I would love Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga even if there were no space. It’s the best Lego game I’ve ever played, and it might even be the best Star Wars game. It more than delivers on TT Games’ promise that it would be the best Star Wars game ever.
If you’ve played any of the studio’s other Lego games, you won’t be surprised by the basic idea. You can play through a number of levels with characters from a licensed property. There are a million things to collect, and some of them can’t be obtained until you play a class with a different character. Those are the building blocks for something much bigger and more ambitious this time.
The Skywalker Saga covers all nine of the main Star Wars movies. You can start with The Phantom Menace, A New Hope, or The Force Awakens to play through the three trilogies. I had to start with the first two parts of the original trilogy, then move on to the prequels, and then go back to Return of the Jedi. Then it was time for the next part. I don’t see how the chapters could be played in any other order.
This Lego Star Wars game is huge in a way that other games haven’t been. Each episode has five levels, and there are open-world parts in between.
If you only do the main missions, it should take you between 18 and 20 hours to finish the story mode. But there are so many other things to do, like finding collectibles and going on side quests. You can also replay levels to get all the mini kits and finish the three challenges for each. As you play, more of the galaxy will open up to you, and you’ll be able to move between worlds at will. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that getting 100% completion in The Skywalker Saga, on top of finishing the story mode, will take another 25–30 hours.
And this is where I have a big problem. I know that Lego games are always about collecting things and having a lot to do. But I can’t ignore what we’ve heard about how this game was made.
In January, Polygon said that the people who worked on TT had to deal with a long-standing culture of “crunch,” which meant they had to work long hours to finish the game. Some staff members said that there were times when they worked 80 to 100 hours a week.
No game is important enough to put the physical and mental health of its developers at risk to get it out the door on an arbitrary schedule. Yes, The Skywalker Saga took a long time to complete.It would have been much better to push back the schedule by a few months or even longer so that team members could have a better balance between work and life.
It already feels like there’s too much to do in the game, so making things a little simpler, especially in the open-world areas, might have made their jobs easier. There is also some unnecessary back and forth between objectives to move the story along. I think that most of those time-consuming trips could have been done with cutscenes that were already in the game.
All of this is a real shame. The rumors about how the game was created have cast a large cloud over a significant achievement by a talented group of people. Without starting from scratch, they made something that rethinks what a Lego game can be while staying true to the series’ roots and capturing the spirit of Star Wars. That’s not easy.
The differences from the last game are big. Most of the time, the camera is now behind the character you’re controlling, and you can aim from a third-person view. Thanks to much better aiming, it feels better than ever to fire a blaster or throw a lightsaber.
This game is beautiful to look at and listen to. It has beautiful settings and worked well for me on PS5 (save for a couple of bugs that were fixed by restarting).
At times, the Skywalker Saga is laugh-out-loud funny, especially when it makes fun of well-known scenes from the Star Wars canon. One of the jokes that made me laugh was its take on the line, “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”
I don’t think that all of the new mechanics work perfectly, though. With the melee system being so focused on combos, time-to-kill often felt a bit too long. But that’s a minor complaint since the developers got so many other things right. I like the dogfighting scenes here a lot more than in Star Wars: Squadrons, for one thing.
The Skywalker Saga does a great job of putting all nine movies into one game without getting too bogged down in the backstory. TT fully embraces the absurdity of Star Wars to make what may be the best game in the series so far.
Just one more thing to do before I go finish celebrating Star Wars Day…
Movies from the last 20 years may have spoilers.
In this game, you can destroy a lot of things, including character models. In the open-world parts, I should be able to use a lightsaber to kill Anakin, Palpatine, or Jar Jar Binks and save the galaxy from a lot of trouble.
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