I’ve recently been watching episodes of the Clone Wars cartoon series, and it came to mind while playing a near-final build of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. Both offer their own riffs on the series’ established film stories, weaving in and out of Lucasfilm’s vision (or Lucas’ most recent revision since). Both are clearly built with a real love of the source material. And both have bits which feel like filler – but when things work, they work well.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga arrives after a protracted development and after a rare, brief pause in Lego game releases. Development has been tough – especially so on its team, as a recent report highlighted – and lengthy – around five years in the making.
From an hour or so of playing the game, the end result feels like a familiar – albeit well polished – TT Games Lego experience. You can choose to begin each of the saga’s film trilogies in any order, then progress through each. Story missions start and end in open world areas, which get added to your galaxy map to revisit and comb through again as you unlock new characters and capabilities.
LEGO® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga – Building the Galaxy Watch on YouTube
Beginning the original film trilogy treats you to a level set aboard the Tantive IV, as Darth Vader busts in and C3PO and R2D2 scurry away, with some neatly-added moments that link into the end of Rogue One. The ship – as with the Death Star later on – is made entirely out of digital Lego, something I vastly prefer to the vague CGI environments dotted with bricks seen in some other Lego titles.