Skywalker Saga fun, but a little forced
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Available on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S Developer: TT Games Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
When you play Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, you can see the vast blueprint TT Games drafted for its creation. The studio has reimagined the Lego game's combat system, not just by changing the player's point of view but by introducing an entire levelling system for different classes of characters. You're able to explore every world from the Star Wars universe, but in that expansiveness, sometimes searching for largely meaningless ingame items and completing fetch quests, the greatest revelation is a question: Was this ambitious vision for The Skywalker Saga worth its cost?
To be clear, the game is entertaining, leaning into its witty trademark humour and delivering the sort of nostalgia that will compel you to impulsively relive your childhood. The game is also the best iteration of the Lego franchise. But the box set of all nine episodes is filled with numerous pieces that I skipped over entirely — and that's not just because I rushed to write this review. Parts of The Skywalker Saga feel unnecessary, which is frustrating because the people who made the game say they crunched six days a week to get it out the door.
The game stretches a bit thin across the many galaxies it's attempting to re-create. Whether you're walking through the streets of Coruscant or Naboo, the scenes are just places for you to find more studs (the in-game currency) or Kyber bricks (which help you level up along with studs). I don't believe every page of the studio's plan needed to exist — especially, again, when you consider the amount of overtime reportedly required to piece together this massive Lego set.
The Skywalker Saga tells the combined story of all nine Star Wars episodes, stretching from the blockade of Naboo to the rise of the Final Order on Exegol. When you start the game, you get the chance to play through the series at the beginning of any of the three-episode arcs, with The Phantom Menace, A New Hope or The Force Awakens. And like all the Lego games from TT Games, The Skywalker Saga is an abbreviated version of the movies, briskly moving you through the key moments from every episode in several missions that require you to fight enemies, build tools and solve puzzles to advance.
The crowning achievement of The Skywalker Saga is that it never takes the franchise too seriously. TT Games managed to turn even the most questionable plot lines from The Rise of Skywalker into palatable moments. There are plenty of times where the game had me chuckling to myself on the couch. Anakin Skywalker is always complaining about sand — even long after his death. And Luke Skywalker is always searching for that strange blue milk he drinks on his hermit island.