Star Wars has finally received the open-world Ubisoft treatment with Star Wars Outlaws, allowing you to roam the galaxy to live out your Han Solo space scoundrel dreams. After the misfire of Ubisoft Massive’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora last year, it is fortunate that Star Wars Outlaws largely succeeds in providing an open galaxy that is fun to explore while telling an enjoyable (if not wholly original) heist story to get the player invested in its world.

Set in between Star Wars Episodes V and VI, the galaxy is in chaos as the Empire struggles to reassert its authority following the destruction of the Death Star while criminal syndicates move in to fill the power vacuum. You play as Kay Vess, a young thief from the casino planet of Canto Bight who ends up with a death mark on her head and nowhere to go after a heist goes wrong. She is then offered the chance to gain her freedom when she is approached by an enigmatic fixer named Jaylen Vrax with an offer: assemble a crew from around the galaxy and steal the contents of the vault of Sliro Ruback, the head of the Zerek Besh syndicate on Canto Bight.

It’s a fun little heist story with a good number of twists and turns. Kay makes for a decent underdog antiheroine, even if I wish her crew was a bit better developed. With the exception of Jaylen and ND-5, the droid bodyguard Jaylen appoints to keep Kay in line, each of the members of Kay’s band of thieves feels a bit underdeveloped and one-note, not interacting with one another or getting much focus beyond their initial recruitment mission and overall filling fairly standard Star Wars or heist movie cliches, such as the manic demolitions expert or the regretful Imperial defector. This was perhaps a consequence of the game’s open-world nature, in which most of the crew can be recruited in any order. That said, it led to a similar sensation I had by the end of Rogue One, which was that while I liked the plot, I barely knew anything about most of the protagonists by the time the credits rolled.

As mentioned, Kay’s taciturn droid bodyguard ND-5 did feel fairly well-developed by contrast, having a number of sidequests focused on his backstory during the Clone Wars and examining his unique and evolving perspective on the nature of droid freedom. Considering that the theme of droids essentially being sentient second-class citizens that nobody really questions has been an awkward undercurrent of Star Wars since 1977, having this be more seriously examined without the matter being flippantly dismissed, like with L3-37 in Solo, is a breath of fresh air.

Star Wars Outlaws dips its toes in multiple genres and does so competently across the board. There is a focus on stealth, with Kay being aided by Nix, her pet merqaal (an adorable little creature who looks like a mix between an axolotl and a cat) who can distract guards, steal unsecured items and disable alarms at a distance. If you are discovered, Kay can start blasting with her own upgradable blaster, a variety of grenades and disposable heavy weapons dropped by foes. There is also a speeder you can ride to get between towns, and space combat on top of that.

I mostly enjoyed the stealth, although the game’s first couple of hours are heavily populated with frustrating forced and linear stealth sections and you do not yet have many tools at your disposal to take down guards. As the game progresses, you acquire smoke bombs and additional ways of distracting guards to make stealth a more viable tactic.

The combat also works rather well and has just the right amount of complexity; the variety of different blaster modules Kay can switch to for taking down shielded enemies is a nice touch, while the fact that the blaster has unlimited ammo and simply needs to cool down if you fire it too much keeps the pacing up and ensures that you won’t need to scrounge for ammunition. There is also an Adrenaline ability, allowing players to mark a number of foes and automatically shoot them like the Dead Eye ability in Red Dead Redemption 2, which was useful in a pinch and really helped emphasise Kay’s space gunslinger image.

I enjoyed the space combat as well; Kay’s ship, the Trailblazer, can be kitted out with new weapons and paint jobs, and there are plenty of hidden loot and pirates in orbit for her to encounter. It isn’t as feature-rich as the space combat in, say, Star Wars: Squadrons, but it doesn’t need to be.

It’s a clever little system involving a lot of weighing up of priorities, although the consequences of ignoring it are fairly minor. There isn’t really any substantial reward for getting maximum reputation with a syndicate or any impact on the main plot. This fits with the game’s theme of the syndicates being inherently untrustworthy compared to the bond that Kay builds with her crew, but still felt a bit anticlimactic after spending so long trying to curry favour with a specific faction. The sorts of actions can lose reputation also felt a bit arbitrary at times, like when I lost reputation for stealing from Crimson Dawn in their territory despite nobody actually seeing me, or when I lost reputation with the Hutts for trespassing when Jabba the Hutt had expressly invited me to his palace for a story mission. What was I supposed to do, not go?

Overall, what Star Wars Outlaws nails is the Star Wars atmosphere, with four fairly large open areas to fully explore on foot or on your speeder. Nothing is gated behind an obvious loading screen, with landing from space and then zooming out into the Tatooine desert on your speeder from the back of the Trailblazer feeling seamless. In particular, the swell of the orchestra punctuating my voyage to the great unknown when I took off and flew into space made the simple act of getting around feel exhilarating, and ensured that I barely ever used the game’s fast travel feature.

Rather than do the usual Ubisoft Towers thing to reveal map icons, Star Wars Outlaws takes a different approach with Intel. Intel can be acquired through datapads found in the environment, listening to conversations in a cantina or simply purchased from merchants. Intel can reveal hidden treasure, Imperial outposts and other points of interest. and it overall felt a lot more organic and less repetitive than the standard Ubisoft open-world formula that the company has made its brand for the last 15 or so years.

It also felt a lot less grindy than a lot of these open-world sandbox games can tend to be. There is no traditional levelling or experience system, with Kay instead gaining new abilities by upgrading her equipment and completing challenges given to her by experts that she meets in her travels. While some of these challenges can be kind of annoying scavenging quests to find rare materials, others were more fun tests of skill, such as taking down five enemies while at one bar of HP or doing a really big jump on your speeder without crashing. It felt more enjoyable than just repeatedly taking down mobs of stormtroopers and encouraged me to explore Star Wars Outlaws’ mechanics to their fullest.