Co-op'd this with my gf and had a pretty solid time with it. It's ambitious for a Lego game and so full of fun details and fun humor. A lot of the gags land pretty well and it makes some of the movies (episode 9 in particular) decently fun to re-experience in a goofier context.

My main issue is that while I do genuinely respect and even enjoy the ambition and scope this is going for overall it feels way too bloated. The combat has an upgrade tree but no real reason to use it because combat is extremely easy. There's lots of detail in each hub and the areas in general but their size also makes half of what you're doing in this game walking from one point to another just following dots around a map in fairly uninteresting segments.

Some of the episodes in this are also just adapted in extremely boring ways. The prequel trilogy is egregiously padded with following characters around hubs and walking from place to place. Episode 9 is paced really boringly for basically the same reasons too. It ends up feeling like there are levels throughout this entire game that just feel like complete time wasters of running around hub levels doing fairly boring quests with funny dialogue. It just feels like while I understand for some levels why they gotta pad them out the way they do, there's some where it just feels apparent that they didn't really know how to really do anything interesting with them and that's kinda lame.

Some of this also just feels like it wasn't fully thought well out for co-op and having the second player contribute to fights and setpieces in fun or interesting ways. Episode 6 has an actually decently neat co-op Vader and Luke fight but Episode 3's final fight has player 2 be C3PO and R2D2 for some reason and not Anakin? It's a very bizarre choice that just doesn't really work for me at all especially when the older games did exactly that. Not that I need to be fighting every second but it just wasn't always that engaging to me or felt like what the second player in that scene was doing felt like a complete afterthought.

Overall though even with my complaints I still had a solid time I just wish they reigned in some of the scope a bit and focused/polished up some of the episodes and levels a bit more. Ballin around as BB-8 was cozy.

As wide as the ocean, as deep as a puddle.

I was looking forward to playing a new Lego Star Wars game as I have so many great memories playing the originals back in the day. At the start I was enjoying fighting some clankers while taking in the beautiful graphics, but this didn't last long.

I wish they focused more on the levels instead of the open world. There are a few interesting levels but most of them are way too short and uninspiring. Exploring each area sounds fun but there is too much repetitive side content in each open area that it becomes such a slog, I don't even want to attempt to 100% it. I'm still struggling to understand why a lot of the mechanics are even in the game, being able to take cover, chain combos and purchase a load of upgrades is pointless as the game is already laughably easy.

Also I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud but I preferred it when the characters didn't talk. We've all watched the films and know whats going on, part of the charm of the originals was the lack of voice acting and the visual slapstick comedy.

I'm sure a lot of people will still enjoy this and that's good for them but for me I can't help feel disappointed, however it's probably the best way to watch the sequels.

This might be the worst game I've played in a very, very long time. The camera is terrible. All you ever do is walk around big, samey looking open areas that have as many popups as this scene from Free Guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHwdLBxz7E4). The combat ranges from annoying to boring. It seems like it wants you to be able to do big combos, but every enemy dies in 2-3 hits except bosses who just stop taking damage whenever the game thinks they should be walking around now. I beat Darth Maul by repeatedly mashing the throw lightsaber button. He did not move until the game said I did enough damage that it was time for a cutscene to play where he moves somewhere else. Every level (the rare times that you get to engage with actual gameplay) is short, riddled with cutscenes and obnoxious dialogue, and is a flat out slog. Before a lot of levels you get to walk around the bland open areas, sometimes doing an "escort mission" where you hear the characters talk about The Plot and crawling at a snail's pace. The cutscenes aren't even remotely funny despite trying as hard as they can to be. The dialogue is ripped straight from the films with no deviation at all (no matter how boring), except that lines are re-recorded by the actors from The Clone Wars TV show. This game feels like exactly what it is: a Star Wars made by Disney in 2022. There are loading screens out the wazoo, and hoo boy do they take a while even with a beefy Gamer PC like I have. There are a billion menus with submenus that navigate slower than molasses. Do not buy this game.

