I have a lot of love for the blaster in Star Wars Outlaws . It's simple to wield, a no thrills point of interaction with a universe which has often considered it to be an inelegant weapon for a more uncivilized age. Developer Massive Entertainment builds an incredible sense of time and place throughout its first Star Wars adventure, but perhaps something I didn't give the studio enough credit for in my Star Wars Outlaws review was just how well the studio captured how chaotic combat in the original trilogy could be.
I think back to Han Solo frantically firing from the hip aboard the original Death Star after detection, small-arms fire against an army of Stormtroopers who couldn't bullseye a womp rat at a two meter distance. It's a riot to watch, but not necessarily the easiest experience to translate into a competent third-person shooter model – particularly as the genre grapples with increasing complexity in the modern era. Still, Star Wars Outlaws finds the fun in functional combat as Key Vess holds her own against mobs of Syndicate gunslingers and Imperial squadrons.
Something I really like about Star Wars Outlaws is how it essentially merges the snappiness of the Uncharted-style of haphazard combat with a lot of micro-interactions – a change in blaster module here, a cleanly-timed reload there – to keep this element of play feeling forever active, as if any moment of passivity while under duress, ducking behind cover to lazily trade plasma bolts with an encroaching .