We've been waiting for this for years, and it's finally coming! This June, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be released for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox 1, PSVita, 3DS, Wii U, and PC. It's been FIVE WHOLE YEARS since our last Lego Star Wars adventure. This was my childhood, everybody. There's no way to count how many hours I spent on LSW: The Complete Saga. But will the game live up to the previous Lego Star Wars titles? Here are five reasons Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens deserves our excitement.1: The Characters Get ready to play as Rey, Finn, Kylo, and more. Personally, I'm excited to play as BB-8. Because he's the best, and I'm excited to see if they've improved on droid gameplay at all.2: Flight Levels Even though I'm a devoted fan on these games, I have to admit that the flight levels in The Complete Saga could be cumbersome (Don't get me started on the impossible pod-racing level!). The dev team at TT Games seems to have noticed this and have promised two new types of flight levels.
One is 'dog-fights in space', which sounds great. The other type are 'arena based fights'. They have not yet revealed exactly what that means, but anything beats the dang pod-racing!3: Dynamic Building In past games, you built Lego objects to solve puzzles. In TFA, you can build one thing, then tear it down and build another. That's very intriguing to me because it adds a real world Lego element to the game.4: Setting TFA had some amazing locals. Rey's home, the desert planet of Jakku, was particularly breath-taking and I can't wait to see it translated into Lego. Takodana also added some beauty to the space opera, and we'll hopefully get some open world areas on these planets to explore!5: New (presumably canon) Story This is without a doubt the most exciting part of this game. LSW:TFA will feature a new story, bridging the gap between Episode 6 and Episode 7. Don't expect Rey's parents to be revealed or anything like that, however we might assume that some levels (or one level) will focus on Luke and Kylo - specifically Kylo's fall to the dark side.
After all, "there's too much Vader in him".If all of that doesn't excite you, try this on for size - a Lego version of the first trailer we got for The Force Awakens: I'm sure this game will be great. It's predecessors definitely were. Lego Star Wars already has a fantastic track record and with the addition of new stories, new flight levels, and our favorite new characters from The Force Awakens,this is shaping up to be a must play game. Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes out on June 28 2016 on the platforms mentioned above. Are you excited for the next chapter in Lego Star Wars?I'll tell you why in the comments below!I'll comment or post about it! What Ever Happened To Viral Star Chris Crocker? His Fame-Fueled Life After 'Leave Britney Alone!' Happily Never After: This Fan Art Reveals the Darker Sides to the Stories That Inspired Disney Classics Kick Off 2017 With These Great Horror Films On Netflix! IMDb May Have Leaked Spider-Man PS4's Villain...
And He Has A Very Familiar Face Coach Invites Ronda Rousey to Train With 'Cyborg' Justino Screenwriter Hired For ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’ Sequel Did You Catch This Huge 'Watchmen' Easter Egg In The 'Batman V Superman' Ultimate Edition?Lego Star Wars reinvents itself enough to avoid the usual critiques of its gameplay, only to fall short trying to stretch out its story. We have to talk about the opening level. It's a slight spoiler - if you believe in spoilers for a Lego adaptation of a film you've already seen - so forgive me, or skip the rest of this paragraph if you must. But, here's the thing - Lego's take on The Force Awakens begins long before the film does, 30 years before, in an extended prologue which showcases every front from Return of the Jedi's Battle of Endor. It sees you stomping across Endor's moon in AT-STs, forming a band of Ewoks, fighting Darth Vader, defeating the Emperor, piloting the Millennium Falcon and blowing up the Second Death Star. Not only is it a complete surprise opening, it is an amazing first half hour.
You may be thinking it's all downhill from there then. It's not, though some later levels are admittedly not great - we'll come to those shortly. I love the prologue - it sets the scene, it gives you a chance to play as some of the saga's heroes in their heyday, it gives them an excuse to appear on the game's character roster. It also showcases how far Lego games have evolved, however slowly, since developer TT Games originally adapted these scenes ten years ago. It is the Lego games' own Special Edition moment, with all of TT's' latest tech in place. But while Force Awakens' prologue does plenty to move the series' gameplay on, it also acts as a reminder of the series' regular pacing, which Force Awakens throws out the window.Lego's basic game formula remains largely unchanged. Smash stuff, build stuff, funny cutscene, rinse n' repeat. Two new types of gameplay help break this up, however, and a third invention adds a new twist. Levels are now interspersed with cover shooting and aerial dogfighting, both fun additions, even if shooting people in the face feels slightly odd for a Lego title.
Almost every mission includes a cover-based battle, where the camera pulls in to an over-shoulder perspective and you pop out to fire on enemies. Aerial battles, meanwhile, are genuinely great, especially in areas which let you fly freely around, find collectibles, and blast enemy craft. The new gameplay twist comes in the form of rebuilds, where piles of pieces can be combined into more than one creation, broken down and rearranged into another. The best uses for this come within puzzles, where the same selection of bricks must be assembled into different parts of a machine in sequence within a time limit. Alternatively, fully exploring the choices can reward you with a collectible, or simply lead to a visual gag. There are smaller tweaks, too: a neat Mass Effect-style Galaxy Map for choosing missions and free-roam areas, the ability to create teams of NPCs to take with you on jobs, charged-up super attacks and medals for your battle performance. :: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - new Switch characters, battle mode and everything else we know
Then there are the open worlds: Jakku, the Millennium Falcon, the snowy planet pretending to be a new Death Star, the planet with the new Cantina, and the Resistance base pretending to be the Rebel base from A New Hope. Each area is stuffed full of extra characters to track down, races, scavenger missions, aerial missions and bounty hunts, so as usual you'll finish the game's story and still be far from complete. If the last time you played a Lego game was in the old Star Wars or Indiana Jones days, you'll be surprised at how much there is to do. And even if you play Lego games regularly (don't get me started on the wallet-ruining Dimensions) there's still more new elements than in any other Lego game since these open worlds were introduced with the first Lego Harry Potter. For me, there's enough new in The Force Awakens that it can stand up to the usual Lego game criticism. This is a Lego game which can finally boast - to some degree, at least - about its gameplay. Which only makes it more disheartening when you find how little story there is to go with it.
The Force Awakens faces an uphill struggle to stretch a single two-hour film into an eight-hour campaign, and it is a problem which gets worse as the game goes along. A couple of levels on Jakku are fine - the characters are introduced, the new dialogue with original voice actors is snappy (later including Harrison Ford, on fine form). Then the story campaign hits Maz Kanata's castle cantina and the pace slows to a Star Wars opening crawl. The scene with Rey finding the lightsaber, a few minutes on screen, is extended to a 20-minute platforming section. Then, after the battle, the pace slows further as you prepare for the game's final showdown with a puzzle where you stock the Millennium Falcon with Wookiee Cookies. It's easy to guess why we're seeing a new Lego Star Wars game already - and, to be fair, it's been a long time since the last. But I'd have preferred TT Games wait until at least the end of this year to fit in scenes from Rogue One. Lego games traditionally adapt at least a trilogy of movies (see: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones), or even four (see both Harry Potters, Pirates of the Caribbean and Jurassic World).