LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Review

Both Star Wars and LEGO hold a special place in my heart. They’re both things that have been with me throughout my whole life and have continually been some of my favourite forms of entertainment. So obviously when those two worlds collide again I couldn’t help but be excited for The Skywalker Saga to finally release. It’s the first time some of the later Star Wars films have received a video game adaptation of any kind, and it’s immense amount of characters to unlock and quests to complete will keep you busy for a very long time. Best of all, just like LEGO itself, the game has plenty on offer to be enjoyed by players of any age.

One of the core selling points of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was that it will contain all 9 of the mainline Star Wars movies in one game. And it absolutely delivers on that promise. This is also the first time that The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker have received a playable version, LEGO or otherwise, so I was pretty excited to be able to play around with the new worlds and characters introduced in those films. On top of that, there is also content for The Skywalker Saga that includes nods to scenes and also unlockable characters from Rogue One, Solo and the Mandalorian too.

Upon starting the game, you’ll be able to jump in and start playing at the beginning of any of the 3 core trilogies. This allows you to choose your own jumping off point and can begin with The Phantom Menace, A New Hope or The Force Awakens. You will need to play through the chosen trilogy chronologically though once you’ve started it, so for example, if Revenge of the Sith is your favourite, you will have to complete the main missions for both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones before you’ll gain access to the third story of the prequel trilogy.

If you’ve played any previous LEGO games, the first thing you’ll notice with The Skywalker Saga is that it’s had a bit of a change up with it’s overall presentation and combat systems. The game features a more cinematic, over the shoulder view of the player character which helps further enforce the feeling of playing the movies and also living in the diverse worlds that make up the Star Wars universe. The over the shoulder view was likely also introduced for better playability when controlling characters that use blasters as their primary form of attack as the third person aiming and shooting does feel really nice, and unlike what is normally experienced in LEGO titles. Visually, it’s also the best looking LEGO game that’s ever been released, incorporating many current graphical techniques and lighting to look incredibly vibrant. For those characters that focus more on melee and lightsaber/weapon combat the game has also introduced a new combo system where your character can perform different melee techniques that are each mapped to a different face button (cross, square and circle on the PS5).

Most enemy characters are also capable of blocking attacks which requires you to perform a different combat attack to break their guard, this encourages you to perform varied combos rather than just spam a single attack button endlessly. Unfortunately when it comes to enemies that shoot from a distance, they’re just as useful as they’ve always appeared, with the game putting up little challenge when it comes to surviving against shooting enemies. There is often terrain in the combat areas that can be used as shielded cover but I rarely ever felt the need to use it as the Stormtroopers seem to fit their typical trope of being unable to shoot straight.

Even though the Skywalker Saga is heavily based around the Star Wars license, it is first and foremost a LEGO game. If you love the quirky, humorous take that TT Games put on their licensed LEGO titles, you’re going to have a great time. The game captures the scope, design and sound of the Star Wars universe but tells the story with the typical LEGO game humorous twists and turns. And for those that want that really classic LEGO game experience, there’s even a mumble mode that can be activated too.

Being a LEGO game, there’s a ton of things to do and diverse options for replayability. The game has close to 400 characters and ships to unlock, many of which you’ll come across throughout your time playing through the 3 trilogies. Many others though will require you to jump back into the game’s stages in free-play where you can switch and swap between your unlocked characters on the fly to gain access to new areas that weren’t accessible with the fixed characters you’re required to use during the story mode and then often solve environmental puzzles to unlock new characters.

I also loved that many parts of the game can only be accessed via using the right characters. As the game takes place over a whole universe, I loved that some character NPCs would only talk to playable characters of a certain race or class alignment and for those that wouldn’t be able to understand them to accept the mission, the text box when speaking to them looks like an unreadable language.

Unfortunately, something I did miss that I have enjoyed playing around with in previous LEGO games was the custom character creator mode. While this was confirmed pre-release, I still missed the ability to create a fully customer character that could traverse the Star Wars universe, getting to fully pick their appearance, skill set and powers. Fingers crossed it comes in a future update because it’s something I personally really want to fiddle around with.

I did encounter a number of bugs throughout my time with the game too. While I didn’t encounter any full game crashes, I did come across a few instances of character’s disappearing into the environment, getting stuck in invisible walls and did have some mission breaking bugs that required a restart of the checkpoint to resolve. Overall though with the huge number of hours I put into the game, these were thankfully few and far between overall.

Final Thoughts

Overall LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is not only a fantastic LEGO title, but a truly great and respectful take on the Star Wars stories. It provides hours upon hours of things to do, find and collect But above all, it’s incredible to explore many of the ships and planets we’ve come to love from the Star Wars franchise. Many of which are appearing in video game form for the first time. The sound design, puts you right into the Star Wars universe immediately from the time you boot it up. And just like LEGO, there’s plenty to love here for gamers of all ages.

A PS5 review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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