An interesting paradox in that it has the most content of any of the Traveler's Tales LEGO games and yet feels exceptionally lazy in almost every aspect. Actually no, sorry, that's not interesting at all. To be honest, this is one of the least interesting games I've played in quite a while.

First of all, it does a really bad job at adapting the films, even by the standards of this series. There are now only five missions per movie (because having ten or whatever there were in previous games would make the story mode just unfeasibly long) and so just by default you're glossing over a whole hell of a lot. I know this doesn't mean much because who in the world would the following apply to at this point - but if you don't already know the Star Wars movies, you're not gonna be getting much out of the campaign here. Also the levels are much, much shorter and simpler than in previous entries. It's almost silly how quick you can blow through what should really be the meat of this thing.

Additionally, as I think has been the case with some of the other recent TT LEGO games (I haven't played all of them), the different abilities and character types have been VASTLY pared down, and the overall gameplay is now simple to an almost insulting degree. All 'character' in your characters has been drained away compared to something like LEGO DC SUPERVILLAINS or MARVEL SUPER HEROES which had in the neighborhood of 50 distinct abilities instead of, like, I don't know, ten here? It's really quite basic. And therefore boring!

And this ends up affecting the real content of the game, which is the absolutely absurd overworld shit. Because when all your characters are the same, running around open world maps for MORE THAN SEVENTY-FIVE FUCKING HOURS gets really, really boring. Now, I am repeatedly on record as being a collectathon guy. I'm PYSCHONAUTS-pilled. I'm a DONKEY KONG 64-cel. Have been for a long time. But this may have broken me of it. This is the limit. The amount of absolutely drudgerous, totally meaningless shit you have to do to clear the overworld maps and 100% this thing is beyond anything I've encountered before. Yes, this is an all-ages game, but there are basically no interesting or challenging puzzles or platforming - you may as well be literally going down a list of around 2000(!!!!!!!!) checkboxes and filling them all in with a button press. Except, of course, it takes way longer than that. I've played my share of these LEGO games, and there is a really clear lack of effort in this area compared to previous ones, and there is just so unfathomably fucking much of it. It almost feels like one of those service games like FORZA HORIZON or something where you're not really ever supposed to even consider 100%ing it, but no, there's the big percentage meters all over the place letting you know how you're doing! Each level, each world, each region! And the cherry on top is that this has by far the most insulting 100% "reward" I've ever seen - so galling I don't even know if I'm gonna do the last little bit of trophy mop-up because I can't bear to give this another minute of my time after seeing what it was.

The only real bright spots lie in the writing (always pretty solid) and a couple fun deep-cut callbacks to SW lore and old EU stuff. But under that K2-sized mountain of at best blahness and at worst shocking incompetence (menus that should be prosecutable, busted-ass challenges you can cheese about twenty different ways, a frankly embarrassing amount of bugs, etc, etc.) they don't mean much.

Not a great sendoff for the series that started this whole LEGO game thing! Really should have rethought the scope on this one!

So I've completed the main story but still need to 100% down the line, and I've never had a game give me such a conflicting feeling in my life. The story for the most part is really fun, but to balance it out you have episode 1 which is one of the worst things I've ever played, and the sequel trilogy is pretty poor. I think this got way overhyped but the fact is that outside of episode 1, as well as most of the sequel trilogy, this game is a blast, and my highlight is probably the Yoda vs Palpatine fight in episode 3.

Star Wars fans will definitely enjoy this one for the exploration and tongue in cheek humour, especially in the prequels, the game is never afraid to take a jab at itself or the films it's based on, but it can't hit the heights complete saga gave us unfortunately. Something is missing that I can't put my finger on (and the bugs don't help the cause either) but right now I'm left feeling happy overall with the state of the game, but this could have been so much more.

Whoever said this was a reinvention of the LEGO games was lying. This is identical to the old games but just... more. Much more. Way too much more.

