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.
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.
2 Comments
I would recomend you to finish the story quickly so that every major character is available to buy. Then buy the characters you want to play as and explore the planets you're curious about, then just put the game down.
Nancyfly
1 year ago