Are you ready to become the Jedi you were meant to be? To save the galaxy from the forces of evil and tyranny? To live out your Star Wars fantasies in the way you’d always hoped you could while laughing your butt off?
If the answer to that is yes, then look no further than Traveller’s Tales latest Lego game, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
After some delays, Traveller’s Tales have finally delivered The Skywalker Saga to gamers all and sundry and, in the process, have delivered not only the largest franchise Lego game to date but also the best – not counting the recent remaster of KoToR – Star Wars game that I’ve played in years.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga holds all nine of the Star Wars movies in one collection for you to play through. It would have been easy for Traveller’s Tales to simply take the previous Star Wars games, update them and pop them into this collection. Thankfully, that isn’t what they did. Instead, Traveller’s Tales took the games right back to the design stage and built The Skywalker Saga from the ground up on their newest engine, making them all new Lego Star Wars games. Sure the story beats will remain the same, but it’s how it’s presented that matters and the developers have certainly outdone themselves here.
The basic Lego gameplay loop still remains the same. You explore the environment, beat up bad guys, break Lego structures for studs and build other Lego objects to help you in combat or to solve environmental puzzles. All of this is done against the backdrop of those planets in that galaxy far, far away. Help Luke and Han save Princess Leia. Blow up a Death Star. Stop a Phantom Menace. Help Rey fight The First Order. And totally blow off C-3P0 when he tries to tell you why he’s become so fashion misaligned with one red arm.
Each movie is told with that same gentle Lego humour that both venerates the source material while poking fun at it in a hilarious fashion. Most of the jokes usually happen in the background or through dialogue splashed around in the levels and more than once I found myself laughing out loud, usually at the crazy antics of the Storm Troopers. The moments between each narrative beat have been expanded upon with some creative license by providing you with vast sections of the planets you visit to explore. Between deadly Tie-Fighter duels, you can explore the environment, picking up side quests and missions and collecting the many, many Kyber bricks (in lieu of Kyber crystals) that the game is stacked with. Over one thousand of them in fact. And if you’re not collecting those, then there are plenty of characters, ships and cheats to unlock.
The story levels come with their own little challenges as well which award you with Kyber bricks if you complete them. Collect enough studs, unlock characters, and perform certain actions in a level all add to the replayability and the need to fully complete and explore each location. If that isn’t enough for you, the game now has space sections for you to play around in with dog fights and collectables to find as well.
Once you’ve completed an area, you open it up for free play and exploration. Story levels usually have areas you can’t open or items you can’t collect without a specific ability. It’s here that free play will let you run through the story levels with another character that can destroy gold Lego pieces, for instance.
Traveller’s Tales have added new dialogue as well. Instead of using voice clips from the movies as they have in previous franchise games, there’s a whole new cast of sound-alikes voicing your favourite Star Wars characters. Only a few of the characters have their original actors voicing their lines but the replacement cast does a pretty good job of sounding like Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. For the absolute purists, traditional Lego mumbling makes a welcome return with “Mumble” mode.
The biggest changes come in the gameplay mechanics and visuals.
Both melee and ranged combat have been reworked. The game’s camera has been brought in closer to your character and when aiming with a weapon, the shooting becomes a more traditional 3RD person shooter with some light Gears of War-style mechanics thrown in. Now you can hug cover, shoot out from behind it and vault over if need be. And in that grand Lego fashion, you can rebuild it if it gets blown up in a shower of studs and pieces. The melee combat has had a wonderful combat overhaul as well. Taking cues from Lego Ninjago, melee combat is now combo-based with blocks, counters and some wonderful air juggles thrown in. And it all flows incredibly smoothly between the two combat styles and fighting animations. Whether you’re using lightsabres, which can now be flung at your opponent, or fisticuffs, the combat is incredibly fun.
And those Kyber bricks? Well, they’re used to buy new skills for your characters in the game’s skill tree system. There’s a basic skill tree for every character and then there are class-specific ones for Jedi, Scouts, Rogues, etc.
Visually, this is the best a Lego game has ever looked. The Lego pieces are superbly modelled and animated, with the game rendering the pieces right down to the wear and tear that Lego pieces usually have, including dirt and the worn molding you sometimes get on physical bricks. This applies to the set design as well, with areas such as Mos Eisley looking old and dusty while the halls and hangers of Empire buildings are shiny and bright. The engine is making use of techniques such as PBR materials, cube maps and screen-space reflections.
Speaking of cube map reflections and SSR, the games reflection effects are absolutely stellar. Most areas in the game have some form of reflections but in Starkiller Base and the Death Star, the reflection effects are truly something to behold with everything, including your characters, NPC’s and exploding Lego pieces and studs being reflected as you play. It’s a wonderful showcase for just how far the technology has come in recent years.
Performance-wise, the game runs absolutely smoothly. No matter what happens while you’re playing, there are no performance dips at all as the engine maintains a smooth frame rate all the time.
There is the only area of the game presentation that suffers, however, and that’s in the cutscenes which have an odd, jerky performance about them, making them seem as though they’ve been recorded at a lower frame rate or are suffering from frame rate problems if they’re been rendered in real-time. In short, most of the time they look shuddery.
From the moment you hear that wonderful John Williams score while looking at the level select screen – which sports some gorgeously animated dioramas for each movie – to the moment that Episode IV’s scrolling text rolls across the screen, to the moment you’ve blown up the Death Star and the many, many moments after, Lego Star War: The Skywalker Saga is nothing but a delight. Even the much maligned trilogies – you know who you are – are an absolute blast to play through here, faring ever so much better than the actual movies they’re based on.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a beautiful, charming, breezy and epic adventure that will remind you why you were glad that A New Hope came into your life. And why this is a game that deserves to be in your life too.
- Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
- Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows
- Developers: Traveller’s Tales, TT Games
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