Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga goes back to where the Lego licensed games once began. The tried and true concept is completely reassembled, but not every brick will fit.
I’ve been building Star Wars spaceships out of Lego since I was seven years old. I still own some of the first generations of sets ever made by Lego. Namely the very first X-Wing from 1999. After that, there were other sets like the Millennium Falcon or the cool combination of Y-Wing and Darth Vader’s Tie-Fighter. The Tie-X1 turbo star fighter, to be precise.
So you could say: Lego Star Wars was my childhood. And even then, when I was actually a bit too old to actively play with the spaceships. In the meantime, they are more exhibits than toys. Although even today I occasionally pick one up, carry it through the air and make pew-pew noises.
But at some point, I no longer had to play with my Lego sets, but could live through the complete trilogy in the form of the unexpectedly entertaining Star Wars Lego games. The success of these games was the colourful bone of contention that brought all sorts of licensed Lego software after them, all of which copied the principle of Lego: Star Wars with slight modifications.
Why no final rating yet?
This is not an Early Access test, but you won’t find our typical rating box here for the time being. The reason for this is that, as a magazine for PC games, we primarily test and evaluate the PC versions. But we don’t have a test sample for the PC yet. So we played Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga completely on the PS5. That’s enough for a rating tendency, but not for a final verdict. We will try out the PC version as soon as we can and then give you our final rating.
If the technical condition of a game is very important to you, we advise you to be patient until then. Before then, we can’t comment on possible problems with the PC or any difficulties with the controls or graphics options.
Now it’s back to Star Wars to be a trailblazer. For Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga not only aims to combine all three trilogies into one, but puts aside the tried and tested manual and builds on it a little more free-spiritedly.
Consequently, I was more than jittery this year at the thought of finally playing it. And well, the result leaves me similarly ambivalent as a cool Lego set to what I consider to be terrible episodes 7 to 9, because Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga bogs down a lot of what I actually wanted, but still finds new ways to intrigue me.
Table of Contents
Transformed the gameplay
The predecessors to Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga were a refreshingly colourful mix. At their core, they were very linear story adventures that followed the plot from the first six films. Only here, the heroes and enemies were made of Lego, and even parts of the interior were made of colourful bricks. Spaceships, anyway.
On the one hand, enemies were dismantled with lightsabres and blasters, on the other hand, the furniture was destroyed in order to collect thousands of little bricks. Occasionally, the stones were reassembled to solve puzzles and open up new paths.
In essence, The Skywalker Saga remains true to this basic principle, yet it feels completely different from the first minute. This is because the camera is very close behind the character the whole time in the new adventure. Whereas the predecessors with their fixed camera angles and distanced view from above were reminiscent of hack-and-slash games, The Skywalker Saga has the flair of a third-person adventure.
This on the one hand drew me much more directly into this fantastic universe and made jumping passages easier, but on the other hand made finding hidden objects a little more awkward. Whereas the Lego games were never famous for their pretension anyway and a little more search work doesn’t hurt that much.
The gameplay differs most noticeably in the battles. Gone are the days when I would mindlessly hammer on a button and at most perform a jump attack every now and then. The Skywalker Saga now offers a fully-fledged combo system for close combat and plays like a real third-person shooter with blasters. Including cover mechanics!
There’s even a combo meter that I fill up with varied attacks (light attacks, jump attacks, special attacks), earning more stones for defeated enemies, which I need as currency for pretty much everything unlockable.
This actually plays very, very entertaining. Where neither cover nor combos are really necessary to overcome the jam-building opponents. The Skywalker Saga remains as soft as Banthafell in terms of toughness and shouldn’t present much of a challenge even to an Ewok with right-left weakness.
Deaths are still only rewarded with the temporary loss of a few stones and dying at all is already a great art. But the challenge is almost never the point of Lego. That’s why it’s so important that I can be more creative in the battles, experiment with combos and even actively use the Force to throw tables or enemies around. This is a lot of fun even without pretension!
The universe expanded
In addition to the new and improved gameplay, the development studio TT Games has made a few structural changes. If you have already seen trailers or similar promo material for The Skywalker Saga, you may have been puzzled by the following sentence: Explore the galaxy!
This sounds like an open-world approach that doesn’t really fit in with the stringent narrative of the Lego games. Actually, it was always about playing through all the episodes in one go and not going parsecs off course to explore some planet beyond the Outer Rim.
So does The Skywalker Saga now have an open world? No, not really. But unlike in the predecessors, the universe no longer consists of linear levels, but of a total of 52 hub worlds. Sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, sometimes airless space. As a rule, there is at least one open area on every planet that appears in the cinematic saga. Important planets like Tatooine or Coruscant even have several.
