Kay Vess is bad at her job

And so is Ubisoft, and so am I -- which is why I'm playing the game anyhow.

There are games that deliver a riveting story. Games that deliver memorable atmosphere. Games that deliver an emotional ride. And then there are comfort games. Usually open-world games with fun environments and lots of little side quests and other things to do. Games you don't try to "win" so much as go and visit. Skyrim. Horizon Forbidden West. Subnautica.

And Star Wars Outlaws. When it works, is when you are just wandering around the marketplace, hanging out in the cantina looking for interesting gossip to overhear, or sometimes out exploring.

It made me miss travel a little less. These are good environments, good enough that Ubi was actually smart enough to put in a couple of rest spots that are just there to sit and take in the scenery.

And while there is a main campaign, it isn't really an arc, there's nothing big at stake (Kay is offered membership several times in the Rebellion and turns them down), there's no character development. Kay is early Han Solo, just living the life -- the life being, steal everything that isn't nailed down, and quite a few things that had been, complete with coded locks and armed guards. Hang out with her low-life buddies, buying blaster parts from back-alley traders between betting on the fathiers and games of Sabac, and eating at street stalls.

And I'll get back to this little scene in a bit.

Kay is probably the right character for this, although she can be annoying. She's a neophyte, a jumped-up street rat trying to earn that street cred. Which is great for the player because you get to build skills, contacts, familiarity with the streets and of course that important reputation.

Which means the most important skill is putting up a good front. Acting tough so people don't mess with you, pretending experience so they will hire you, bluffing or intimidating as the need may be and, if all else fails, fast-talking your way out of trouble.

And she is just so bad at it!

Even Nix, when sent to distract enemies, is so adorably bad at it. And no use pretending that Kay's lame "I'm really good at this, trust me" isn't reading across languages. You can tell when a jawa is being sarcastic, in this game. There's even a fast-talk skill that takes multiple missions and challenges to fully unlock, which resolves as Kay going "Uh, hey guys, I was just..." for maybe two seconds before they draw their blasters anyhow.

Maybe she gets better at it in the course of the game but it takes a bit of the fun out of it when she, the player, and everyone else is completely aware she's not the hardened outlaw she pretends to be.

Only maybe she is. Or maybe it is just the universe is lame. The big patch Ubi put in was to remove mandatory stealth. Well, I started the game on High difficulty because I already knew the combat was too easy. It turns out just difficult enough that stealth is a good idea. Oh, and while Kay may be able to pick locks and crouch-walk, her take-downs are the least stealthy thing you can imagine. It really does become ludicrous, when you send your pet to attack a guy's face, kick his legs out from under him, then slam him into a table, four feet away from an oblivious Imperial Stormtrooper.

Who you can then knock out by hitting his helmet with your bare fist. What planet did Kay come from, anyhow?!

In open combat, at least the Stormtroopers have good aim. Uncanny good aim. If you try to fight everyone in an Imperial base it is going to be one tough fight. (If you can find a hiding spot, though...it may take a while, but eventually you get that old "It must have been the wind.")

So it isn't completely immersion-breaking. There's enough difficulty and tension to make you feel like you accomplished something. Something random, that is. These are for all intents and purposes Radiant quests, even if only the Faction quests really do seem to be radiant. (The faction quests are also notable in that most of them, and all the high-paying ones, are "betray this other faction." Which is why your faction approvals go up and down like the VU on an '80s stereo.)

There's even a mechanism by which right as you complete a mission, you can choose instead to betray the faction that sent you on it!

So it all sort of works, and aside from just wandering the markets, there are some fun missions; infiltrating Jabba's Palace was about as good as the game got for me, although the fight with the rancor at the end was not fun.

Because with all this betrayal going on, it totally makes sense the game would betray you. Remember that it used to have mandatory stealth missions? Well, many of the missions it doesn't matter if you have perfect stealth, when you grab the McGuffin it will go to cut scene and at the end of it the entire place is alerted and shooting at you. Plus your reputation with that faction is shot (I don't think I'm ever getting back in good graces with the Pike cartel).

And this is Ubisoft. King of ridiculous control schemes. If you've stolen a bracelet and want to pawn it, hold down the space bar. It slowly scrolls until the sale is completed. Have two? You tap the spacebar to go to a screen where you select how many. Then tap the icon of the space bar on that screen? No; that icon is broken. Select the icon with the mouse and click on it to complete the sale.

(Or maybe not. The controls in this game are peculiarly opinionated for how long you need to hold them down. Take fast travel. Tap too quick, or too short, and it won't happen. This ain't a fast travel mechanism, it's a rhythm mini-game!)

Want to go lower on the grappling line you are hanging from? S. Unless this is a place where you can swing, so you have to use E instead. To get off, press C. Or maybe space. Or maybe space makes you jump to your doom. Sometimes it is space, sometimes enter, sometimes control is back, sometimes it isn't. Your gun auto-switches ammo type so the civvie you tried to stun just got a blaster bolt to the face.

Bringing us back to the rancor fight. Ubi really loves doing these action sequences where they introduce a brand-new mechanic they've never used before, with a brand-new control for which the icon might or might not flash briefly. For the grappling hook, it is a paragraph. A list-out of six different commands. In small type. For about a quarter of a second. At the moment you start your swing across a chasm.

And that was the food stall experience. A delightful little sequence with nice animations and a cute cutscene and delicious looking street food and Nix of course being adorable...and you spend the whole thing squinting at your screen as ten different buttons are called for in different orders and fast succession.

Turns out you can at least turn that shit down. This is a modern enough game to have a tweak screen for "difficulty," even if the Ubilords phrased it all in terms of "If you are too much of an idiot to play our perfectly-designed game the way we designed it, and have to ruin everything, and if you are really sure about this, then you can turn this one little bit down just a hair." Just for the eating mini-game. Because even Ubi realized how shit that was.

In so many small ways they are trying to make this the same rote looter-shooter they turned Assassin's Creed into (in fact, so much of this is just retread). Even Tatooine is cluttered with icons for meaningless bits of loot and XP.

They had six hundred people working on this game. It makes sense that they could have some wonderful costume set and even hair design that really captures the old-school Star Wars vibe (if the entire thing took place in a back alley behind the cantina -- seriously, where is the good part of town on any of these planets?) Creature animation, environments, a few basic but amusing puzzles. And then lame and annoying story, gameplay, and control scheme decisions that cramp your experience.

AAA is balanced right now at the point where they have to put enough random crap and collectibles in, and enough mandatory sequences that slow the game down, so people feel like they got their money's worth. Even if the return for a longer game is you get a shittier game. The raw economics, or the way the companies interpret the economics, are spiraling into a Corey Doctorow of games that are increasingly expensive yet increasingly less fun to play.

Fortunately, Steam has frequent sales. I would never have paid the full dollar for this one. At slightly less than the cost of breakfast out...I am not unhappy.