| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| PC | 6.70 |
| Overall | 6.70 |
|
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. There are a few missions that mirror this one, also painful but none have a vehicle as ill equipped for combat as this one. 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. There is this space mission that has you entering hyperspace and coming out to battle a squad of TIEs and it always spawns you inside a broken Trade federation ship, it’s clearly not supposed to be there as you can just fly through it but there it is every time you do any mission like that. 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 like convincing stormtroopers to move from the detention level on the Death Star by pretending to be darth Vader in a PSA announcement. 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. What’s stranger is some major movie moments are just glossed over, like there is no space battle of Endor… how does that happen? Flying into the second Death Star designs itself, how is that not a level? 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. There are special unique characters too like Jabba, a wompa and even a rancor that don’t fit into any category. 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. On Tatooine for instance you can start at Luke’s homestead, hop on a speeder and travel to jabbas palace and the sarlaac pit. You can visit the many locations of Coruscant from the Jedi Temple, the Senate and the underbelly with it’s night clubs and dexters bar. 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. A bunch of bricks are simply found by climbing off the beaten path and doing simple no failing platforming. Some are as simple as switch to the class of character that lets you interact with an object like throw a grenade at a silver case to open it. You will find the shoot the four hidden targets to open the chest brick on every planet. There will be plenty of stacking of crates using the force to reach a high up brick and so on. 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 like translating runes or figuring out the correct order to construct some object. Even these sometimes repeat but they are a welcome activity compared to most. NPCs in each area have some missions to complete and again you will find the same few missions repeated all over the galaxy. There will be an escort mission where you protect an NPC to a destination. A mission where you question NPCs as you look for a specific one, a sort of where’s Waldo like game except the game tells you where to look. The worst involve collecting a bunch of objects that are often times scattered across multiple planets which amounts to a huge fetch quest for mostly nothing. 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, well the answer might not surprise you, 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. Graphically this is by far the best looking Lego game ever made and in general it’s a looker. Very clean and great looking Lego characters, the environments are basic in design (again it’s Lego blocks) but it feels alive with crisp and clean graphics. I had a few performance issues in a few locations that were dense with activity but most of the time the game ran smoothly on my PC. The music is obviously licensed Star Wars music, this includes music from every movie meaning it should have one of the best soundtracks. But as I mentioned before the sound feels glitchy many times with tracks just cutting in and out at odd times. There are butchered versions of songs like Duel of the Fates. Some music doesn’t match the movie it’s in. It’s just odd to have such a rich library to use and it feel like music implementation was rushed. I enjoyed Lego Star Wars The Skywalker Saga a lot more than I should have. My critical side was screaming at all the poor gameplay choices and the boring repetition but my Star Wars fan side was having fun with the care and effort Lego put in into making it a huge celebration of the series. If only they cared to focus on the gameplay, that said have to remember this game is made for kids of all ages so the no challenge combat and simplistic platforming is to be expected. If you have enjoyed Lego games before this might be one of the best ones ever made. If you love Star Wars it’s worth trying. If you are just looking for a good game to play this game can only be recommended if one is willing to accept the basic made for kids gameplay. |
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Posted by Dvader Thu, 05 May 2022 21:44:07
Fri, 13 May 2022 03:04:36
This review reminds me that in Nintendo Power they had a score ranking for "Fun." That was an important category.
Fri, 13 May 2022 08:35:41
It would be good to get you on the podcast to discuss.
Fri, 13 May 2022 21:35:00
I find these an interesting kind of entertainment, be it game, movie or otherwise; ones where you objectively recognize it as not good, but love it anyway. Almost like sometimes preferring a fast food version of a better product.
Sat, 14 May 2022 02:48:33
That is the entire reason people eat McDonald's cheeseburgers. On no level do they actually taste like a cheeseburger. But whatever they taste like, it's good and I'll be damned if there are days that's the only thing I want to eat.
Sun, 15 May 2022 17:54:25
Aspro, if you want to record some separate segment with me at a time when I can we can do that.
Sat, 29 Oct 2022 23:39:12
Wtf. Must read this tomorrow
Sun, 30 Oct 2022 12:22:28
I wonder what you would think of LEGO City?
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