LEGO Star Wars is kinda its own special brand of Star Wars. Complete with its own toy line, TV shows, and lately it seems its own self-contained canon! LEGO Star Wars The Freemaker Adventures is the latest of these recent LEGO shows for anyone looking for that LEGO fix. The Freemakers are a family of scavengers and repair shop, owners trying to make their way in the galaxy. It’s definitely a show geared towards younger kids but it’s also something I can enjoy with the kids. As far as the show goes, it’s definitely the best of the LEGO Star Wars animated offerings so far. The story is delivered with all the humor and fast-paced writing that the LEGO animation is known for. While it is most certainly very kid-oriented there were a few moments that had me literally laughing out loud. The Blu-ray release once again looks amazing. With all the streaming and iTunes and HD versions out there all of that still somehow pales in comparison to a good Blu-ray quality–solid audio and video delivered in a way only Blu-ray can.
The bonus features are also a huge thing to consider when picking up a Blu-ray. Unfortunately, the recent Star Wars releases have all suffered from minimal bonus features and this is no exception; there are only two bonus features included here. The first, The Freemaker Adventures: Meet the Freemaker Family, was actually released on the Star Wars YouTube channel prior to the show’s release. This really fits in that unfortunate Rebels Recon pile that, while is fun to watch, is content we’ve already seen and is already available to us. The second, Freemaker Salvage and Repair, is a really cute little commercial for the Freemakers’ repair shop. It’s fun and everything but totals to about two minutes or so. While the Star Wars Rebels Blu-rays have also suffered from minimal bonus content, the edge they have is that the interviews are usually well worth a few rewatches. Unfortunately while these bonus features are fun, one is already available and the other is a fun couple of minutes.
All things considered this is worth the pickup if you really like the show because that’s pretty much all you’re going to get. If you’re satisfied with your streaming quality and your iTunes purchases then maybe this is one you can skip. If you watch it with your kids and want to toss on the surround sound and HDTV then this is the best way to see it! A fun show that looks great but barely existent content that I can’t see myself going back to for rewatches makes this one lose a few points for me. There's just something about the LEGO Star Wars series that works. With the first game, released in 2005, developer Traveller's Tales took two great brands, smashed them together and created something instantly familiar yet refreshingly new. The effort was a grand departure from the vast majority of licensed games, which are often nothing more than transparent attempts to wring a few measly Republic Credits out of an established name. LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Star Wars II were both successful ventures -- a rare combination of kid-friendly gameplay that also grabbed the hearts and minds of gamers with more mature tastes.
That's why we were excited to get our hands on the latest member of TT's blocky little family: LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, which pulls LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Star Wars II together in one cohesive package. The Complete Saga is essentially a straight compilation of those games, bumped up to HD-quality and lightly tweaked, and it will be most appealing to people who have never played the games at all or gamers who played one or both but don't already own them. If you're not familiar with the LEGO Star Wars concept, here's a quick breakdown. The first game covers the "prequel" Star Wars films (Episodes I-III), and the second picks up where its predecessor left off (Episodes IV-VI). Each game is an action/puzzle/platform version of the story segment it covers, fast-forwarding through the highlights of every movie with LEGO approximations standing in for their real-life counterparts. Rather than simply slap the two games together and forcing the player to choose one from the main menu, TT smartly chose to expand the Mos Eisley Cantina lobby system both LSW games use to move you between episodes.
The Complete Saga drops you into the Cantina to roam as you please - you can mess around in the junkyard, browse the shop, wander over to a two-player arcade arena or jump right in to the game's lengthy story mode. After you finish the first chapter of Episode I (there are six chapters in each), the intro chapter of each episode is automatically opened for you, so you can skip around from episode-to-episode if you want to play your favorites first. But LEGO Star Wars doesn't limit you simply playing through the story. We plowed through the game's six episodes in about 12 hours without detouring much for mini-games, arcade play or free play (more on that later). When our eyes refocused, we were surprised to see we'd only completed about 30 percent of the total game. Overall, The Complete Saga is a success. The humor is spot-on, the animation is sharper and shinier than ever, the music and sound are extremely high-quality, and the entire package works on almost every level. The addition of online co-op for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 makes the game's already enjoyable two-person multiplayer that much better.
Unfortunately, the series has always suffered from a somewhat problematic camera system that can at times be overly restrictive and unforgiving. The camera controls feel a bit better in The Complete Saga, but they're still frustrating at times.Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens Developed by: Traveller’s Tales, TT Fusion Published by: WBIE Available on: Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Wii U, PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One At this point, most sane humans have had enough of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” but big corporations like Lego and Warner Bros. think you want more BB-8, Rey and the whole intergalactic gang. So with no less than 13 promotional trailers targeting kids and families on YouTube, the onslaught of “Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has begun. Beyond Nintendo’s Mario and “The Legend of Zelda” games, one could argue that the sweetest of the long-running series of family-oriented games is the Lego franchise. There are times when I actually enjoy the Lego games more than those lauded Nintendo games.