When you follow the story, however, you cannot explore the individual worlds at will, but must first unlock them through story missions. For example, Qui-Go-Jin and Obi-Wan Kenobi must first reach the city world of Coruscant before you are allowed to go to the planet voluntarily. Depending on which trilogy you start with, this will open up other planets to you later on;
Within these hub worlds there are always story missions, which usually last about 15 minutes, but occasionally only two. However, since an open area is not suitable for every film scene, the selection is additionally supplemented by classic levels. That is, 45 self-contained areas that are more reminiscent of the individual game sections of the predecessors. These include air battles or lightsaber duels, for example.
And this is the moment where I have to say: Lego Star Wars … we need to talk.
The prequels dismantled
Because there’s a reason why I was really crassly disappointed with Lego Star Wars, especially in my first few hours of play. Being a cultured person, I naturally started with Episode 1, though it would also be possible to start with Episode 4 and even Episode 7 is unlocked from the start. The rest are unlocked only after completing the immediate prequels.
And for some reason, the prequels in The Skywalker Saga are terribly implemented. I get it, older vintages in particular will quip, “It’s not because of The Skywalker Saga!” But we don’t want to start a quality debate about the prequels here. From a purely gameplay point of view, the prequels in The Skywalker Saga bear no relation to the other two trilogies. And it’s not as if the sequels have a more glamorous reputation.
However, while the level, and open-world sections in Episode 4 to 9 are all motivating, the gameplay sections of Episode 1, 2 and (part of) 3 are mostly laughably short or uninspired. None of the levels are as extensive as in earlier Lego games. This is equally true of the later episodes, but at least there the plot is expanded a little more creatively. For example, I get to search for Luke on Hoth with Han Solo using my tauntaun, solving minor puzzles to reach the tops of three radio towers and messing with Imperial search droids in the meantime. This doesn’t happen in the films, but it’s fun!
In the prequels, on the other hand, even decisive battles like the battle for the palace of Theed are dealt with entirely in cutscenes. Instead, I get to chug around in a lame underwater level with my bongo and shoot at fish.
Those who don’t force themselves to voluntarily give the story a brief rest in Episode 1 and instead explore the open areas between levels at length will have flown through this episode faster than Han Solo flew the Cauldron route. However, even if you want to explore, these areas don’t give too much away initially, as you’ll need to unlock new characters for most of the puzzles in the hub worlds.
Hundreds of unlocks built in
It takes no more than ten hours to play through the story of The Skywalker Saga. But then you will have flown through the campaign at the speed of light and ignored everything in the open worlds. There is truly a lot to discover here.
The long-term motivation of Lego Star Wars is collecting. Not only the endless little currency stones, but also various other items. Especially in the planetary areas there are lots of optional puzzles, quests, battles and hidden places where you can find special items. The most common of these are pale blue kyber stones. But there are also new starships, mini-kits, data cards and a huge amount of playable characters. There are 380 of them in total, but at least you unlock some of them by playing the campaign.
As is typical for the series, you won’t be able to solve every puzzle in every area right from the start. As usual, the 380 characters are divided into character classes. Each of them has its own abilities. Jedi or Sith make stones fly and can control NPCs, heroes use grappling hooks, scrap collectors craft weapons, bounty hunters overheat gold blocks, astromechs hack terminals, protocol droids translate foreign languages, villains blow up steel and villains recognise weak points in door controls.
Many puzzles always require the use of a certain character class. Consequently, you can’t unlock very much in the areas of the trilogy you start with. This hurts especially in episodes 1 and 2, where there is hardly anything else to do in the areas and where the individual levels offer little playful variety.
My tip: It’s better to start with Episode 4, because there are much more exciting tasks for you right away. The fact that the hub worlds unfold so little at the beginning can be annoying, but it has a very good reason. It motivates you to unlock all the characters and return to places that were previously closed off. And that’s exactly how Lego Star Wars wants to keep us playing even after the last episode.
However, you must have the will in you to want to solve the little puzzles. Because said cyber crystals are not a great incentive in themselves. You can only use them to level up the individual character classes and thus cause more damage or obtain new abilities. Astromechs like R2-D2, for example, can distract enemies with a Jar Jar Binks hologram.
That’s nice, but there’s simply no need for these upgrades. Apart from a few crunchy puzzles, the game can be mastered without any difficulty. Personally, I therefore had no interest in doing any more damage. The fights were too easy for me from the start and there are no difficulty levels at all apart from some game settings for path guidance or regeneration. So at some point the kyber stones piled up because I didn’t want to level up any more.
