The Force Awakens must be magic. First it reinvigorated Star Wars after a string of duds, and now it’s given the slumping LEGO games the same shot in the arm. LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the most creative, well-paced, and fun LEGO game in years. Developer Traveler's Tales always displays a keen love and affection for its source material, but with this take on the most recent Star Wars movie, it tells an entertaining story that pays wonderful tribute to Episode VII through a slew of smart puzzles and unique characters. Unlike the disjointed storytelling in the disappointing LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, The Force Awakens uses dialogue from the film effectively. The story of Rey, Finn, and company follows the same path as the movie, while also throwing in a bunch of really clever gags and goofs. Wandering through the ruins of Maz Kanada’s castle, overhearing some weird creatures talk about where they’re going to drink next, and having one of them suggest his old watering hole on Tatooine left a big dumb grin on my face.
It even handles heavy events, like that Big Spoilery Thing™ with a solid dose of humor and charm. I loved scouring each level for all of their secrets. Each level in the eight-hour campaign does a great job of spreading out puzzle solutions between multiple characters and their unique abilities. Unlike LEGO Avengers, where the second player oftentimes found themselves bored, here you’ll need each character’s inherent abilities to make it through a level. Plus, the abilities are generally fun to use -- Rey’s agility creates some great platforming segments, while BB-8’s ability to jack into any electrical outlet allows you to fiddle around and manipulate platforms and other objects in the world. Whether I was playing by myself or alongside a pal, I really enjoyed scouring each level for all of their secrets. That said, certain puzzle mechanics are dull and used a bit too often. For example, playing as Finn and having to line up the head and torsos of a holographic Stormtrooper to enter a First Order door quickly transforms from a light challenge into a chore.
While the destroy, build, and collect mechanics are familiar to anyone who has played a LEGO game, The Force Awakens tosses in some new and unique scenarios that surprised me with how fun they were. Specifically, cover-based shootouts that feel like “My First Gears of War.” These sections were totally unexpected, but really helped deliver some diversity to the familiar gameplay loop. Add in the fact that each character has a special meter that allows you to destroy the battlefield with a cool-looking unique attack, and Force Awakens has the best-feeling action of any LEGO game yet. Flying levels are fun, frantic, and more entertaining than this year’s Star Fox Zero. Likewise, the flying sections -- both the on-rails and open-air dogfights -- are fun, frantic, and honestly more entertaining than this year’s Star Fox Zero. Whether I was jetting through an asteroid field, gunning down TIE Fighters on my way off of Jakku, or saving the Resistance as Poe on the shores of Takodana, I looked forward to every scene where I got to hop into the cockpit of a ship.
I couldn’t help but imagine what Travelers Tales would do with a full-on Rogue Squadron game. While I love the individual levels, I’m a bit disappointment by the hub worlds. Unlike the awesome, interconnected core of LEGO Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, this series of small hubs here are disjointed and require fairly lengthy load screens to pop between them. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it adds some frustration when you want to check out a bunch of different challenges and worlds. LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens is also filled with cute, smart nods that Star Wars nuts are going to love. Scouring the galaxy for slabs of carbonite that unlock characters from the original trilogy and the prequels is a blast. Likewise, there are rad secret missions that fill in the gaps of certain events left out of the film, with one of the more memorable ones featuring Poe on his rescue mission to snatch Admiral Ackbar. All of this constantly compelled to keep playing on my mission to 100% it. LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the most gaming fun I’ve had with either series in years.
The story is great, the levels are dense with fun puzzles, and unlocking all of the secrets is a blast. Whether I was going through it solo or playing alongside a buddy, LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens proved to be an adaption worthy of its incredible source material.iPhone/iPad, PC, PlayStation 3 Mixed or average reviews- based on 118 Ratings See all 24 Critic Reviews See all 16 User Reviews More slick Lego gameplay New puzzle and combat mechanics Some filler in the lengthy chapters Available on Xbox One (reviewed), PS4, PC, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii UA whole Lego Star Wars game devoted to just the one film? I’ll admit that my first response to TT Games’ latest was fairly cynical. While we know the Lego series works well for trilogies or even looser themed collections (see Lego Marvel’s The Avengers), could one movie really stretch out over many hours of gameplay without cramming in too much filler? Well, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens has not merely dispelled my snark but made it feel unwarranted.
It’s yet another great example of how the series can hold onto its core while managing to quietly innovate, and might also be the funniest Lego Star Wars game to date.Perhaps the biggest surprise is the scope of the game, opening with a prologue that reworks the climax of Return of the Jedi – and in more style than in The Original Trilogy game – before taking us through the events of Episode VII. That much you might have predicted, but TT Games has somehow got permission to take things even further, with a series of unlockable side missions that explore the characters and events of The Force Awakens in more depth. It might be strange to find the exploits of Poe Dameron, Kylo Ren and Han and Chewie chronicled for the first time in Lego form, but this helps make Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens almost unmissable for Star Wars fans. They’ve even managed to get the major cast members to do new dialogue, and that includes Harrison Ford. This, by any standards, is a coup.Of course the gameplay doesn’t veer far from the old Lego template, though I think we’ve reached the point where complaining about that is like complaining that Call of Duty involves a lot of shooting people in the face through a holographic sight.
