LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga brings adventure and excitement galore in this stunning new installment in the long-running LEGO series of Traveller's Tales games. Featuring stunning settings from all nine Star Wars films and a surprising number of iconic planets to explore freely in between, the Skywalker saga is a blockbuster executed with a goofy charm that'll make you as happy as a droid in a hot oil bath.
The perspective of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Unlike the zoomed-out camera perspective of previous LEGO titles, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga features a narrower, shoulder-top third-person view of the kind seen in Gears of War or Uncharted, and that means far more control over your attacks . Lightsabers can be hurled with satisfying precision and crates pounded with the Force, and a simple combo system allows you to launch enemies into the air with ease to juggle a volley of sword swings. Combat as a Jedi or Sith may not have the depth of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, but it's still fast, fluid, and feels awesome.
take cover
When controlling a character equipped with a blaster, you now have the ability to take cover behind walls and other objects to take out your enemies from afar, and switch between cover positions with the press of a button. (A similar cover mechanic was present in LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens from 2016, but only in certain sections of a level). I love that you can quickly rebuild a destroyed cover (as well as the enemies), but apart from a few special boss fights I hardly felt the need to hide behind anything. In LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, the combination of an ever-charging health bar and the authentic inaccuracy of the Stormtroopers' shots meant there was little risk involved in chasing the weapon. While I still enjoyed the shootouts in The Skywalker Saga, it was more for the flashy spectacle than the shallow attempts at strategy.
Close-up Perspective
The new close-up perspective in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga not only makes you feel more immersed in the action, it also gives you a better understanding of how realistic each individual LEGO brick is. 2021's Hot Wheels Unleashed set a new standard for faithful virtual plastic, and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga lives up to it, right down to every plastic stitch and textured hairpiece, with the minifigure's color popping after extended use flakes off as if they were a beloved toy. Absolutely every LEGO creation looks so eerily lifelike that when you shoot an immaculately assembled 1000 piece Tie Fighter out of the sky you can almost hear the cries of pain from the parents who spent their whole Sunday afternoon helping their child build it.
Spaceball awakens
The LEGO games have always brought a Spaceballs-like silliness to their recreations of iconic Star Wars scenes, and the Skywalker saga is no different, always looking for the funny side of the Force even in the darkest of situations. Be it Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader discussing the new Death Star while im background objects Rows of Stormtroopers fall like dominoes, or that a confused Darth Sidious accidentally issues Order 67 instead of 66, forcing all the clone troopers to spontaneously dance instead of committing mass genocide against the Jedi. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga always finds a way to gently poke fun at the original, with wonderfully absurd and hilarious results. Amazingly, even the events of The Rise of Skywalker are far more entertaining when they're intentionally ridiculous than when they're so by accident.
variety of missions
It's not just the LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga's sense of humor that keeps you hooked, but also the variety of missions. While the main story's 45 levels aren't quite as daring and imaginative as 2021's It Takes Two, they keep things varied so the action never gets boring. The Skywalker saga is capable of delivering mindless carnage on a grand scale, such as when the Battle for Naboo momentarily turns into a thrilling tower defense game and you gleefully hurl energy balls from Gungan catapults to destroy hordes of droids and to decimate Trade Federation assault tanks. But it can also be more focused and intellectual, like when Rey enters the Mirror Cave on Temple Island and you carefully use her reflections as a puppeteer to reach the exit portal switches.
High-speed pod racing
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga does indeed have levels designed for high-speed podracing, X-wing trench racing and all the essential lightsaber duels. But even in the most familiar moments, the campaign is still fun because it feels so fluid and is a stunning sight to behold. The only catch is that the strict adherence to the cinematic style of presentation can feel a little too rigid at times. For example, if you reduce your health bar to zero in one of the boss fights against Kylo Ren, the fight will continue randomly for another minute, so you can fight through the rest of the Quicktime events with the push of a button.