This is one of those times. Lego games have been published since 1997’s “Lego Island,” an odd offering that had the frowning, stubble-faced Brickster using the mere smell of pizza to disintegrate the lock on his prison cell. The Lego releases became more admirably complex when England’s Traveller’s Tales took over in 2005 (with, you guessed it, a Star Wars game). At that time, the characters didn’t even talk. They just made silly, quirky noises full of emotion (which somehow worked if you believed, as I did, you were playing inside an almost-silent movie). Compared to other Lego games, “The Force Awakens” is a larger, more open world offering, expansive in the way some games for adults are. But there’s a tried and true formula — sometimes magic, sometimes banal — to the Lego games catalog. “The Force Awakens” doesn’t stray far from this blueprint, but those who believe playing is like downing candy are trying too hard to be pretentious. The blocky characters exude humor, from signature winks to the ardent-but-lunking way they pad about.
Add some nifty, Pixar-style satire for adults, and you have a Lego game. There was pressure to get this one right because last year’s “Disney Infinity 3.0 Star Wars The Force Awakens,” also made for kids and families, was generally awesome. (And it’s a complete shame that Disney recently shuttered the studio that made these toys-to-life games.) Traveller’s Tales and TT Fusion have shown their research chops by going back to the source. Lego toys, the ingenious Danish invention which means ‘play well’ in English, are about building things. So in Lego games, you collect pieces called studs, you find piles of things to construct which, when they are released through controller button taps, turn from pieces into machinery or vehicles. These help you solve puzzles and move from one level to the next. With “Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” you can play 200 characters from the film in a game that follows, in close approximation, the movie’s plot. All of the actors involved in the movie, including Harrison Ford, recorded lines for the game (although Daisy Ridley sounds as if she recorded her muddled Rey bits on a cell phone).
Once inside, I enjoyed seeing two Ewoks on a tree limb, tuning up on a trumpet and horn, readying to play the Star Wars theme. Happily, I figured out how to employ a band of Ewoks to help me push logs onto a pesky Walker below. I had a choice of two or three things to build and I constructed a turret gun and a ladder in the right order to move ahead in the verdant forests of Endor. Then, just as Han Solo tossed an enemy one-handed from a vehicle, something awful happened, something that had never has happened to me in my history of playing Lego games. It was worse than that moment in Lego Jurassic Park when a character was eternally stuck jumping, trying to leap out of a crevasse. This time, the game crashed. I lost all of my progress — along with much of my good will, and had to start the game all over again. Had I stopped out of frustration (and I was indeed annoyed), I would have missed an emotional Darth Vader, sniffling and shedding tears when presented with Luke Skywalker’s childhood drawing of daddy Darth as a stick figure.
I would’ve missed BB-8 playing soccer and basketball during a blazing battle. And I would have missed rubber ducks appearing for no reason whatsoever. Seeing them on Jakku was pleasurable in a weird way. “The Force Awakens” is the biggest of the Lego games, and while that hugeness can add to its epic, space opera nature, the narrative sometimes loses the pace needed to sustain an action adventure. During long battles there’s a distinct lack of that signature humor making it, at times, feel more like Halo or Gears of War with Lego characters. And, if you want to replay levels to find the gold blocks you missed, it takes even more time. But, if you’re patient, you’re rewarded with the momentary joy of esteemed actor Harrison Ford asking for “Wookiee cookies for Chewie.” If you’re an enduring Star Wars fan, you’ll uncover the heartrending story which explains why C3PO has a red arm. And the curious fan will find out how Han and Chewbacca got those creepy Rathar monsters with octopus-like tentacles, giant maw and razor-sharp teeth onto the Millennium Falcon.
Despite the amount of original content, there is too much leaning on past successes. The Lego recipe hasn’t changed much, so the collecting of studs and gold bricks — searching high and low in every nook and cranny in this vast world to find them — becomes repetitive. And since so many around the world already know “The Force Awakens” story through the movie (and last year’s Disney game), you wish the developers had gone the extra mile with even more levels and plot points that move beyond the theatrical offering into the vast treasure trove of Star Wars lore. Ultimately, it’s a beautifully animated action-adventure game with occasionally spectacular views from space and of magnificent landscapes on various planets. When the humor is present, it’s even better. But there should be far more of it. And what’s there certainly isn’t irreverent enough. It’s one thing to respect the source material. It’s another altogether to honor it as if it were a religion. In this Lego game, there’s just enough comedy to get you by.