"A death mark is not an easy thing to live with." Upon this premise, spoken by Rebel Alliance General Rieekan to Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, is built the story of scoundrel Kay Vess. Kay is the protagonist of Star Wars Outlaws and when we first meet her she is a young woman trying to survive in the underworld of Cantonica. She is fatherless, essentially homeless, and abandoned by her mother. She survives by living off of the generosity of a barkeep and is understandably desperate. A criminal offers her an opportunity for a big score, and she is too desperate to refuse. Naturally, she is double-crossed during this heist and forced to steal a ship which belongs to her mark in order to escape. The person she robbed, Sliro Barsha, being a freshly minted and vicious crime lord, puts a dead-or-alive bounty on Kay which she will spend the rest of the story trying to resolve.

Throughout Kay's journey she finds herself working for and with four competing criminal syndicates in order to earn credits and get the contacts and resources necessary for fixing "her" ship, which was damaged in her getaway. After she fixes the ship, she is confronted by a man named Jaylen Vrax who more or less blackmails Kay into going back to rob Sliro's vault again. But to do so, Kay will need a team which she spends most of the rest of the story recruiting. Jaylen even leaves his enforcer droid ND-5 with Kay to make sure Kay hires the right people and to blast her if she tries to double-cross or defy Jaylen. Recruiting Jaylen's needed specialists will require Kay to get even more involved with the four criminal syndicates as they are all associated with different syndicates to varying degrees.

Each of these syndicates, Crimson Dawn, the Hutt Cartel, the Ashiga Clan, and the Pyke Syndicate, have a 5-tier reputation system with Kay that goes from very bad (shoot on sight) to excellent (access to exclusive contacts and vendors). Successfully running jobs for a faction increases Kay's reputation with them, and failing a job lowers it. Beyond that, there are several times throughout the story, usually tied to recruiting one of the team members, where Kay is forced to make a choice that will increase one faction's reputation while lowering another's. In my experience, and opinion, I don't think these choices were as meaningful as intended. It's pretty easy to make up the lost reputation by simply doing a few small jobs for the faction. In a real criminal undertaking like that, or even in normal non-criminal real-life situations, major failures, lack of trust and faithfulness doesn't get won back just by doing odd jobs for the organization you just were actively disloyal to. So, call it a critique of realism, but when you've got Crimson Dawn and the Pyke Syndicate both wanting something that only one entity can get, the criminal entity you hold out on won't just continue to give you meaningful work after you give what they want to their rival. They might even decide you're better off permanently unemployable.

Kay is accompanied throughout her journey by her cute creature companion Nix who is kind of like a lizard/ferret. Practically, Nix can get places Kay can't reach, push buttons, hold access panels open, distract or even attack enemies, rig objects to explode, set traps, retrieve small objects from the environment and deliver them to Kay, pick pockets, detonate grenades on people's belts, and help Kay cheat at Sabacc by looking at other player's hands. Not all of these abilities are available at the beginning. They have to be learned by completing tasks from contacts you meet throughout the story. There are nine such contacts who each teach Nix or Kay six different abilities or skills.

You can upgrade Kay's blaster pistol, speeder bike, and spaceship by collecting the needed upgrade materials. Those materials are often bought from vendors associated with one of the various criminal factions who you'd need a positive relationship with to have access to.

Kay is a genuinely likeable person, with a good personality. Unfortunately, this is in conflict with the kind of setting Kay finds herself in. Kay's personality and demeanor don't really mix well with a cutthroat criminal lifestyle. But that tends to be the kinds of folks she interacts with. At her best, her charismatic, easy-going and kind nature makes her a good Sabacc player or confidante. At her worst, she should have been shot by being utterly unconvincing while trying to bluff her way out of a situation. When she's bluffing someone she will constantly use "um" and fall into an uneven speech rhythm which sounds like she is trying to come up with a lie on the spot which, of course, she is. It's another realism critique I have where her delivery on almost all of her attempted bluffs was so unconvincingly delivered that there is no way anyone would have bought it. But, with out fail, Kay somehow convinces stormtroopers she is a fellow stormtrooper escorting a prisoner, or convinces Gammorean guards she can see Jabba, or convinces Crimson Dawn enforcers that she's supposed to be in a restricted area. These interactions happen regularly even far into the story. Maybe it wouldn't be as hard of a critique if she did that less as she progressed and developed, but she only seems to get worse the farther she gets.

