Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Review

There are few things in this galaxy as iconic as Lego and Star Wars. In one way or another, both influenced our childhood and now impact our kids and millions of adults around the world. Two separate universes, Lego and Star Wars, have provided us with some of the most amazing toys and experiences.

Bringing the best of two worlds, the Lego Star Wars games became a paragon of entertainment in gaming. 

The first game in the series, Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, came out in 2005, and the universe created by Traveller's Tales (now TT Games) was impossible to ignore. Bringing the best of two worlds, the Lego Star Wars games became a paragon of entertainment in gaming. 

With its sixth and latest installment in the series, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, TT Games has made yet another massive contribution to the Lego Star Wars universe. In this Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga review, we are looking at one of the most anticipated and most comprehensive (and, probably, one of the best) Lego games of recent years. 

First, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is not a single game with one storyline but a collection of games, each following the original nine movies broken down into trilogies. There are nine episodes in the game, with each episode taking you on an adventure through the events of the corresponding film and its legendary characters. 

At the same time, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga doesn’t feel like a mere anthology. Moving from trilogy to trilogy feels more like roaming the familiar universe than hopping from one title to another. You’re free to choose the trilogy order to complete the game, and nothing stops you from completing one episode in, say, the original trilogy and then moving on to The Force Awakens trilogy (the one with Rey), completing the first episode there and moving back to the original one. 

Whatever order of completing the game you choose, you’re guaranteed to have tons of excitement, reliving the most iconic movie scenes and dialogues. Add ridiculously and, often, beyond-explaining Lego humor to it, and you’ll get the complete picture of what kind of fun awaits you.

As with other Lego-themed video games, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga features a world made of Lego bricks, where almost any medium-sized object could be dismantled. All you need is to apply some force: you can crush the items with your character’s fists, shoot them, cut through them with a lightsaber, and throw them with Jedi force. Whatever destruction method you choose, make sure to collect the debris, the so-called studs, that can buy you new characters, ships, and upgrades.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga features an almost entirely accurate cast of 400 characters, each with its unique voice, animation, and personality (reportedly causing headaches for developers and designers). While you can choose between only a handful of characters completing the main story, you’re free to return to the location in a free play mode with any character you’ve already unlocked.

The freedom of exploration is probably amongst the best features of the game. The developers have put enormous effort into building a universe that is both huge and cozy, making you want to come back to it after completing the episode. You’re free to do so, thanks to the free play mode (where you don’t have to achieve the objective) that becomes available after completing the episode. 

In general, replaying the episodes in free play mode is sensible for most players. The thing is, you don’t always have enough time or required characters to uncover all the rooms and secrets of a given location. 

For example, completing an episode, following the main objectives only, will give you around 30-35 percent of completion. Meaning that you didn’t discover at least 65-70 percent of things. And these are not just studs. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga allows you to collect Kyberbricks (required for upgrades) and Minikits (can give you plenty of rewards), which are scattered around the map and often need solving a puzzle or two.

One of my favorite elements of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is not its playability and comfortable level of difficulty but the amount of ridiculous humor you encounter while playing.

If you’ve seen any of the Lego movies in the past, you know what I mean. The creators of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga found a way to introduce absurd elements into almost every “important” scene of the original movies, making it impossible not to laugh (even just inside) about the ridiculousness of the situation. 

If anything, this approach to seemingly serious moments of the Star Wars movies (along with the destructible universe) is another reminder that even great Star Wars is just a piece of fiction that should not be taken seriously.

You don’t have to do a bunch to find the ridiculous. Just take the wrong door and encounter a group of stormtroopers practicing taichi or high-intensity interval training. Enter the room you’re not supposed to enter, and you’ll find another stormtrooper sipping coffee while aimlessly looking at the surveillance monitor. 

The absurdity and ridiculousness have been Lego credo both in film and video games for years, and, in this sense, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga does not bring anything new to the table. And this is perfectly fine because it is the Lego-kind- of-fun we love and expect from any new Lego-themed title.

The sixth installment in the Lego Star Wars series, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is not a radical departure from the previous titles. Still, it is the most complete game in the series, bringing nine stories from the original movies under one hood.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest selling points of the game, its relentless humor, becomes the game's weakest point. Despite the game being cohesive and featuring a wide range of characters, ships, and great locations, it sometimes feels a bit repetitive and lacks anything else except pure fun. And while it may be fun to revisit certain areas in the game in a free play mode, the benefits of replaying the game at a later point in the future are not clear. 

After all, one of the major driving forces of the game is humor. And we all know that nothing is funny twice.