LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – A CliffsNotes® Version of The Films

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• LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – A CliffsNotes® Version of The Films

Game Details

LEGO Star Wars takes me back to my childhood years when I played LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game on the Nintendo GameCube. Back then, the technology forced the game design to be fairly limited, but still had plenty of content even if some of the later levels felt like they took too long to complete. This newest addition to the LEGO Star Wars series of games from TT Games gives you the entire story timeline from the Star Wars films told with a comedic spin.

Gameplay

The game world features an overworld in the sense that you can travel to varies locations around the galaxy, and, once on the planet, you can navigate around various points of interest with NPCs and plenty of destructible objects to collect studs. Much of the game is played through this overworld layer with each Episode story containing only 5 levels (really just main story missions). Within this overworld layer you have a vast number of collectibles: Kyber Bricks, Starships, and Characters.

Kyber Bricks function more in the way of Skill Points in other games. You collect enough of them, and, with a stud cost, you can unlock/enhance character and class abilities. Once you complete an entire Episode, you can revisit areas in Free Play mode where you can continue to collect items you were barred access too while playing the story.

Combat

Combat is fairly straightforward. Playing as a Jedi you can block blaster shots, perform a range attack by throwing the lightsaber, force throw enemies at each other, perform the basic melee attacks. One of the improvements to the combat system since I last played a LEGO Star Wars game was the addition of combos. Now, instead of just pressing the melee attack button in tempo with the animations (the original way to perform a long combo) you have a more intricate system that involves juggling the enemies. For example, using an Xbox controller, you can initiate the combo with X and then you can perform a “high attack” with Y that launches the enemy into the air. From there you can keep hitting them or slam them into the ground using B. This adds a welcome amount of flair that keeps the combat from becoming too stale.

Blaster combat saw the biggest improvement. Compared to the original game, you can now free aim with blasters. For general combat, it’s not overly helpful, but it does come in handy with finding Kyber Bricks or collecting studs.

Story

The story is presented episodically in a manner that reminds me of the campaign in StarCraft. The episodes are broken up into to eras with the first episode from each one being unlocked first. The majority of the story is told through cinematics and dialogue spoken through story objectives when traversing the overworld. In typical LEGO fashion, the story elements have a comedic spin to them that makes even the darker scenes in Star Wars mildly funny.

Overall Rating

Author’s Thoughts

I had a hard time playing this game, but that may be due to fact that I’m not part of the target demographic. The game was visually beautiful and the controls were well thought out. Though I did experience some issues with using the force on certain objects where it didn’t want to select the object unless the camera was rotated a certain way. The story was okay, but, if you’re like most people, Episode 1 can be pretty trying simply because of all the Gungans. The level design of the overworld areas felt a little out of place. One of the biggest breaks in the story for me was when you see Clone Troopers in Episode 1’s story on Coruscant. It’s a minor gripe, but it would be have better if the overworld maps changed with each Episode to preserve the story integrity.

The amount of collectible items in this game is staggering and, to a point, burdening if you want to 100% complete the game. In more recent games, this reminded me of Super Mario Odyssey where I put the game down after collecting over 600 moons and still didn’t have them all. There is a fine balance between adding collectibles as a challenge and adding them to pad game time. I feel this game suffers from adding too many to use as game time filler. That said, you don’t really need all of them. In my opinion, if you collect enough Kyber Bricks to complete the Core skill tree then you’re good to go.

Rating

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a game I’d recommend to someone of a younger demographic. I would rate it 3/5 as being overall an average video game. The game excelled in areas, but is hindered by too many collectibles. I would have preferred that if so many collectibles were going to be used that a system to help you find them all like Ghost of Tsushima‘s Guiding Wind as I feel it doesn’t respect the player’s time to gather thousands of collectibles.