Sure the combat is slightly improved as you can use a couple buttons to do combos instead of just one attack button, but you don't need to. You can still just mash attack and it'll have the same effect. Sure the shooting has been slightly improved but it is still by no means comparable to any actual shooter. Structurally and gameplay wise, this is the same LEGO video game they've been making for the last 15+ years.

Really it seems like they approached this game with one goal in mind - more. Just more. Levels? More. Boring boss fights? More. Playable characters? More. Collectibles? WAY MORE. There are a combined total of almost 2000 collectibles in this game - 1200 Kyber bricks, 380 unlockable characters, 119 unlockable ships, 225 minikits (across 45 levels), and 19 datacards. insane. Too much.

The only thing that really kept me going through all this was seeing all my favorite Star Wars moments again in LEGO from. It was cute and silly. I liked taking a little time between levels to explore a new recognizable Star Wars area made out of LEGO.

I'd recommend this game to kids and families playing together, or Star Wars fans looking for something cute, but don't expect anything much more than that.

+ Star Wars good
+ Fun to explore new areas

- Too long
- Too many collectibles
- Repetitive

Collected every single stuff you can find around the galaxy, the only thing I need now to 100% is to replay all the story levels to get the last challenges and mini-kits. But I first need to take a break.

Because boy was that a slog to get through.

The first moments with the game are nice enough: mostly pretty graphics, the writing has its moments, and it doesn't feel bad to play, but the honeymoon period unfortunately doesn't last for long.

When you start to realize that the story levels aren't very inspired and are way too short (which is both a blessing and a curse, considering there are 45 of them; I can understand the devs' decision about that at the very least), that a lot of mechanics are kinda dull - the contraband missions were never fun - and, by jove, the repetitivity of it all! Well, after 5 or so hours, you just start to play mechanically, following the kinda obnoxious blue trail to go through one objective to another, without caring much about what happens.

They Mario Odyssey-fied my Lego games, with a lot a dumb, short stuff to do in order to always make the player rewarded for destroying a rock or doing a short acrobatic session where you have to push the jump button a few times (Guess what? I never felt rewarded for that), an atrocious amount of collectibles to get, worlds way too big for their own good, and all of that only gives you a certain amount of annoyment. I'm very much not a fan of the modern Nintendo way of rewarding the player every 5 to 10 minutes for solving mind-numbing stuff, and I was not happy to see that it is the main influence for this game.

It's unfortunate for me to consider it the worst Lego game I've played so far, but there is clearly something about the older ones that I'm missing here. A more compact experience, which doesn't always hit, but where the misses are more forgiveable, because you don't have to repeat them as much. Feature creep truly is a fearsome thing.

In two minds about this one. I thought the Lego game format would be near-impossible to screw up yet here we are. Firstly the player-controlled camera is nice and the combat system is slightly more complex with a simple combo system, it's a decent upgrade. More of the environments are Lego this time around (always bothered me how much of these games AREN'T Lego). That might be where the good stuff ends.

The whole Star Wars universe rendered in semi open-world Lego sounds good, but in practice each level feels terribly unfocused, every new area is just another big open room to run around and collect studs, there's little feeling of progress or momentum. The mini game sections are a nice break in theory but most of them are awful to play, I end up just waiting for them to end.

I may be wrong but there seems to be bizarrely no way to turn off friendly fire in co-op, and so it's nearly impossible to play without regularly killing eachother - not least because the melee auto-target insists on going for the other player rather than an enemy even when the enemy is closer. This is something that could be toggled right in the pause screen of the older version.

Performance-wise this absolutely chugs on a PS5, along with oddly long loading times make me assume the game is particularly poorly optimised.

There's also these utterly annoying little travel segments between levels. Previous iterations would just cut from one scene to another, following the film. In here when you've finished a bit you often need to backtrack to your ship, select the next location, sit through a take off and warp speed section, then fly closer to the target planet and press X to land (then sit through the landing animation / load screen). If the next area is on the same planet you might instead have to get a taxi to a different area and then walk through the streets to a specific location.

I fail to see how any of this resembles an improvement. I would much rather just cut to the next bit than do all of the footwork that the films cut out.

