Star Wars Outlaws (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £69.99)
Verdict: Care and character
Ever come across a toilet in a Star Wars world? You will, about ten minutes into Star Wars Outlaws.
There, in the back of a nightclub through which our main character, Kay Vess, is sneaking, are some cubicles for aliens to go about their… er, space-business.
Those toilets are sort of the point of Outlaws — in a good way.
This isn’t the Star Wars of Jedi, lightsabers and hifalutin’ prophecies. It’s a game of crime and making a buck amid the muck.
This distinguishes Outlaws from the very start. There’s plenty here that longtime fans will thrill at — from particular droids to the way the doors whoosh open — but, as much as anything can in this well-mapped galaxy far, far away, it also feels quite novel.
This isn’t the Star Wars of Jedi, lightsabers and hifalutin’ prophecies. It’s a game of crime and making a buck amid the muck, writes Peter Hoskin
The game sees Kay and her her squirellish companion Nix (pictured together) traverse across the galaxy
Players can run or bike across expansive landscapes, doing little quests, gaining better skills and equipment, all in the hope of progressing through this story of competing underworld interests
Kay is part of that: a genuinely likeable lead scoundrel. So is her squirellish companion Nix, who can be directed to perform various tasks which include distracting guards with his cuteness.
Together, they roam from planet to planet in what is technically the first open-world Star Wars game. It’s that open-world gameplay that’s the least fresh part of Outlaws.
You run or bike across expansive landscapes, doing little quests, gaining better skills and equipment, all in the hope of progressing through this story of competing underworld interests.
But makers Ubisoft demonstrate some of the progress they’ve made in other recent releases, such as Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
This isn’t a universe of a million map-markers and pointless tasks. It’s a relatively focused and very lovingly created experience.
In fact, Outlaws reminded me of another recent (non-Ubisoft) release: last year’s Hogwarts Legacy. A fairly unsurprising game that’s elevated — and how! — by the care that’s gone into rendering its popular universe. Right down to the toilets.
Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Nintendo Switch, £39.99)
Verdict: Raises half a smile
Now here’s a turn-up. The series known as Famicom Detective Club started in the late 1980s with a couple of games, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, released in Japan — but it never made it much further than that.
Neither game was brought to the West at the time, nor was the sort-of sequel made in 1997. The whole thing may as well have disappeared, an unsolved case.
But then, in 2021, Nintendo saw fit to give those first two games a modern makeover and publish them globally. And now, another three years later, we have a new, bona fide sequel: Emio – The Smiling Man. Case reopened.
Emio – The Smiling Man is the latest addition to the Famicom Detective Club series
What makes this situation stranger is that even the modern remakes felt constrained by the limitations of Famicom Detective Club’s original time — and so, too, does The Smiling Man, writes Peter Hoskin
What makes this situation stranger is that even the modern remakes felt constrained by the limitations of Famicom Detective Club’s original time — and so, too, does The Smiling Man. Here is an old-fashioned sort of game in which you, an aspiring detective, choose from a list of verbs to progress the murder story.
Will you ‘talk’ to the police officer in front of you? Or ‘think’ about what they’ve already told you? Or perhaps ‘look around’ the crime scene?
This isn’t to say that it’s an unsatisfying experience. The Smiling Man’s text-based mechanics can feel a little bit trial-and-error at first; you look when you should talk, tear your hair out when you should think. But as soon as you get into the swing of what it wants from you, nudging each conversation to its end is a rewarding task.
But what about the overarching mystery? It starts off enticing enough — children are dying after encountering a creepy chap with a paper bag on his head — but it goes to places that are a little bit too oblique or just plain underbaked. Good enough for a Sunday afternoon diversion, but not much more.
Still, I could bear to see more entries in this long-lived, long-ignored series.Just give them better stories in future, Nintendo, and you’ll make a smiling man out of me.