Another noteworthy aspect of Kay's personality and character is that she consistently maintains trust in people despite having no reason to do so and being repeatedly betrayed. In the story, Kay starts out having been abandoned by her only known family member, gets betrayed by the person she's working for, gets betrayed by the next person she meets after escaping, and gets betrayed again by the end of the story at least two more times. That's a lot of betrayal that would kind of sour me on the prospect of trusting anyone. But Kay is a consistently trusting person despite that.

Visually, Outlaws is nice and polished. Characters appear natural and have good facial articulations. The voice work is great, the soundtrack is fairly standard Star Wars for the most part. Star Wars themes are recognizable where appropriate and any unique elements are not noticeably out of place for the IP. One critique isn't with the game's performance itself but on the Ubisoft launcher's annoying habit of losing connection to the Ubisoft server, forcing me to quit the launcher and restart it every time I returned to play or it wouldn't sync properly to my save files. This probably isn't an issue on a console though. I played Outlaws on a Windows PC from Steam and the Ubisoft launcher didn't seem to work well with Steam either.

Morally, Outlaws does fairly well, but I have some concerns. First up, as the title "Star Wars Outlaws" suggests it should come as no surprise that you play, well, an outlaw. Language isn't too bad as far as that goes, but I do want to put a caveat on that. While we may not associate phrases like, "Dank Ferrik" with anything offensive or crude, it's clear by the context of the usage that it's not entirely polite in the Star Wars universe, and would probably offend a Jedi Knight should they hear it.

As an outlaw, working for violent criminal syndicates, Kay has a hard life. And part of that life is fulfilling contracts that injure or kill other people. There's also killing in self-defense against other ne'er-do-wells and Imperial troops, but what caused the most concern in the violence category was the contract killings for Crimson Dawn you can undertake.

Finally, on the sexual content front it's a shame I need to comment on this for a Star Wars game. In Outlaws Kay does not have romantic interactions. She has no romantic interests, expressed or implied. The story isn't about that. Kay is modestly dressed. There are no revealing outfits, no seductive behavior, and the most skin she ever shows in any of her outfits are her bare arms, sometimes. So what's the problem? I'm glad you asked. The problem is that the developer went out of its way to promote homosexuality/non-binary gender as normative through subtext, visual messaging, inference and burying it in lore notes, and they did so in a way that did not matter to the story at all. They did it just to do it, to check a box.

Here are examples: Two obviously same-gendered aliens, but not even of the same species, which is a Star Wars no-no, are holding each other close and slow-dancing to a jukebox in a bar. A female Mon Calamari side-quest giver comments about her "chosen mate" who is referred to as "her." Now, that one makes absolutely no sense, even biologically. A "mate" in this context is not Australian for "friend." It is a reproductive partner. A same-gender sexual partner cannot be a reproductive partner, so the developer obviously failed biology class. One of the bios of one of the characters you meet is obviously female but referred to as a "they."

So overall, Star Wars Outlaws is fun, kept me engaged for about 90 hours, and Kay is a fun character to explore four fairly large environments with. It does a good job of faithfully representing the Star Wars galaxy far far away and stays mostly true to the lore and established characters. There are tie-ins to several of the movies and shows such as Solo and The Empire Strikes Back. If you like Star Wars and you can overlook the subtle and unnecessary woke expressions, then you'll likely enjoy the game. In my humble opinion Outlaws is over-priced at $70 for the standard game, so you may want to wait for a sale.

-Mike Desmond