You’ll still spend most of your time tackling stormtroopers and space-gangsters with your fists, light sabre or blaster, while smashing the scenery into handy Lego bricks. You’ll turn some of these bricks into new objects which can be used to solve simple puzzles, while collecting characters with special abilities you can harness to get past all the obstacles in your way. This is as true of Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens as it was true of, well, just about every other Lego game.Related: Forza Horizon 3 previewYet there’s always something distinct about every Lego game, whether that comes down to Lego Batman’s costume-based puzzles and open-world adventures or Lego Pirates of the Caribbean’s focus on platforming and melee combat. Lego Star Wars continues its predecessors’ love of vehicle sections with a stream of Starfox-esque flying sequences and dogfights, many of which are good enough to put Star Wars: Battlefront’s meagre efforts in the shade. In fact, I can’t remember having such a good time blasting cannons from capital ships and tackling Tie Fighters since the glory days of Rogue Squadron.Meanwhile, the new characters bring new abilities into play.
BB-8, while weak in combat, becomes a veritable swiss-army-knife of charging, unlocking, traversal and activating capabilities, while Rey is arguably the Lego games’ most agile hero ever, with a range of jumping, wall-running and pole-spinning moves that put her ahead of even Lego Batman’s Robin. Finn, Poe, Han, Chewie and even Kylo Ren also get their chance to shine, and in a way the game manages the same amazing trick as the movie: making you almost as invested in the new faces as you are in the ones you grew up with.Related: Xbox One S vs Xbox OneYet the most impressive thing is that the series can still find new tricks lurking up its sleeves. The first is a simplified cover-shooting mechanic, where racing behind specific walls or doorways allows you to shift with a squeeze of the left trigger into an over-the-shoulder, Gears of War-style view. From here you can move the reticule around to take pot-shots at hiding stormtroopers, though the game might make this a little too easy with an over-zealous auto-aim.
Headshots are understandably a no-no and it’s impossible to snipe some enemies, but it makes you feel part of the action in a way that no previous Lego Star Wars game has managed. Add a new range of character-specific special attacks, and you get Lego combat at its best.Secondly, many of the old bash-and-build puzzles now give you a choice of where and what to build. One spot might give you a launcher for BB-8, another a rotary switch for Rey to push, another a gun turret or water-cannon, and you decide which to go for first. In some cases you’re just choosing between two or three solutions to defeat one enemy, but in others you’ll need to find the right order to build in, knocking down each build to get the bricks to do the next. This adds a new layer of sophistication to puzzles that might otherwise be stupidly simple. While I’d be the first to say that we don’t look for Witness-level puzzles in a kiddie-friendly Lego game, some of BB-8’s combination lock puzzles are so pitifully easy that they might not actually need to be there.
Related: All the latest news plus a preview of Watch Dogs 2There are, admittedly, moments where you’ll wonder whether this section or that really deserves to be here, as Rey spends fifteen minutes exploring Maz Kanata’s castle or Finn goes on the hunt for a mug of coffee. Yet for most of the time, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens gives you too much fun stuff to do to leave you thinking about it too much. The gameplay holds up brilliantly when playing solo then only gets better when you add another player into the mix.And beyond just getting through the chapters, there’s the real challenge to keep you busy: the constant demand to find and collect everything you can. The lure of more characters, vehicles and those True Jedi ratings will keep you coming back to missions you’ve completed, but with the new story missions requiring a good supply of gold bricks to unlock, you finally have a really good reason to make sure you get every one.In the end, though, it’s not the gameplay that will make Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, one of my most cherished games of the year.
Nor is it the graphics, though I think there’s the most lustrous and weirdly realistic the series has delivered (when it comes to rendering plastics, no-one else comes close). Nope, it’s with the laugh-out-loud humour that TT Games has really nailed it. It’s always respectful, always affectionate, but always happy to rip the wotsits out of the scripts, settings, characters and cast. One minute there’s a fantastic sight gag on Han Solo, the next an exceptional skit on Kylo Ren’s teenage angst. Sunbathing stormtroopers, fiendish villains and cuppa-crazy rebels are all butts for great jokes, and the juxtaposition of earnest dialogue with on-screen slapstick is hilarious. If you love Star Wars and loved The Force Awakens, you’ll have an easier job resisting Kylo Ren’s force powers than resisting this.What could have been a cash-in is another classic Lego game. The gameplay is strong, with its new, more sophisticated puzzles, stronger combat and brilliant flying sequences, while the visuals are absolutely brilliant, with the old camera issues on the decline.