R2 tour
Every story mission in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is connected by surprisingly large nodes, located on around 20 different planets, from the sandy streets of Mos Eisley on Tatooine to the polished surfaces of Coruscant's financial district, and everywhere between. These open areas are full of hidden kyber bricks that can be collected by solving various environmental puzzles, and while some challenges are repeated across the galaxy, stacking crates to reach airborne kyber bricks seems like one popular task no matter what planet you are on. There are many other fun little surprises you may stumble upon along the way. There's a Lemmings-inspired challenge on Kamino where you must adjust a series of platforms to prevent an unfortunate clone from sliding to its doom, or arrange a chorus of Wookiees on Kashyyyk to make them angry perform a rendition of John Williams' signature music yawn.
Kyber Stones
Collected Kyber Stones serve as currency that can be invested in upgrades in addition to studs, either in basic perks for all characters or in class-specific expansions. While many of the core improvements like expanding the radius at which your character automatically sucks up dropped studs or increasing the speed at which he builds objects are self-evident, the vast majority of class-specific improvements seemed unnecessary given the difficulty level of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is way too easy already. The question is, what incentive is there to give bounty hunters the ability to spot enemies through walls when you can easily take out anyone on the other side with a couple of blaster bolts, even if they give you a head start. The Skywalker saga is beginning to resemble some kind of endearing Mass Effect for minifigures.
Story missions and side missions
While you primarily stay on target and focused on the main mission path, after completing all of the story missions, you still spent a few hours visiting your favorite locations and completing side missions to unlock additional characters that you then join your travel party Swap in and out to use their unique abilities to solve specific problems. In those moments, when you jet from one solar system to the next and fly onto the surface of a planet to do odd jobs for the inhabitants there, the LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga begins to resemble a sort of endearing Mass Effect for minifigures. And when you get bored of exploring and action-platforming across the numerous planets, you can just grab your favorite spaceship and jet into orbit for some impromptu dogfights. There really is an incredible amount to do in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and despite the fact that you can spend over 20 hours playing the game you will feel that you have only scratched the surface. There are apparently enough collectible LEGO vehicles and minifigures here to fill several hundred letters to Santa.
Failure of the Dagobah system
The only Star Destroyer affecting your LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga experience is a bug that makes it impossible for you to continue the story of the prequel trilogy after Attack of the Clones. When playing on Xbox Series X, a crash occurs while attempting to start a mission to hunt down Jango Fett. When you restart LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, the mission marker has disappeared from the map and menus, and there seems to be no way to trigger it again. Because you can skip between episodes and play the three trilogies in any order, you're still able to complete Episodes IV through IX on your original save, but you had to create a new game to complete the episodes Play through I to III, with the error that aborts the game maybe fortunately no longer appearing. The developer has been working on a patch to prevent the issue.
Drop in and drop out in co-op
There are some small issues with LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga's local hop-on, hop-off co-op mode. In the nine episodes you can play alone about half the time and with a co-op partner the other half. The bottom line is that having a second player and the comedic chaos that ensues is a lot more fun, but the limited field of view within the confines of vertical split-screen makes combat feel a little imprecise and exploration a little more disorienting. Also, one player always seems to lose out in story mode boss fights. He's cast in the role of a comparatively inept companion droid while the other player engages in a spectacular lightsaber duel. At a point that culminates in the confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin on the molten surface of Mustafar, you spend a good deal of time as C-3PO spectating on a floating platform while all the action unfolds below.
Verdict
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga offers some rollicking reinterpretations of the most iconic moments from Star Wars and places them in a series of interplanetary playgrounds that are filled with discovery and fun diversion. Certain elements like the upgrade and cover systems feel a bit redundant, and the co-op mode has some notable downsides, but otherwise there were enough laughable gags and surprising gameplay twists to keep you from the beginning of Episode I to the end of Episode IX, which is more than can be said for the actual films. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga offers some rollicking reinterpretations of the most iconic Star Wars moments and sets them in a series of interplanetary playgrounds that are packed with discovery and fun diversion.
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