After a long wait, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga delivers exactly what it needed to.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is finally here, after many years of teasing updates and crushing delays. Developer Traveler’s Tales has recreated all nine of the mainline Star Wars films in its trademark charming style and we’ve spent the weekend getting in among the bricks to see how they stack up against other Lego games. There are hundreds of characters to unlock, overhauled combat to get grips with, flyable starships to pilot, and a whole galaxy to explore. The question is, is this the Star Wars game you’re looking for? Your first decision in Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is crucial: which trilogy to start with. We opted for the prequel movies, not because they’re our favorite (shout out to the original trilogy), but because the first Lego Star Wars game covered the prequel films back in 2005 and we want to poke at that nostalgia (and see how the games compare). After a classic Star Wars crawl about intergalactic taxes and trade blockades, the shiny, plastic forms of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn walk onto the screen in all their minifig glory. From there, it’s straight into what makes these games so charming: a cinematic that had us giggling immediately – Traveler’s Tales has lost none of its silly, self-referential humor over the years. If you’re familiar with the films, you might expect to start the game in that alarmingly clean conference room that totally isn’t a trap. Instead, Skywalker Saga’s take on the Phantom Menace kicks off with you in full control of the Republic starship on the way to the negotiations. It’s a tease at how much bigger this game is than the 2005 original. After landing on the Trade Federation’s donut-shaped starship, we walk around the large and ominously empty docking bay. A change that immediately jumps out is the camera, it now sits much closer to Qui-Gon than in the other Lego games, and it makes for a more intimate view of the action. We do what any self-respecting Jedi would do in this situation and begin to destroy every inanimate object in the room with our lightsaber. A little orange objective marker tries to get us to talk to a waiting protocol droid, but those boxes weren’t going to destroy themselves. Qui-Gon swings his lightsaber with weight, easily eviscerating the random assortment of objects around the room; he feels powerful to play, more so than in the Lego games that have come before. Naturally, we can also use the force to pick up the crates and containers around the room, smashing them against the walls to make them explode in a shower of colors and Lego studs (the small plastic pegs you use as currency). You can also throw your lightsaber at enemies (and boxes), using the force to pull it back to your lego hook hand, making for a devastating ranged attack. As soon as you open the Holoprojector, you get a sense of just how big The Skywalker Saga is. This menu screen shows a map of the entire galaxy, broken up into sectors. There are also tabs for characters (of which there are hundreds), ships, and skills.
