Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga - Review
Revealed back at E3 2019, the road to release for Lego Star Wars The Skywalker Saga has been a long one, it’s as if a thousand voices all cried out for their wants and desires. Now that the game is here though, will they be silenced, or cry out in celebration, let me just say now, I don’t have a bad feeling about this.
Normally at this point of the review, I would explain the story setup and characters and such, in order to put things into context, but I feel that explaining the story of 9 movies, in a condensed manner would be a disservice to them, but also be pointless, as the Star Wars movies are some of the most well known in existence. However, what I will say here is that the stories that are on offer, hit all the high notes from the 9 movies, so if you thought that the flashback in Episode IX of Luke and Leia training was weird, good news it isn’t in there. Also missing are long and tedious galactic politics from the prequels and lots of drawn-out explanations from the originals. What we get are basically CliffNotes for the movies, the beats are still here, but some elements have been shifted around, in order to keep the pace moving and put characters into their correct places.
What this means though is that if you thought Rey and Kylo going from enemies to lovers/friends over the course of a single movie was too quick, prepare for lightspeed. The game doesn’t hold itself back in anyway here, the stories are here to basically drive you to the next set piece and they do their job, but if you are hoping to get more detail about why Admiral Holdo opted to launch the ship into hyperspace, you are out of luck. There are good points and bad points for this fast-tracked story, the good is mostly for those players familiar with the stories, you don’t have to deal with characters explaining things in depth that you already know. On the flip side, if you are not all that familiar with the stories, then you may feel a little left out at times, as they skip across points faster that the Millennium Falcon doing the Kessel Run.
The same speed can be applied to the gameplay as well, there are times when things move so fast, it really feels like the game doesn’t want you to play, but there are times when it slows down and demands you pay attention. For the most part, the game is a 3rd person adventure, but depending on the character that you can controlling, it can become a 3rd person cover shooter, or even a lite puzzler. When you are not running around on foot, you will be in a number of classic vehicles, from speeders to the previously mentioned Millennium Falcon and depending on the vehicle type, things can change as well. If we take a look at the times you can fly, going in, I was expecting much to happen, I figured an on-rails shooter akin to Star Fox at times, but nope, this is wide open space and feels more like Rogue Squadron. When you are in a vehicle that is locked to a planets surface, be it a speeder or animal, it behaves more like a generic open world adventure game, which is fine and does play up the exploration nature of the game.
This is one of the elements that sets the game apart from the countless other Lego games over the years, especially the Lego Star Wars games from decades ago. If you play the episodes in timeline order, you will star with The Phantom Menace and while the earlier games had more combat and such in the corridors after the gas attack, this time there is more exploration to do. The exploration can lead to secrets and gags, there are so many of those, but beyond that, it helps space things out, because if you do push through, the entire ‘story’ only lasts about an hour and change. When you get to Theed and rescue the Queen, the game directs you to take her to the hangar, but you can ignore that and opt to explore the city, sure the game will throw enemies at you, but you can take them down with ease and explore away. There are some locations where there really isn’t a lot of exploring to do, but most of the time, the locations range for decent in size to insane and once you have completed them in the story mode, you can revisit in free play whenever you would like.
While the game is all about the Skywalker Saga, the Free Play mode is where the fun really kicks off, because as you play through the various episodes, you will discover doors, crates and other items that you can’t access, without having a character class. Once you can revisit the location, with any character, that means that you can now go ahead and get all those collectables, of which there are a so many, it might even be too much. The main collectable are the Kaiber Bricks, those are hidden everywhere and also given out as rewards for completing missions, doing cool things during them and more. The other collectables, which are thankfully smaller in total, but they are much harder to locate, the datacards are used to unlock cheats and are the most challenging to discover. Whereas the mini-kits can be found in the levels, but sometimes are so hard to get, that free play will be required, in order to have a chance at getting some of them. The Kaiber Bricks are your real objective though because you can use them to upgrade your game, specifically through core and class upgrades.
The core upgrades are applied to all characters, so droids, bounty hunters, jedi and beyond, with enhancements to running, build speed, total health and stud pick-up radius. If you upgrade your run speed, then you will get faster characters across the board, but if you choose to upgrade your Jedi abilities and then play as Han Solo, you won’t have access to those upgrades. Something like the Jedi skills offer the ability to throw things with the force quicker, or as a scavenger, climbing faster and depending on how you want to play things out, your choices can make things easier or harder. All the upgrades need a mix of Kaiber Bricks and Studs to unlock and as with most games, the more you unlock the more you need, even after completing the main episodes and collecting a decent amount of Kaiber Bricks, I still only hit 10% of the total to be found. So, the game may end up being a completionists nightmare.
But for all that good, we need to address the problems that the game has and they are mostly just weird things, first up the balance. There are times when you will get into a fight in a location and there will be countless enemies coming towards you, standard stuff, but the games combat isn’t the best. When you have a character with a blaster, you just need to pull on the left trigger to aim down the sights and fire, which for the most part works well, you can then fine tune your aim with the right stick and take out a lot of enemies with a few well-placed shots. The problem is when you get into fights with the melee offerings or worse force powered folks, because the game will target the nearest person to you, by default, even if they are other members of your group. I can’t begin to count the number of times that I would start to punch someone, launch them into the air and while they get defeated up there, aim for the next target on the ground, only to then ground pound one of my team.