Lastly there's the addition of voice acting, a plainly awful idea. Half the charm of the old Lego games was in the mute characters having to convey the plot non-verbally, setting the stage for most of the humor. Now the characters just use the film lines outright, usually from a VA doing a distractingly poor impression of the screen actor, and so a comedic, playful homage to the films is here downgraded to a shoddy imitation of them. What jokes remain are usually still visual, now often just relegated to the background.

It's enjoyable enough to pass a May 4th afternoon, but I'm surprised at how let down I was by this. Star Wars nerds can't catch a break.

Easily the most ambitious LEGO game to date. The overhauled new changes to combat is pretty wild, the complete shift to spacious openly lived environments is impressive, and the unlockable characters being massive in sheer size but also cleverly sorted into classes for playstyles is a welcoming touch. Altogether, this creates a very enjoyable experience for people like me to re-experience the movies in a simplistic, child-like, charming format.

This isn’t to say it doesn’t come without its own shortcomings in trying to deliver the definitive Star Wars experience. The developers probably did too good of a job with the open-world like hub worlds because a lot of the actual levels now feel a bit underwhelming by comparison. Episodes 1-3 are probably the best of the bunch in terms of overall enjoyment even if Episode 1 feels very obvious “this was the first level we did”. Episodes 4-6 are very consistently solid but the focus gearing more towards levels than the open environments, or a more constant hub world like Coruscant, leaned back more into the levels feeling less impressive. Episodes 7-9 are arguably the most inconsistent because it felt like it was struggling but trying to make these movies feel as engaging as they can be in a game like this. Throughout my playthrough it did venture into the realm of repetition because of how cinematically scripted some bosses can feel and how the levels feel too linear without much fun LEGO styled puzzle solving to make up for it.

I'm guessing the true enjoyment to be had comes down to the postgame freeplay mode where everything you unlocked or explored becomes your own personal playground to scour hundreds of collectibles with your favorite minifigures. I’m not really a completionist and this isn’t exactly my type of game to try and time sink deep into doing that but I'm glad younger kids or families can find real fun with that.

But hey, at least they made Rise of Skywalker just okay.

Summary : Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was an ambitious project, maybe too ambitious. A Lego Star Wars Open World game, giving you the possibility to explore every planet seen in the movies (except for Kijimi), and relive the events of the movies with that classic Lego charm ?? Sign me up !! However, the game wants too much, throwing countless meaningless objectives at you, which makes the game feel quite boring after a while. The story levels aren't great, playing through them in quick play is a catastrophe. However, the open-world, the vast roster of characters and ships, the humor, and the attention to detail make this a very good game for Lego Star Wars fans ( even though you should not try to 100% it) and a very average game for non-Lego Star Wars fans.

This game is not a game for kids, it's a game for those who grew up with The Complete Saga, like me. To accomplish this objective of aiming for a more mature audience, the game isn't designed as the other Lego games. It's a third person action game, with different character classes, and a ton of young adult humor. You'll find plenty of Star Wars memes exploited by the writers, but also references to the real world. This game doesn't hide its target audience. The exploitation of the memes is so good that I don't regret the good old days of Lego mumble anymore.