The fact that I still felt the urge to collect more and more of them speaks for the puzzle design and the collecting mania that The Skywalker Saga triggered in me. The quest for new characters and spaceships is also motivating, regardless of the skill system.
Built on the love of Star Wars
The whole thing leaves the impression that TT Games focused too much on filling the hub worlds with interesting activities and collectibles during development, while a detailed recreation of the films rather suffered. And it is indeed very annoying when great moments like the flight into the second Death Star, the battle for Theed or the duel between Sidious and Mace Windu are not playable. I had hoped that this collection would really cover all the legendary film moments in terms of gameplay.
Fortunately, as I mentioned, these shortcomings only really hurt the first episodes, while later ones can be gotten over. The loving staging also contributes its share. There were truly people at work here who burned the words Star Wars into their hearts with a soldering gun.
The cutscenes recreate the events of the films extremely charmingly and with a lot of wit, and thanks to the voice-over they manage to present the plot in a comprehensible way in all brevity. As before, the slapstick is a more reliable guarantor for smiles than the dialogue, which also provides funny moments. When Padmé asks Anakin about his nightmare and whether there was a lot of sand in it, that deserves a laugh.
Scenes like these and others show the attention to detail and understanding of the fan culture behind Star Wars. And they highlight how many insider gags and memes have since been added since the first Lego Star Wars games.
This would all be even better if the German voice-over didn’t make you gnash your teeth in parts. At least you can switch to English at any time or even activate the mumble mode instead. Then the characters babble as incomprehensibly as in the first Lego Star Wars games. However, this is not more than a nice gimmick, because unlike in the past, the cutscenes do not assume that you cannot understand the characters.
Built in co-op mode
The Skywalker Saga usually takes greater liberties with the plot when only one playable character would actually be conceivable. Luke, for example, fights together with R2-D2 against Vader on Bespin and when Anakin takes down the Sand People, he takes C-3PO with him for some reason.
Because Lego Star Wars has always lived from its co-op mode and therefore there always had to be a reason to make two characters playable. It’s just annoying that the co-op in The Skywalker Saga drops significantly in comparison to the past. Since the camera is now stuck directly behind the characters, there is no longer a shared screen in co-op, but instead a perspective-limited split screen, which makes the image section far too small and the overview completely disappears. Probably also for this reason, the open areas and levels offer significantly fewer opportunities to work together in puzzles and battles.
An online multiplayer mode could at least help with the overview, but it is incomprehensibly missing. You can only play with each other in local co-op, which is much less fun than in the previous games because of the lack of an overview.
As in so many places, The Skywalker thus misses out on its gigantic potential. Basically, the action adventure shows great new approaches, a lot of love for the template and motivates with numerous collection options. At the same time, every inaccessibility feels like a Lego brick under the bare sole of your foot.
It’s not even possible to relive the story campaign after playing through it with the same save game and unlocked characters. Instead, you are only allowed to repeat the five linear levels per episode, which only make up a fraction of the game and its fascination. Even the story tasks in the open worlds are denied to you. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
It’s incomprehensible design decisions like this that really leave me flabbergasted and keep pulling me out of my Lego dream. The Skywalker Saga, at least from episode 4 to 9 and for soloists, is a charming as well as action-packed and extensive adventure that you can have a lot of fun with for quite a while. Just not as much fun as would have been possible and as I would have liked as a long-time fan of spaceships with Lego studs.
Preliminary Score Box
Editor’s conclusion
I find it very puzzling why the prequels and episode 1 in particular deviate so much in quality from the rest. Because you would actually think that the developers would have an interest in making a good impression right off the bat. Admittedly, The Skywalker Saga pushes me a bit to start with Episode 4. For example, this episode is the first to be selected when I start the game. But seriously, that’s missing the target audience! I understand the arguments why someone who doesn’t know Star Wars should start with episode 4, but everyone else wants to experience the story chronologically in most cases.
What I want to say is: The danger that someone starts with Episode 1 (ONE) is incredibly high. Especially as this game is very much aimed at Star Wars fans and not newcomers. But well, I’m getting a bit hung up on that too. Personally, I was really looking forward to playing through the prequels again. And at least Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is getting better and better! Episode 2 is already more entertaining. Episode 3 even more so. And from Episode 4 onwards, the campaign gets really good. Yes, episodes 7, 8 and 9 are also fun. Even if some may lack passion here.
In general, it should be emphasised again how much better The Skywalker Saga plays than earlier parts. And the films have never been depicted as extensively as they are now in a single game. However, much more would have been possible, and you can feel that the team floundered at times during development, because they obviously made compromises in some places. But at the end of the day, they still managed to complete an entertaining action game whose foundation is crumbling a bit, but which is full of love for Star Wars.
