Recent reviews by dvader654

This new Lego Star ars entry was supposed to be a big turnaround for the Lego franchise with new mechanics and structure. They hyped up the over the shoulder shooting camera, better combo based melee system, a bunch of new skills and large open spaces to explore and solve puzzles in. While all those enhancements are in the game it amounts to diddly squat in terms of actual gameplay depth. What you are left with is another simple kid Lego game that is gigantic is scale, covering all nine movies, covering every location and nearly every character. The sheer amount of content is what holds this game up and I am still very impressed at its scope, I just wish it was more fun to play.

The Skywalker Saga has better controls and mechanics than in Lego games past but none of it matters because death doesn’t matter, difficulty doesn’t exist at all. What good is a cover based shooting system when it doesn’t matter if you get hit? What good as a melee system with fast, strong, and arial attacks that can be chained together when every enemy can be killed by just hitting one button over and over. It is compounded further with an upgrade tree system to make these attacks more powerful… why?! There is zero effort put forth by the devs to making any of these new combat systems necessary. Even with boss battles, where you would think they would make the battles more interesting, they are basically heavily scripted sequences where you just hit the boss when allowed to and after a short time a QTE or cutscene will lead you to the next phase and you repeat. The only fun parts of bosses come when you have to do something other then fight them, for instance performing some platforming or do some puzzle solving to attack them. I understand this game is for kids but kids can handle more than the level of challenge presented here.

Like the movies there are plenty of vehicle segments where you will take control of the Falcon or any ship of your choice. Ships mostly feel the same, maybe the speed of the laser fire changes but that’s about it. Space combat is extremely basic, just fly around a small area and shoot enemies. Once again damage doesn’t matter, you can die and respawn immediately with no penalty, no strategy is needed, all these segments are are glorified shooting galleries. Most of them are painless fun little time wasters, a few are actually good with decent setpieces and maybe a timer or something to require a modicum of skill.

For every decent mission there are missions that are terrible exercises in tediousness. One in particular is during Attack of the Clones, the coruscant taxi chase has you pilot this taxi that has one pathetic laser which fires at a ridiculous slow rate of one shot a second. You are supposed to hit the bounty hunter vehicle that is moving in all directions, with no lock on and such a slow laser you have to guess where the vehicle will be. This lasts FOREVER, and never ends until you do enough damage after like three different phases.

What’s worse is how buggy a lot of the game is. I encountered multiple random crashes that made me quit to the desktop. Many missions would just glitch and become impossible to complete and of course this would happen during the worst missions forcing me to replay them. Odd glitches like characters not being able to be switched out would happen, parts of a level wouldn’t load and the music in general would just cut in and out at odd times. Clearly feels like this game could have used some time in the oven.

The game is structured where you can pick a movie and play through the movies’s events as series of missions. In between missions you are free to explore whatever location the movie takes you, these are the main play areas and when not in a mission serves as a huge platforming like collectathon. When you are ready you can hit the next mission start point and move the story along, unlocking new locations and characters as you go. The missions have different secret goals to discover, collectibles to find and a high score to reach. Most of the time the levels have a bunch of the aforementioned boring combat but sometimes there are fun moments. There is some platforming to be done, puzzles to solve and so on; usually the missions last ten to twenty minutes or so and there are about five per movie.

I love playing through SW movies so it was a joy to experience all the major moments of every film. Sadly the missions vary in quality so much, one moment the mission feels different and exciting, the next one might be a trash vehicle segment that’s terrible to control and worse glitchy. Some vehicle segments are great like the battle of Hoth, others made me want to die like the bike chase on Endor which lasted about twenty minutes of the worst possible gameplay. Same unevenness happens with bosses, some are fun, some make me want to turn off the game.

So why did I ultimately like this game, well the platforming game aspect was actually pretty fun. Outside the movies you can enter free play which lets you visit any planet and explore that area with every character you have unlocked, complete missions and find the main collectable, blue Lego bricks. These bricks serve as the “stars” so to speak and there are about 1200 of them. No I did not get that wrong, 1200 bricks to collect… it’s absurd. There are about 30 large levels to explore. Over 200 characters and ships to unlock. The content is so impressive and these worlds are extremely detailed, many have two or more locations in them too. As a Star Wars fan there is no greater collection of content from the movies than this game.

Most of my time was spent just exploring these levels and using my many characters to get around. The characters are split into different groups depending of their skills. Jedi and sith get to use the force to move objects, rebels and Imperials get special weapons, scavengers get to create tools to access special areas and droids get to interact with different machines among other things. If you come across an alien that’s not human you either need to be a character that knows that language or play as a protocol droid to translate. If you choose two characters who know each other in the movies they often times have some special dialogue when they spawn, I had a lot of fun discovering which combinations of characters have these responses. Everyone is playable, and while most of the time it doesn’t really offer any gameplay difference it’s fun to create a dream team of SW characters.

The levels themselves are the star of the game as every single moment and location is represented. Each area is filled with loads of personality and inside jokes delivered by the many inhabitants of the different locations. The different locations serve as an old school platforming playgrounds to acquire bricks and do missions. This would be great if the actual aquiring of said bricks involved good gameplay, but all to often it results in repetitive simplistic activities. The best ones involve some sort of puzzle, most of the time they are brain dead but every once in a while there is an inspired one that involves careful exploration and some thinking. NPCs in each area have some missions to complete and again you will find the same few missions repeated all over the galaxy.

So why did I still enjoy this game despite it being so simplistic? Why did I collect over 800 bricks and play for nearly 50 hours, it’s Star Wars! More than that it’s how much personality Lego injects into these games, they use the property in such clever and funny ways. All those boring missions I described many times have funny dialogue, some are self aware at how mundane the task is. No matter what I was doing I had a smile on my face the entire time because I can clearly see this game was made by major fans like me, and yes I have to be reminded it’s for the kids.