Conclusion

Star Wars Outlaws is an expansive action-adventure game that takes players on a number of Star Wars worlds, each planet featuring a large map to explore and loads of quests and activities.

The game is simply too demanding for the ASUS ROG Ally. You can get a near 30 FPS experience, at least when it comes to average frame rate, by setting every visual option to its lowest value, and setting FSR to Ultra Performance. This won't fix the stutters and freezes, though, which plague the game, no matter the resolution and visual settings you use.

Turning on FSR 3 Frame Generation bumps the average frame rate a little but introduces extra latency, and makes said stutters and freezes even more pronounced. You've probably seen this coming, but I do not recommend playing Star Wars Outlaws on the ASUS ROG Ally because the performance is too low to consider the game playable.

Perhaps the ASUS ROG Ally X fares better thanks to its 24 GB of memory, but the 16 GB found on the regular Ally simply isn't enough for this game, even at 720p. It's also possible that due to the mandatory ray tracing effects pushing up system requirements, there's simply no way to experience this game on current gaming handhelds, which use AMD iGPUs based on the RDNA 3 generation.

Concerning the Steam Deck, the game crashes every single time, but from what I've seen online from people who played an earlier version of the game that actually worked on Steam Deck, even if a future patch makes it possible to run the game again on SteamOS, the performance will be far from playable. The average frame rate is in the low 20s, and stutters and freezes are a regular part of the Star Wars Outlaws experience on Steam Deck, when you actually manage to play it. The Steam Deck uses an older AMD iGPU based on the RDNA 2 architecture, so the mandatory RT effects of this game are even more of an insurmountable challenge for the APU.

When it comes to the controls, the game plays without issues on the inbuilt ROG Ally controls, but it failed to recognize Steam Deck's inbuilt controller as well as two other controllers we used during our testing—an Xbox Series and an 8BitDo Ultimate 2.4G controller. We disabled Steam Input, restarted our Deck, used different Proton versions as well as Proton GE, and tried running the game in Desktop Mode, but nothing worked. This is a known issue with some Ubisoft games that's most likely tied to the Ubisoft Connect launcher, and while some games do recognize controllers after you launch them with Proton Experimental or restart the console, this time that method didn't work.

Star Wars Outlaws looks like an interesting Star Wars adventure, as long you aren't burned out by the Ubisoft open-world formula. Massive did make some tweaks to it, most notably reducing the amount of busywork, but as someone who's been unable to finish a single Ubisoft-style open-world game since 2019—Assassin's Creed Odyssey was the last such game I've finished—I don't think I'll return to Outlaws after spending about four hours playing the game in preparation for this performance review.