak. The world is ♥♥♥♥, Laika has lived a truly terrible life, afflicted with a curse that makes her unable to die, while she's seen multiple of her own children and her spouse die to illness or raids from marauders and mercenaries. Half of her friends have already whithered away, and she's doing everything she can to keep what remains of her little village alive against the oppressors. You sabotage their machinery, you kill their leadership, you destroy their monuments, but little does it matter, they just never stop coming.

The music in the game is a selection of songs written specifically for this game by the developers' in-house musicians, and they really do set the appropriate tone for the setting: the soundtrack is sorrowful, melancholic, and gloomy, but also beautiful, with the acoustic guitar and wistful lyrics playing along as Laika races across the wasteland on her next adventure.

The game is roughly 20 or so hours long, shorter if you skip most of the side-quests, and as an added bonus the savegame you create in the available demo also carries over into the main game, and the demo alone gives you almost 2 hours worth of gameplay on its own, so I suggest if you're on the fence about this game, check out the demo first, and continue playing if the gameplay and tone of the game is to your liking, because the tricky control scheme and bleak setting is going to be a hard sell for many.

But it is without a doubt one of the best games I've played all year, and I whole-heartedly recommend it.