The gameplay varies wildly in quality, to a point where I need to split this up in multiple parts to get every thought organised.
The open world is great. Exploration is fun. This game clearly has inspiration from Super Mario Odyssey with its collectathon style gameplay. The quality of the planets you explore changes a lot from planet to planet. Endor is terrible, being a maze of small claustrophobic platforms on multiple floors, while Yavin 4 was way more enjoyable. There is no doubt that the game really overdoes it though. There are more than 1100 kyberbricks to collect. You'll find 270 in levels, sure, but the rest are in the open world, just waiting to be found. If you thought Super Mario Odyssey had filler moons, wait until you see this game. This isn't a terrible problem, but it's one of the factors that made me quit my 100% playthrough after I was something like 65% in.
We need to talk about the side quests, because they are some of the worst ever. They are all the same: either an NPC will ask you to protect them on their way, or they'll ask you to go fetch X amount of a certain item (which can be on a different planet of course), or they'll ask you to fight a space battle. The only one that sticks out that I can think about on the 15 planets I completed the exploration of was on Exegol, where I was charged with fighting 5 short boss fights, with every boss being very different from the other personality wise. But even then, the fights themselves were pretty much identical. What's really bad is that there are 140 of them. Even if every one of them was unique, that would already be too much. Breath of the Wild has like 75. Just to add insult to injury, the game only rewards you with either kyber bricks (lame), characters that you mostly don't care about (like a variant of a stormtrooper for example), or a capital ship. The capital ships are really cool, basically unlocking them allows you to call a huge ship, like the Death Star, and explore it. It's a shame you can't pilot them though, and that they're pretty small, and that the side quests to unlock them SUCK. I only did two out of the 6, but both were simply "we need you to go get this". What a shame.
Space exploration now: it's surprisingly good. The races in space are fun, they were really well layed out, and really made me feel the speed of the ships I was flying. The shooting challenges are pretty good as well. The space battles are fun the first couple of times, but get pretty tiring pretty quick.
The levels now. Oh boy what a flop. They suck. The worslt levels in any Lego game ever. I just wanted to be done with them and move on to the exploration to be honest. The boss fights are cool, it's a shame they force feed you unnecessary QTEs. Free Play is a complete miss, as it often makes certain side objectives hard to get. Side objectives, as an idea, aren't bad. But, in this game, they most often come down to just "do this funny thing haha" and sometimes don't even work. They feel like more of a chore than anything.
Controls aren't the best either. You often end up doing an action by pressing the circle button that you didn't want to do. How many times, as a Jedi, did I break apart a protocol droid instead of force lifting something. Why is breaking apart a protocol droid an option, if you're not playing as the protocol droid ?? It's totally useless and gets in the way.
The game's pacing is pretty slow. Like they sometimes show you something during a level, but for some reason the camerajust lingers there. For example, a group of enemis will appear, and the camera will show them. The enemies will start firing at you, and the camera will just stay there. Sure the enemies can't damage you as you're still in a cutscene, but it just slows the game down so much. Also, the UI sucks. Like badly. The hologram isn't bad, but some of the menu placements are weird (why are the level side objectives not placed with the levels themselves ???) and the HUD is sooooo slow. Often, when I unlocked a ship for example, it would show me the ship once, and not have time to finish its animation before I entered a room or collected something else. Because it didn't have time to finish, the game just decided to show the ship unlock again. If the animation was shorter, like 2 seconds instead of the 5 or 6 it actually takes, this problem wouldn't exist.

So, you may be asking, why am I giving it a 3.5/5, which is the third highest score I give games, if it's so flawed ?? Well, simply, this game is magical for a Star Wars game. If you aren't a Star Wars/ Lego Star Wars fan, don't play this game. It's pretty unremarkable for an average gamer. But, as a young adult who grew up with The Complete Saga, who discovered vide games through Lego Star Wars, and discovered Star Wars through Lego, this game was amazing. It's very funny, the character interactions in free play are funny, the exploration is amazing if you consume it in small doses. Never did I think I would say this about a Lego Star Wars game, but this game made me realise just how subjective a critic of a video game is. This game really asks the question of how we should critique a game that is made for a specific part of the population. Objectively, this game isn't great, but it isn't meant to be amazing for everyone, it's meant to be an hommage to Star Wars and to Lego Star Wars, it's meant to be a "fan service game". If you like Lego Star Wars, buy this. If you don't, don't buy this.

At the end of Lego Skywalker Saga, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, the gameplay is far better than previous Lego SW titles, the visuals and sounds are fantastic, the roster is immense, and there are a truly vast amount of things to do.

On the other hand, I had to experience Episode IX again.

