If nothing else, I’ve had a wonderful time playing Sabacc. The new variant, Kessel Sabacc, invented for Star Wars Outlaws is infinitely moreish, a simple card game that takes elements of Blackjack and Poker and a few others, and blends them into an eminently snackable bit of video game gambling. In the simplest terms, four players are each dealt a hand of two cards and take turns, through three rounds, to attempt to make a pair of the two lowest numbers possible. Drawing a new card costs a token, as does coming anywhere but first at the end of each set of rounds. When you’re out of tokens you’re out of the game; last player standing wins. I could play it all day.
Star Wars Outlaws reviewDeveloper: Ubisoft Massive, UbisoftPublisher: UbisoftPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out 30th August (27th August for Early Access) on PC (Ubisoft, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S
In some sense this is open world Ubisoft at its best: a bit of colour off to the side, extraneous to the main story, and yet still woven into the world through unlockable cheats and sidequests and bonuses you can acquire and deploy. It’s a byproduct of the kind of development the developer-publisher has come to be synonymous with, albeit usually in derogatory terms. This is Ubisoft ‘formula’ stuff, but it’s also a reminder that the formula is often driven by generosity as much as anything. Development-as-gift-giving: have another system; chuck another mechanic on the pile; here’s one more neat little thing to do.
The problem with Star Wars Outlaws, however, isn’t that it adheres too closely to a development approach akin to hoarding, but that it does the opposite, stripping away years of accumulated video game clutter. Admirably Outlaws does this quite aggressively – Kessel Sabacc aside – but in doing so it reveals an integral issue: Ubisoft open worlds are not only fun because of their formula; they their formula. To strip it away isn’t like peeling off some old wallpaper to reveal the original brickwork. It’s lifting up the carpet to find a whacking great hole in the ground.
It’s a great shame, because there are some nice ideas here. Star Wars Outlaws is effectively a kind of gateway open world game, pitched more broadly at the young adult crowd, a stepping stone from, say, TT Games’ Lego Star Wars to Respawn’s Jedi series. This is good – Star Wars is a family franchise! We don’t need everything to be extra mature – and it leads to a kind of breeziness and levity, but also a more manageable and, in theory, focused take on open world structure that is at first quite welcome.