LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has made large strides in the series’ design, including many openly explorable areas, but those have come at great expense to the game’s retelling of the movies’ story. LEGO Skywalker Saga adapts all nine mainline Star Wars films and combines them into a gorgeous package, complete with many gameplay improvements from previous LEGO games. The adaptions of the popular films’ stories have taken a back seat in LEGO Skywalker Saga to the open ended hub worlds, where the game’s focus clearly lies.
When players first begin the game, they are able to start from the beginning of any of the three Star Wars trilogies. This means the early levels are pulled straight from The Phantom Menace, A New Hope, and The Force Awakens. Other than this restriction, the order that LEGO Skywalker Saga is played in is up to the player, but it ultimately won’t really matter since the game glosses over the narrative anyway. The gameplay can be very fun, and it’s nice that the engaging content isn’t detracted from by extensive cutscenes, but the LEGO reenactments are part of the game’s appeal.
Many cutscenes are noticeably short, with one or two characters having only a single line before the cutscene ends entirely, or shifts to another sequence. This leaves very little room for the game to get in the series’ signature humor, and some of the physical comedy will happen in the background while a joke is being told simultaneously. Not much of the story is presented during gameplay either, with nearly every story mission being quite brief and linear, which contributes to LEGO Skywalker Saga‘s rather short completion time even though there are nine films to play through.
LEGO Skywalker Saga Expects Players To Know The Plot
Incredibly short cutscenes and main missions creates a strange situation where LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga barely even has a narrative. It is obviously conveying the well-known plot of the Star Wars movies, but the Minifigure characters pop up to tell a joke or briefly mention a motivation before the player is ushered into the next open-world segment. The game practically expects the player to have seen all the Star Wars movies, which is admittedly a significant part of LEGO Skywalker Saga‘s demographic, but it leaves little more than an extremely barebones adaption. The game is generally a celebration of the series, with so many beautifully realized locations, hundreds of playable Star Wars characters, and a similarly large list of flyable spaceships, but a huge chunk of the game often feels absent with the emphasis on hub world exploration.
Main missions tend to feel like vehicles to get the player to the next open area, a design which turns more of the game into something almost synonymous with the series’ longstanding Free Roam mode. This becomes a trade-off because the freedom of exploration is where LEGO Skywalker Saga shines, and some story quests are adequately implemented into the hub worlds, but the more linear main missions have become much shorter and less intricate than in previous LEGO Star Wars games. At times it feels like as much of each Star Wars movie as possible has been grafted onto the open world format, leaving only the largest set pieces to become truncated space battles, boss fights that don’t work well in co-op, or other similarly novel gameplay sequences. For those who like the collectathons offered by the LEGO games, the time will be well spent, but anyone hoping for a thorough, brick-filled, comedic adaption of the movies might find LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga a bit lacking.
