Format: Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, PC, Nintendo Switch
To call Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga “ambitious” might be an understatement. Cramming in all nine core films of the iconic trilogy is a huge undertaking – especially when the last Lego Star Wars game was focused solely on The Force Awakens – but developer Traveller’s Tales has not only succeeded in condensing a trilogy of trilogies into a cogent whole, but also evolved the increasingly dated formula for Lego video games.
In terms of content, it’s easily the biggest Lego game to date, packing in dozens of locations, hundreds of playable characters and vehicles, and thousands of puzzles to solve along the way. Yet despite the vast amount of sheer stuff to be getting on with, it also masterfully streamlines its huge volume of content for the target audience.
Jumping into Story Mode, the first episode of each trilogy can be played from the off, with the subsequent ‘films’ unlocking as you progress. How you progress is expanded though, with each movie’s story split between active mission levels and exploration of larger hub areas, with cut scenes threading the narrative with the Lego series’ typically wry sense of humour. Yet even with that well-honed comedic twist, the prequels still struggle to bring much excitement, with The Phantom Menace straining to thread active play missions between walking from A to B for discussions of politics and taxation. Thankfully, this is made up for with some of the better hub areas, with locations such as Theed or the Gungans’ aquatic city impressing with ease, while a level dedicated solely to the iconic pod race is an easy favourite.
This is not only the best-looking Lego game ever, but could give more realistic titles a run for their money.
With a whole galaxy to explore, those hub areas are scattered across numerous planets. These are some of the best hubs any Lego game has seen, each one a massive location packed with secrets to uncover, further characters and vehicles to unlock, and mini-games such as races to pursue. They’re visually stunning too, both in scale and in detail, with Traveller’s Tales beautifully blending the blocky aesthetic of plastic bricks with gorgeously realised environmental detail. This is not only the best-looking Lego game ever, but could give more realistic titles a run for their money.
Even the series’ simplistic combat gets a much-needed overhaul, and while it’s still fully kid-friendly, it now offers a touch more complexity for bigger kids. Enemies will now utilise a variety of ranged attacks, and block melee attacks after a few blows, forcing you to switch up your approach. It makes missions and even free roaming areas feel a little less repetitive than simply hammering out the attack button on repeat. There’s even a welcome RPG-esque element of character growth, with upgradable core stats and unique skills for each character class (Jedi, scavenger, Droid, etc) to improve.
However, despite the ambition, the scale, and the otherwise wonderful improvements across its brick-based galaxy, Lego Skywalker Saga is still – 17 years after the first Lego Star Wars game – plagued by many of the same problems that have become unfortunately commonplace in the series.
Context keys offer a hair-trigger’s difference between functions – for instance, protocol Droids such as C-3PO can use specific computer terminals or split in half to fit into small vents, but both actions use the B button (on Xbox, version tested), meaning half the time you want to use a computer, you end up with a piecemeal robot. Switching between characters in Free Play mode – where levels can be replayed with any character, using their abilities to reach otherwise unobtainable collectibles – remains haphazard, with the added wrinkle that sometimes a character ‘locks’ and can’t be swapped out.
Other times, entire modes appear to vanish – the Galaxy Free Play mode, allowing players to revisit hub areas outside of story campaigns, seemed to only randomly be available for selection. Worst of all, the game often fails to load, presenting players with only a static starfield and requiring the game to be forcibly closed and relaunched. On Xbox Series X in particular, it also doesn’t seem to support Quick Resume, with the game booting from scratch after being suspended – which, in turn, can lead to the aforementioned loading error.
Hopefully these issues can be patched post-release, but at present they make for a suite of issues ranging from quirky-but-annoying to game-breaking. The end result is that Lego Skywalker Saga is a marred masterpiece - on one hand the best Lego game yet, but on the other, packed with glitches that the series just can’t seem to escape.