Adventure. Excitement. Jedi craves not these things. If that’s the case, then all Jedi must cancel their pre-orders for LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, as this dazzling new installment in the long-running LEGO game series from Traveller’s Tales has brought both adventure and excitement in a plastic bucket. With stunning set pieces taken from all nine main Star Wars films and an astonishingly vast number of iconic hub planets that can be freely explored in between, The Skywalker Saga is a brick-breaking blockbuster executed with silly charm that made me feel as happy as a droid in a hot oil bath.
Diverging sharply from the top-down camera perspective of previous LEGO games, The Skywalker Saga has a more over-the-shoulder third-person view, typical of Gears of War or Uncharted, and it brings much greater control over your attacks. Lightsabers can be thrown like boomerangs, boxes can be pushed with satisfying accuracy, and a simple combo system allows for easy juggling of enemies in mid-air for a flurry of saber strikes. The battles as a Jedi or Sith may not have the depth of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, but nonetheless, it is fast, smooth, and fantastic.
If you’re controlling a blaster-wielding character, you now have the ability to take cover behind walls and other objects to take out enemies from a distance, and switching between cover can be done with a press of a button. (Similar cover mechanics were in the 2016 game LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but only in certain sections of the level).
I like that in this system, there’s the ability to quickly rebuild destroyed cover (as do enemies), but except for a couple of specific boss fights, I almost never felt the need to take cover behind anything. In The Skywalker Saga, the combination of constantly replenishing health and the genuine inaccuracy of every Stormtrooper’s shots meant that hardly anyone takes the risk of running and shooting. I still enjoyed playing The Skywalker Saga, but more for its spectacle than for its shallow attempts at strategy.
The new close-up perspective not only allows for a better sense of immersion in the action but also provides an opportunity to appreciate how realistically every individual LEGO brick is rendered. Hot Wheels Unleashed set a new standard for high plastic realism in virtual form in 2021, and The Skywalker Saga unquestionably matches it down to the last plastic seam and textured hair, with the paint on the minifigs convincingly chipping off after extended use, as if it were a beloved toy. Every single LEGO creation looks so lifelike that when you drop a perfectly assembled TIE Fighter made of 1000 pieces from the sky, you can almost hear the screams of parents who spent the entire Sunday helping their child put it together.
The LEGO games have always brought a Spaceballs-style sense of fun to the recreation of iconic Star Wars scenes, and The Skywalker Saga is no different, constantly seeking to find the bright side of the Force even in the darkest situations. Whether it’s Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader discussing the new Death Star while rows of Stormtroopers awkwardly topple like dominoes or a bewildered Darth Sidious accidentally issuing Order 67 instead of 66 and making all the clone troopers spontaneously start disco dancing instead of committing mass Jedi genocide, The Skywalker Saga consistently finds a way to gently poke fun at its source material with surprisingly absurd and hilarious results. It’s amazing how even the events of “The Rise of Skywalker” are much more enjoyable when they are deliberately ridiculous rather than unintentionally so.
Not only did the humor of The Skywalker Saga keep me entertained, but also the variety of missions. While they may not be as bold and inventive as 2021’s “It Takes Two,” the 45 main story levels constantly change up the scenery, so the action never becomes dull. The Saga is capable of delivering mindless carnage on a grand scale, such as when the Battle of Naboo briefly turns into an exciting tower defense game, and you gleefully hurl energy balls from Gungan catapults to destroy hordes of droids and Trade Federation tanks. However, it can also be more focused and cerebral, such as when Rey enters the mirror cave on Ahch-To island, and you carefully puppeteer her reflections to reach the Portal switches.
Of course, it’s not all just catering to fan standards, and The Skywalker Saga does indeed have levels designed for high-speed pod racing, trench runs in X-Wings, and all the major lightsaber duels you’d expect. But even in the most familiar moments, the campaign remains enjoyable because it is so smooth and engaging. The only hiccup is that strict adherence to the cinematic storytelling style can sometimes feel too rigid. For example, in one boss fight with Kylo Ren, I reduced his health to zero, but the battle continued for another minute arbitrarily, just so I could press a button to go through the remaining quicktime events.
Each story mission is connected to surprisingly large central hubs located on over 20 different planets, from the sandy streets of Mos Eisley on Tatooine to the polished surfaces of the financial district on Coruscant, and everywhere in between. These open spaces are filled with hidden cyber-bricks that need to be collected by solving various puzzles, and while there are some recurring tasks throughout the galaxy – stacking boxes to reach suspended cyber-bricks seems to be a popular task regardless of which planet you’re on – there are plenty of other fun little surprises to stumble upon along the way. I particularly enjoyed the Kamino task inspired by the game Lemmings, where you had to adjust a series of platforms to prevent a hapless clone from rolling to his DOOM, or organizing a Wookiee choir on Kashyyyk to angrily bark while performing John Williams’ signature music.
The collected cyber-bricks serve as currency that can be invested in upgrades – either in general advantages shared by all characters or in class-specific enhancements. While many of the main upgrades felt pointless to me, such as increasing the radius in which your character automatically collects dropped studs or increasing the speed of item creation, most of the class-specific upgrades felt unnecessary, considering that the difficulty level of The Skywalker Saga is already too easy. What incentive is there to give bounty hunters the ability to detect enemies through walls when I can easily take out anyone on the other side with a couple of blaster bolts, even if they catch me off guard?
While I mostly stuck to the objective and focused on completing the main missions, after finishing all the story missions, I spent several more hours revisiting favorite locations and doing side quests to unlock additional characters, and then swapping them out in my tourist group to utilize their unique abilities for specific tasks. It’s in these moments, when you fly from one solar system to another and descend to the surface of a planet to fulfill missions for the locals, that The Skywalker Saga starts to resemble a delightful Mass Effect for minifigures. And if you ever get tired of exploration and action-platforming, blazing your way through multiple planets, you can always just pick your favorite starship and go into orbit for impromptu dogfights. The Skywalker Saga truly has plenty to keep you occupied, and even though I spent over 20 hours in the game, it feels like I’ve only scratched the surface – it seems there’s enough LEGO cars and minifigures here to fill several hundred letters to Santa.
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