I went into Star Wars Outlaws with the lowest expectations. I knew it wasn't good, but I didn't want good, I wanted a stupid open world checklist Ubislop game with pretty graphics.
The game somehow sinks below my non-existent standards. It's SO BLECH.
Every mission is to sneak into somewhere, steal something, and run away. So that means stealth which, I admit, is not normally my favorite. But I've played Assassins Creeds and the rebooted Tomb Raiders and I figure how bad can it be. The game doesn't really give you many tools- it's crouching and using you pet creature to distract guards, that's it. Since the playable character is just a normal person, you can't do any cool shit to manipulate the environment. It's crouching around.
Apparently one of the big complaints the game had is that failing stealth would insta-fail the whole mission. I get that is annoying. But the "fix" was to just have guards try to kill you, which means dying and starting over anyway or fighting your way out, and the game's combat isn't interesting, just the most basic point and shoot. At least in AssCreed you can do Arkham and/or Souls-lite bad-ass combat, and in Far Cry you can whip out an AK and go ham. Here I just have punching and a pistol, and it's not fun, it's so boring. It's all so boring.
I got as far as the first major planet and nothing in it was interesting or cool looking enough to make me want to stay there and deal with the frustrating missions. Nothing interesting was happening with the story. The premise is fine for an open world fuckabout collectathon- you just do thief stuff to play factions against each other. I was down for an AssCreed Odyssey like situation but in that game you can fuck shit up with your demigod warrior skills which can be fun. Outlaws offers nothing like that, so it's just shitty miserable stealth with nothing cool about it like Dishonored, Shadow of Mordor, Hitman, Thief, the old AssCreeds, all of which offer ways to make stealth interesting and fun, or give you cool traversal or combat or environmental mechanics to buttress the stealth with a full suite of gameplay elements.
I know AssCreed and Far Cry get shit on for the Ubisoft formula, but those games are freaking Breath of the Wild compared to the barely-one-dimensional nothing slop of this shit game.