Personal grievances with J.J. Abrams aside, this is a really good Lego game! It's gratifying to see what a Lego title can be when it's not strictly adhering to the same mechanics we've had since 2005. Simply being able to freely move the camera around feels like a revelation, and is something they should have been doing long ago. The split-screen works fantastically too, and not having to stay near your co-op partner makes exploring the various featured planets stress-free. The way unlocks and cheats are handled is the best it's ever been, and if my wife and I hadn't felt so bleak after ending on TRoS, we probably would have 100%ed the whole thing.

If you're looking for a comprehensive Star Wars game that lets you explore practically every planet we've seen in the 9 episodic movies, this is about as good as you're likely to get. But if you're looking for deep-dives on the movies themselves, this game is a bit light on content. Levels in the original two Lego Star Wars games are significantly longer than what you'll find here, with some of the larger story beats consigned to cutscenes. But hey, you can fire your blaster with modern third-shooter controls, so STOP COMPLAINING

Seriously though, the game is solid. If you think you might like it, you're probably right! But if you've got Sequel Trilogy hangups, this doesn't do anything to make those movies any more endearing. Ghost Luke still off-handedly confirms that both he and Leia always knew Rey's heritage, Lando still magically wrangles up the largest Space Posse the Galaxy has ever seen after no one listened to Leia's transmission in TLJ, and giant planet-killing lasers are still showing up constantly. I had hoped that this game would rehabilitate the 2019 ending to this series, much like how Episode I: Racer, Battle for Naboo, and Jedi Power Battles helped me to fall in love with The Phantom Menace. Unfortunately, the sequels are portrayed in a rather dire tone most of the time, and the humor rarely works as well as it did in the older games.

It's a good game! But as this is the first time The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker are playable, any baggage you might have with those divisive films may very well taint the whole experience.

Now go read this graphic novel adaptation of the leaked Duel of the Fates script where Finn leads a Stormtrooper rebellion on Coruscant, then pine for a better world: https://awinegarner.squarespace.com/duel-of-the-fates

I don't know how to accurately rate Lego titles. They're games meant for young children that offer zero challenge and are really just an excuse to run around and collect a million different things. Which, turns out, I'm down for. Every few years when one of these games pops up and is based on a franchise I'm actually interested in, I hop on board for a bit, because they're the kind of simple, mindless fun I think you need once and a while.

The Skywalker Saga is very much of that same mold, although on a seemingly much larger scale. The individual levels of each movie have been abridged to a greater degree than past Lego Star Wars titles (perhaps too much so), but alongside them come much larger, open environments that constitute the meat of this particular one. Side-by-side they offer a lot of variety and I never really found myself bored with each level's gimmicks or the surprising amount of different puzzles, even if it did leave me yearning for a few more character classes to break up some of the more monotonous abilities.

In terms of other criticisms I have about the game, I wish they'd go a bit more off-script from the movies at times. When they do it's really a highlight, but cutscenes stick more to doing word-for-word line reading of the film dialogue and letting the humor fill the background instead of bringing it the forefront. In addition I encountered several annoying bugs that disrupted side quests and collecting tasks, though to the game's credit, it is very good about saving everything so I rarely had to redo something I already accomplished. Also no amount of lampooning could make up for having to re-experience The Rise of Skywalker again, but I suppose that was unavoidable given the game's premise.

Ultimately I'd say this game's biggest strength is simply letting you exist and breathe in the Star Wars universe. The breaks in-between levels where you can just roam around, meet characters, explore the vast array of planets, or just take in the ambience of the extremely detailed environments coupled with the classic Star Wars music and sounds makes for a really relaxing experience. Lego games will never be the most compelling things you'll ever play, but every once and a while I think it's worth it to play something like this for a change of pace. Considering this game delivers on that and then some, I'd say it achieved its goal.

UPDATE: Lowering my score one star. At this point in time I've almost 100% the game but due to a bug I have been unable to do so. Truthfully my entire experience with trying to platinum The Skywalker Saga has been an exercise in frustration due to the constant bugs, glitches, and crashes, little of which I experienced through my main playthrough of the game, but have become overwhelmingly apparent in my attempt to complete everything. I know there are players out there who have experienced even more severe, game-breaking bugs than I have, so I can't even say I've gotten the worst of it.

