Game is full of bugs, falling through textures is something normal and annoying.
I bought this but I cannot recommend it until they release a patch and fix all these issues.

Not recommended.

I'm an old gaming geezer, grew up on Star Wars my whole life. Loved Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2, all the Star Wars X-Wing games. This is advertised as the first Open-World Star Wars game. When I think open-world game, I think of the Fallout series, or Red Dead Redemption.

Not whatever this is.

6 hours in, and everything feels forced. Lot's of NPCs everywhere that you can't talk to; they're always busy but can't be interacted with in the slightest. A few NPCs can have credits stolen from them by your cute thief pet, but there's never any repercussions for this. Walking along I overhear conversations that seem meaningful to the player, but aren't. Plot lines and missions that I'm FORCED to take. I'm shown I can climb a sheer mountainside, but not a steel grate on a building. Well, not THIS grate, but later I can climb one exactly like it. Every place I go has air vents that easily accommodate a person with no resistance. It's already predictably forced.

The graphics are good, but it feels like I'm in a slow-moving play, where I'm herded away from anything interesting because none of it affects the plot. The plot so far? I've escaped the planet I grew up on completely by plot machinations. I'm on the 2nd planet Toshara, I'm being chased by speeder-bike bandits (the very first time I'm on my speeder bike, that just happened to be in the ship I was forced to steal and crash, to escape the crime lord that caught me in a cut scene, and very conveniently the first person to greet me at the crash site is a mechanic, who sends me to work for a local crime lord to get money for parts to fix my ship. Did I mention I've had no choice in any of these decisions?), when suddenly, while in combat, the game says I'm leaving the play area, stops, and resets me to some spot on a road I've never even been on before, the bandits are gone, and I'm headed back to the city I'm being forced to go to.

I have not been able to make a single deviation from the course the writers intended 'us' to take, and I'm forced to accept every mission so far. I know it's early in the game, and these things often take time to set up, but it has gotten tiring very quickly. It has the LOOK of an open-world game, but none of the interactions or exploration. I stopped along this road to investigate what looks like a gas station. I'm rewarded by petting some weird cat-rat type creatures, and find a medodrama tape for some collectible in the game. This was somebody's house or business, and while there's speeder bikes going to-and-fro just outside it, this whole area feels like window dressing with nothing substantial... and it's the first place I've been able to even stop at along this forced plot of a game. I can't even explore the shop I crashed here in, as everything is closed off until the mechanic fixes parts of it.

To round things up, my early impressions of this game are not good, nor fun. It's aggravating to see so much at hand, and not be able to touch or interact with any of it.

Ok this is going to be brief as possible though I could write an entire dissertation on the topic. It addresses the damage to art forms that get caught in the cross-fire of wars of who thinks what is cringe. On one side, the sweaty edge-lords in their fortresses of souls-like complexity, grim dark dank minds of cynical tentacle porn fantasy and the unending thirst for waifu pillow fantasies on one side. They think what is woke is cringe, as they sleep in their matrix like cells deep in the dungeons of their basements and tormented minds, the gaping chasm of time they have to spend spewing venom into the internet narrative between the distraction of tendies and marathon sessions grinding the meta of the Old Ones.

Then there are the people with real lives, kids, jobs, and plans to get outside on a bike this weekend who remember how they felt long ago when the award ceremony credits rolled in the original film. They play games for a few hours after work or on weekends after all the daily activities are winding to a close.

Star Wars Outlaws caters to the latter. The two factions of gamer should not cross their streams in a never-ending pissing contest of unsatisfying outcomes -- the worldviews and lifestyles are so different. They breed entirely different opinions about what matters in a game.

So let the sweatys do their thing mastering the art of no-lifing POE2 maps and providing revenue for the porn game companies, it's what they love. They should never expect a game like this to be even made for their demographic, though. It caters to a larger mainstream audience. Star Wars has always been woke. Princess Leia choked Jabba to death with a slave chain. Luke became a Jedi master in a few weeks and was a whiny baby with abandonment issues. Yoda was gay -- haha not really... or was he??? The vibes were feel good and no one took it as seriously as the ultimate cringe edge-lord Vader himself did. So I say lighten the f**k up boys.

And yeah this game isn't perfect. The mechanics were light, and Kay's haircut is terrible - she has a 4k deathmark, give the poor girl at least a hood or a helmet to hide her face... super stupid immersion break there (if you get through the game to the final scene with her mom you get to see how beautiful she is with an Imperial officer's cap on). Kay is in character when she doesn't give a rat's a$$ what you think of her looks. I think the game's creators are making a direct comment here which few caught.

Now the whole Ubisoft issue is a different story (Ubisoft has become a late stage capitalist nightmare in its own right, oh the irony!) and I think I am praising Massive mostly here. Especially that feeling I got when I walked into the same bar Han shot Greedo in and looked at the floors. Tatooine, what a frikkin hellhole! Massive did a better job than any movie has getting across the sheer grunge of being there. Jabba's Palace, what a true hive of scum and villainy. The lighting, the haze in the air, can you imagine the smells? In other words, go back to 1978 and remember what imagination meant over the meta hive-mind of today with all its fickle, shifting sands of right/wrong, good/bad from influencers drunk on their glut of likes/views and the loudest hate-filled voices on forums and reddit as they cringe out the rest of us who are still living under the stars and who gasp at the beauty of the real full moon.

I guess I've made it clear what side I have chosen. Think I'll go for a walk and bask in the good feeling I have from seeing Kay Vess' sweet smile at the end. This game was her right of passage, and though the lords of sequel funding will likely not favor her, I imagine her trajectory to be one the greats in my head-cannon. I as well bow with respect to any young feisty women who play this game for potentially folding in a template for female persona that would never allow a sith-lord to see her body without her consent and isn't afraid of big bad wolves. Kay Vess has the balls and the skills to back it up. She don't back down from nothing and would earn the respect from any Star Wars character to date, including our poor tormented Anakin. By the end the wolves fear her.

Yes, a few ships taking out a star destroyer is a stretch even for a legendary smuggler's luck. Force users are well-known survivors of terrible falls into the abyss too though. This game, this universe isn't about what's 'realistic.' It's about the friends we make along the way baby. Cute cat gremlin accomplice, check. Bad-ass destroyer droid, check. Bartender dad who pays the light bill, check. Its a feel good piece guys, c'mon. An underdog triumphs against all odds trope. Kay is a sweet heart with the blaster skills of a Mando from the poor side of town in a brutal galaxy of dogs eating dogs after war has ravaged it for decades and the rich laugh from their palaces.

If you want to somehow form-fit this archetypal narrative into your grim dark headspace full of Chaos Marines don't bother, go back to the trope-challenging Elden Ring and scream obscene despair and agony at the sky. I love that too btw. Elden Ring is incredible.

I give this game a solid 8/10. The 10/10 would have happened if Ubisoft wasn't so cringe itself and underbaking like most AAA do now - the unpolished aspects, the samey combat, that horrible dodge-roll implementation, the silly stealth stuff (stealth is just silly though, Kojima's been making it silly on purpose since MGS though Nix is a lot of fun). Kay's moveset when not on set rails is as awkward as a drunk Arthur Morgan.

I concede its jankiness at times, though I didn't let that bother me too much because I saw the original Star Wars in a theater when I was 10 and just loved the immersion and the tale. It's just fun to live in the Star Wars universe as a gritty tough thief girl who can play cards, play the bad guys against each other and fly her own smuggler ship and tricked out speeder bike, jeez how amazingly cool! We have gotten so spoiled in our expectations.

A side note: played this game after all the fixes. People with technical and gameplay beef with the game were legitimate when this game came out.