If it were wonky aiming that would be not the worst thing, but the game also restricts your aiming when you get into a boss fight, usually by locking onto a single enemy. When you are fighting Count Dooku, the camera will lock to him, so even if he is a distance away from you, then you can still see him, which works. The problem is that you can’t disable that lock, so when you get into boss fights with multiple enemies, you are stuck looking at one enemy, while the rest just stand around, watching and while I can appreciate that they wanted to keep things simple, the forced lock-on just feels wrong. Additionally, the game has issues with its puzzles, not the box moving ones, but he console/droid controlled offerings and that is that they are so boring and pointless, they really ought not to exist at all. I understand that the Lego games have a much younger target audience, so puzzle design needed to work for them as well, but when you entire puzzle is repeating the on-screen prompts, you can maybe make those move faster than a snail. The droid puzzles can be tricky, because you have to juggle various rings and rotation of them, but the rest are just annoying and there isn’t any punishment for getting them wrong, which again begs the question, why were they there at all.
Taking a look at the presentation side of things, this is far and away the most stunning looking Lego game ever created, even if I still don’t like the weird mix of real and Lego locations. So, what is so good about this, first up is the scale of everything, there are locations that are massive, but then they get overshadowed by the size of some of the ships, especially the Star Destroyers. The fact that all of this is connected by a sprawling galaxy, allowing you to fly from planet to planet, spending time in space around it, before you then head down to the surface of the planet, it is mind-blowing. When you do get to see characters up close, there is so much detail to them, it is hard to know where to start, all the characters have the word Lego printed on their pieces, with visible seems on hair, guns and such, giving the feeling that they are just real-world pieces come to life. When you visit planets that are sandy, the characters get dirty, sand starts to collect in the various grooves of the model and even when you hit up planets that are muddy, like Takodana, your group will have mud on their feet and splashed up and down their clothes.
The weird issues come from when you go from inside of a Lego ship, full of Lego characters and more, then setting down on a planet and seeing everything looking so real, it is just weird. Now this is not an issue with how nice the game looks, it is stunning, but rather that the juxta positioning of the elements doesn’t make sense, it didn’t in the original game and never has since. What makes it worse is that you will be walking through the swamp locations on Naboo, with large and lush trees around you, only to then see Lego versions of trees right beside them. There are times when fire is made up of Lego, but then there are times when it is more realistic in nature, with nary a Lego piece to be seen. Much like the force, all things need to be in balance and I just wish there was more of an effort to have the world built out of Lego.
On the audio side, there are some amazing moments and some less than stellar ones, but lets start with the good, first up is the music. As a Star Wars game, you know the music is going to be amazing and as most of the music is literally the score from the movies, it is as authentic as you can get. There are some new mixes here and there, blending parts of tracks differently, but it is solid across the board, where things get weird is with the voice work. Now most of the actors that are voicing the characters are not the actors from the movies, though there are some here, for the most part they are soundalikes. I say that, but for the Prequel movies, most of the actors voicing the roles are those same ones who voiced the characters in The Clone Wars animated show. So, James Arnold Taylor is back as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Dee Bradley Baker is Jango Fett and the Clones and so on, with the end result feeling like its perfect casting, mostly because we already know these voices in the role.
Where things change is in the sequel movies, some of the work is great, like Rey but some of it just doesn’t sound right to me at all and its not because they are not good actors, the lines they bring to life are often hilarious and worth listening to, but it is more because they just don’t click as the right voices. I am sure if I had never seen The Clones Wars show, then the same would likely be said for the voices there, but that isn’t the case. One thing to note though is that the game does have a lot of folks to speak with, some are just doing their thing on their various planet, others are quest givers and the voice work here is mixed as well, some sounds fine, others not so much.
Lego Star Wars The Skywalker Saga is an amazing game, it may not be the most thorough Star Wars experience, given how quickly it moves through the stories, but that keeps the fun going. With thousands of collectables to discover, hundreds of characters to unlock and countless ships to pilot, there is a lot in this game to keep you playing for a long, long time. While it does have moments where it feels aimed at kids especially, they don’t detract from the sheer fun that the rest of the game delivers, whether it’s them destroying JarJar Binks or making fun of Luke’s milk obsession. If you are a Star Wars fan, this is the ultimate love letter to the movies and if you are not a Star Wars fan, there is enough humour and fun to be had regardless. The force is strong with this one, so you should blast off to a galaxy far away, you won’t regret it.
The Score
9.0
Review code provided by WB Games
The Pros
+The size of the game is insane, there is simply no way to describe it, without you seeing it first
+The game offers a large assortment of gameplay styles, depending on the character you choose
The Cons
-There is still that weird mix of ‘real’ and Lego visual styles that never quite sits right with me
-Some of the puzzles are so slow and tedious, that it brings the fun to a halt, while you are solving it
