Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga isn’t a game made for me. I’m a 28-year-old who grew up watching and loving the prequels and was obsessed with the original Lego games. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a great game in the right circumstances, and I still loved my time reliving some of my favorite Star Wars moments through a Lego lens. It also gave me an appreciation for the past that I wasn’t expecting.
“I feel the good in you, the conflict.”—Luke Skywalker, Return of the Jedi.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has been a long time coming, and is seemingly a galaxy away from what it could have been. The biggest expectation I had for Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was for it to completely revolutionize Lego games as we know them and directly focus its design on those of us who grew up with the original Lego Star Wars games. However unfair, the original Lego Star Wars games have been placed on a pedestal that many of us fans look upon with rose-tinted glasses. Playing through The Skywalker Saga, one thing became abundantly clear: this wasn’t made for us, and that’s okay.
You see, the Lego games have been and always be made for young children. Adults, many of whom grew up with Legos and Lego Star Wars themselves, can enjoy it as well, but it’s an appreciation that not all things grow along with us. As I get older, having seen the Star Wars prequels in theaters as a child and then the sequels in college, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga hit me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. It has the child-like glee of seeing your favorite characters on screen again, with all of the nostalgic goosebumps creeping up with every swell of John Williams’ score. It also has some of the most simplistic gameplay systems in any lego game.
Five-year-old Alex would have loved Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga in 1999 having just come out of the theater seeing The Phantom Menace. Twenty-eight-year-old Alex, having just earned the platinum from Elden Ring (humble-brag), often found The Skywalker Saga drug in areas and felt like a bore in others. I find it hard to review a game like Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga because it elicits so many nostalgic feelings, all the while feeling like a game that can be played on autopilot. So that’s why I’m not
going to be looking at it through the lens of my current 28-year-old self, but rather approach everything as though I were a kid again; plastic lightsaber strapped to my hip, running through the backyard and all.
Firstly, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has finally flipped the script on its moment-to-moment gameplay. No longer mostly top-down, every Minifigure is controlled through a 3rd person view that gives the illusion of complete and total freedom. It’s fun running around small open-world sections in some of the best Star Wars locales, even if they never make canonical sense. Riding through Hoth as Jar-Jar Binks on a Taun Taun is something I didn’t think I would giggle about for an hour, but there I was. Every minifig is categorized into specialized classes that can be upgraded through a skill tree; which includes Jedi, Villains, Scoundrels, and much more. Each skill tree is simplified into four skills each, but none of them have any tremendous gameplay impact outside of overall health and build-speed. It keeps the gameplay fast and doesn’t concern itself with making the game harder if you don’t want to focus on collecting every Kyber brick.
Kyber bricks are the upgrade currency in The Skywalker Saga, along with the typical Lego studs being used to purchase different minifigs that are unlocked playing through different missions. There are a ton of these to find, to the tune of 1,000+ bricks. Most are unlocked via in-level challenges or overworld puzzles that need to be solved. Unfortunately, Lego The Skywalker Saga doesn’t do a great job at describing each level’s challenges before starting the mission, outside of needing to buy “rumors” using Lego studs to reveal what the challenges are. While it encourages replaying each level multiple times to unlock everything, some of the missions are quite a bore to get through.
Each Star Wars film has been painstakingly recreated, down to the very stud of every Lego model. From the attention to detail in Leia’s voice (she starts A New Hope with a British accent, but quickly goes into an American accent as the story progresses), to the hilarious gags like Obi-Wan’s “high ground” meme. In terms of raw Lego jokes, The Skywalker Saga is above everything that’s come before. I was rolling around laughing at their brilliance at making Jar Jar Binks a more idiotic character than he is in the movies, or Palpatine’s secret not being so secret. All that being said, the attention to detail seems to be a bit more prevalent in the original trilogy as opposed to the prequels or sequels.
It seems the bulk of the development love went directly into the original trilogy movies. Between A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, every level is well-thought and meaningful with its layout and puzzle design. It felt as though I was playing through each of those movies, with every plot point easily being plugged into Lego’s system. The same can’t be said for the prequels and sequels, however. Most of the essential plot points and moments throughout the prequels felt rushed and were over in a blink. The Battle of Geonosis came and went in a blink, and only the Dual of the Fates (Anakin v. Obi-Wan from Ep. 3) felt as epic and important as it should. Contrast that with any moment from the original trilogy, where every battle and major moment is recreated in amazing detail.
Boss battles are another aspect that feels a bit rushed at the end of major story segments. I was very much looking forward to the battle against Darth Maul, my favorite lightsaber battle of any of the movies, only to find that fighting him resulted in one or two combat scenarios to take him down. While there are cinematic lightsaber standoffs that show each Minifigure growling at each other, the strategy to beat each boss often resulted in running up and beating them up. I was hoping that TT Games would incorporate more puzzles into their boss battles to make them each stand out from each other, but was left disappointed with the lack of variety.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga isn’t a game made for me. I’m a 28-year-old who grew up watching and loving the prequels and was obsessed with the original Lego games. I came into this review thinking it was something that was going to blow my mind and change Lego games forever; when it’s a game that’s sole intent is to give the younger generation something to love. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a great game in the right circumstances, and I still loved my time reliving some of my favorite Star Wars moments through a Lego lens. It also gave me an appreciation for the past that I wasn’t expecting.