Adding to that frustration has been the fact that we're now going on nearly a month without any sort of patch to fix these problems, and radio silence from the developer on when we can expect one. Quite frankly that is inexcusable and has really soured my opinion on the game overall, even if a lot of the praise I heaped upon it earlier still stands. I'm sure at some point in the future this game will be fixed and these complaints will be rendered a non-issue, but I simply cannot ignore how long this game has been left to flounder in is post-release window.

Played this in multiplayer for an hour to make my kid brother happy and I have two important observations:
1. Extremely funny how as these games' character rosters get bigger and bigger, they now have add the Glup Shittoiest of Glup Shittos. Like was there a nonzero amount of people excited that they put General Rieekan in this?
2. In one of the ship missions, I got stuck in an endless loop of u-turning that no button combination could get me out of so I basically had to wait and do nothing until my brother finished the mission

Most of this review is from before 100 percent completion but still completely applies.
It's good, but I can't say I like it more than Complete Saga. So so many factors go into why, but I'm just going to make an "abridged" review here (yes, this is the abridged).

One, the levels take a backstage to the open world. The open world has minimal improvement from previous installments, but has a larger amount of quests, causing it to continue having the same problems of repetition and uninteresting gameplay that the previous LEGO games have had.

Two, bugs are a pretty common occurrence. Not usually game breaking ones, but noticeable ones. Again, nothing new to the LEGO (and Traveller's Tales) scene.

Three, following up on the level design, it's arguably not an improvement on Complete Saga's. I will say that things like the lightsaber combat and star ship battles are much more fun, but things like cover shooting, quick time events and the bloated amount of walking from place to place aren't as great.

Those are my biggest issues. I have smaller nitpicks, including strange music choices (like the Naboo chase music during Dooku's battle), but they're not things that I expect anyone else to care about. I know this sounds like a pretty lengthy rant, but there are plenty of good things about the game.

The comedy is spot on. Cutscenes have even more charm than the Complete Saga ones did. Lightsaber duels, again, are awesome. If you've got a friend it's a lot of fun to play around in the hubs. Speaking of friends, puzzle quests are great for them. If there is one thing I loved about the open world it was the puzzle challenges. They are the most creative part of the game and perfect for co-op.

The worlds are beautiful. A lot of them reminded me of layouts from Battlefront 2, which were equally as beautiful. The characters themselves now are modeled to look like actual minifigures, so they have more toy-like features, and particles of snow or sand can get caught on their capes or headpieces. Poses and animations for the characters are more unique than ever before, I absolutely loved watching the different ways Jedi would swing their lightsabers.

It's kind of hard for me to rate this game at all, I'm very mixed on the overall quality of it. But I will definitely say that tons of passion went into it and it's worth a try if you've got some time to kill and a friend to do it with.

EDIT AFTER MASTERY: Wayyyy more bugs than I originally thought. Ones that stick with you permanently as well. Almost believed I was completely hardlocked multiple times. As I expected, there is nothing really rewarding about going for 100 percent, nor is than any actual reward for doing so (unless you count the trophies). With all the reused missions and terrible loading times, it's just not worth the effort.

By no means is this game bad, hell even with all its faults I still think this is probably the best Lego game we've had in a long time; but with that being said I feel like it might be a little too ambitious for its own good. A lot of the skill trees are pretty much pointless, the combat can be fun but most enemies die in only a few hits so most of the time you end up just doing the same combo over and over. The open worlds are pretty empty and are actually only there for side missions for more upgrade points. The actual missions based on the 9 movies are also hit and miss. You'll get super fun ones like Episodes 2,3,4,5 and 8; but you'll also get ones that feel like they're just going through the motions like episodes 1,5,6,7, and 9.

Overall I had some fun with the game but I don't feel like I'll remember my time with this game nearly as much as I do with the original 2 Lego Star Wars games.