‘Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga’ Is Galactic Gaming Comfort Food – Forbes

I’ve been spending the last week with TT Games’ and Warner Bros.’ newest licensed blocky adventure Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. In short, it’s excellent (as reviews will tell you), though it does remind me of the complicated relationship I have with Lego games in general. Are they fun? Are they boring? I can never quite decide.

If you’ve played a Lego title in the last ten years, you’ll find yourself in familiar territory with The Skywalker Saga. Essentially, you wander around carefully crafted levels based on whatever the current property happens to be — in this case it’s the nine perennially popular Star Wars movies — while smashing tiny bits of the Lego-built environment into scattered pieces, solving simple puzzles and reliving the stories from the films, albeit with funny twists and witty nods.

There is one notable difference in this particular entry, though. Gone is the isometric viewpoint common to past TT Lego games; a freshly implemented third-person perspective now lends The Skywalker Saga a decidedly updated and modern feel. I wasn’t sure how I’d adjust to the change, as I rather like the Lego game paradigm we’ve come to expect, but I quickly adapted to the over-the-shoulder camera. Honestly, I wouldn’t go back at this point.

As previous Lego games would have you expect, The Skywalker Saga is a beastly collect-a-thon, and there’s a certain comfort food satisfaction in how it plays out. There are literally hundreds of Star Wars characters and ships to earn and unlock, not to mention dozens upon dozens of challenges to complete. With nine separate films to choose from and entire open world galaxies to explore, you’re never lacking for things to do.

The Skywalker Saga just feels good, kind of like a warm pot roast dinner, or a delicious In-N-Out burger. Like all Lego games, the humor is cheeky, the dad jokes are award-worthy, the controls are solid and the graphics are way better than they have any right being. The lighting is especially noteworthy in certain sections, as are the textures. I’ve actually really been enjoying the vehicle sections, especially flying in the numerous ships.

I did run into several bugs while playing, however, which I’m sure will be patched out in due time. One was a strange splitscreen glitch that made the game think I had a second controller logged in when I didn’t, and the second screen wouldn’t disappear until I performed a hard reset on my Series X. The other was an enemy glitch in Endor during the landspeeder section, which stopped feeding me Stormtroopers to eliminate so that I was endlessly dashing through the forest with no way to progress.

While I do love playing The Skywalker Saga, I’ve noticed a certain malaise start to set in after six or seven hours of gameplay, and it isn’t uncommon for me to experience this with Lego games. TT does objectively great work, and you can tell the team pours its heart and soul into these massive creations, but the whole endeavor inevitably starts to feel, I don’t know, long in the tooth for me.

Lego games are dependable but predictable, for better and for worse. Despite the always changing theming of these titles, an ‘I’ve done all this before’ suspicion arises and my drive to keep pushing forward begins to wane. I’m having fun, I’m laughing, but at the same time, I’m wanting to move on to something else. It’s a strange combination of reactions to something I genuinely enjoy.

I am happy that the third-person perspective was added, though, as it does spice things up a bit. The bottom line is that this is a massive, gorgeous game that’s obviously been put together by passionate people, and the end result is something that Star Wars fans will very much appreciate.

For me, a somewhat jaded Lego game afficionado, there’s undoubtedly a ton of stuff to do in The Skywalker Saga, but I think I’ll be abandoning prolonged play sessions and chipping away at the never-ending Lego Star Wars checklist between rounds in other games.

It does make me miss Lego Dimensions a bit, as that had the physical toys-to-life component, which I think the Lego franchise truly benefited from. What did not benefit, however, was my cluttered game room. That, and my wallet.

Disclosure: Warner Bros. provided a review code for coverage purposes.