💥 TRENDING: Id/the technus/recommended/ - Collection

TL;DR: A great nostalgia trip for Lego and/or Star Wars fans, but rough around the edges and it shows.

I had the original two Lego Star wars games for Gamecube way back in the day. I played and enjoyed the hell out of both of them. So you can imagine my excitement when I realized that I could play both, in one game, on PC. I picked this title up in the winter sale and I've been playing it off and on since then.

It's just as fun as I remember it. The absence of their cringeworthy dialogue and forced love story make the prequels much more enjoyable, though it might be hard to understand if you don't already know the plot. The slapstick and Lego dismemberment gags never get old. There's easter eggs hidden everywhere, encouraging exploration, and the game's puzzles are challenging and rewarding enough to solve for players of any age without getting frustrating (most of the time).

You can play as all your favorite characters, along with many others whose names you never knew and never really cared about, like Grand Moff Tarkin or Ki-Adi-Mundi. Most of the main characters have unique and sometimes hilarious melee animations, like Princess Leia who bitchslaps everyone, or Chewbacca who will leap on stormtroopers and rip their arms off (it's all bloodless Lego gore so it's okay for kids, obviously).

However, no game is without sin and this one commits quite a few of them.

A lot of the optional characters, especially the blaster-wielding ones, have little differentiation between them besides their general appearance, so you'll probably just end up using Luke Skywalker (Jedi), Boba Fett (grown-up), and Darth Vader most of the game.

The most glaring flaws are perhaps the myriad of bugs littered throughout the game, from texture, shadow, and Z-ordering glitches (where background meshes pop through foreground ones) to areas where the Lego studs you're supposed to collect (as currency) simply clip through the floor or walls or other decorations and disappear. Since this game was released in 2009, I very much doubt that these issues will ever be resolved.

Some puzzles are far more tedious than challenging; oftentimes the solution is obvious but requires a lot of work simply to make it seem more difficult than it actually is. This is a trap that many otherwise very good puzzle games (like Portal and The Talos Principle) fall into to pad out their runtimes, and I wish it would stop. Some of the optional puzzles have such obscure and nonsensical "solutions" that you're basically just trying to guess what the game designer was thinking.

There is no brightness slider, so some scenes can become very overblown, especially with the excessively strong bloom shader included in the game. Disabling bloom helps but makes other scenes look much more drab so it's a lose-lose either way. Also, and this is more of a nitpick than anything, but the screen-space reflections on windows and polished floors are inconsistent in resolution, so some are crystal clear while others are horribly pixellated.

Otherwise, the game's graphics have aged about as well as they could have, considering they're rendering a world which is supposed to look like it's made of plastic. I'll have to look at other more recent Lego games and see how they've improved the engine.

However, I really, really, really, really hate the third-person camera. This is one of those games that tries a little too hard to imitate cinema: the camera is often either in a fixed position and pans to show the characters, or pans while following a dolly path through the level. There's also the seemingly intentionally added tracking latency, where it takes a second to catch up to movement of your characters. In addition, some of the levels with mandatory platforming sections have preset camera positions which give very poor depth cues, so sometimes you have no idea if you're going to hit the platform you want or if you're going to fall to your death. Put that all together, you end up with a distracting, oftentimes misleading, and sometimes downright sickening visual ride.

You might be wondering why I'm still recommending this game, even with all these complaints. It's Lego freaking Star Wars, man. This ♥♥♥♥ sells itself.

TL;DR: A great nostalgia trip for Lego and/or Star Wars fans, but rough around the edges and it shows. I had the original two Lego Star wars games for Gamecube way back in the day. I played and enjoyed the hell out of both of them. So you can imagine my excitement when I realized that I could play both, in one game, on PC. I picked this title up in the winter sale and I've been playing it off and on since then. It's just as fun as I remember it. The absence of their cringeworthy dialogue and forced love story make the prequels much more enjoyable, though it might be hard to understand if you don't already know the plot. The slapstick and Lego dismemberment gags never get old. There's easter eggs hidden everywhere, encouraging exploration, and the game's puzzles are challenging and rewarding enough to solve for players of any age without getting frustrating (most of the time). You can play as all your favorite characters, along with many others whose names you never knew and never really cared about, like Grand Moff Tarkin or Ki-Adi-Mundi. Most of the main characters have unique and sometimes hilarious melee animations, like Princess Leia who bitchslaps everyone, or Chewbacca who will leap on stormtroopers and rip their arms off (it's all bloodless Lego gore so it's okay for kids, obviously). However, no game is without sin and this one commits quite a few of them. A lot of the optional characters, especially the blaster-wielding ones, have little differentiation between them besides their general appearance, so you'll probably just end up using Luke Skywalker (Jedi), Boba Fett (grown-up), and Darth Vader most of the game. The most glaring flaws are perhaps the myriad of bugs littered throughout the game, from texture, shadow, and Z-ordering glitches (where background meshes pop through foreground ones) to areas where the Lego studs you're supposed to collect (as currency) simply clip through the floor or walls or other decorations and disappear. Since this game was released in 2009, I very much doubt that these issues will ever be resolved. Some puzzles are far more tedious than challenging; oftentimes the solution is obvious but requires a lot of work simply to make it seem more difficult than it actually is. This is a trap that many otherwise very good puzzle games (like Portal and The Talos Principle) fall into to pad out their runtimes, and I wish it would stop. Some of the optional puzzles have such obscure and nonsensical "solutions" that you're basically just trying to guess what the game designer was thinking. There is no brightness slider, so some scenes can become very overblown, especially with the excessively strong bloom shader included in the game. Disabling bloom helps but makes other scenes look much more drab so it's a lose-lose either way. Also, and this is more of a nitpick than anything, but the screen-space reflections on windows and polished floors are inconsistent in resolution, so some are crystal clear while others are horribly pixellated. Otherwise, the game's graphics have aged about as well as they could have, considering they're rendering a world which is supposed to look like it's made of plastic. I'll have to look at other more recent Lego games and see how they've improved the engine. However, I really, really, really, really hate the third-person camera. This is one of those games that tries a little too hard to imitate cinema: the camera is often either in a fixed position and pans to show the characters, or pans while following a dolly path through the level. There's also the seemingly intentionally added tracking latency, where it takes a second to catch up to movement of your characters. In addition, some of the levels with mandatory platforming sections have preset camera positions which give very poor depth cues, so sometimes you have no idea if you're going to hit the platform you want or if you're going to fall to your death. Put that all together, you end up with a distracting, oftentimes misleading, and sometimes downright sickening visual ride. You might be wondering why I'm still recommending this game, even with all these complaints. It's Lego freaking Star Wars, man. This shit sells itself.