Dubai: You know what you’re getting with one of TT Games’ Lego oeuvres: a solid puzzle-solver with a lot of light combat and plenty of humour.
Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens (LSWTFA) does not disappoint.
The game starts with a flashback to the end of The Return of the Jedi, as Han, Leia, Chewie and a host of Ewoks battle storm troopers on the woods of Endor, and Luke Skywalker faces down the Emperor and redeems Darth Vader.
It serves as a handy refresher in Star Wars lore, if anyone needs one, and an introduction to how this particular game handles puzzles and force powers.
Once the prologue is over, you’re thrust into the events of the new film. LSWTFA continues TT’s long-established technique of using the film’s storyline as a base, turning each scene into a combination of fighting, building and puzzle-solving.
As with previous outings, you players can play cooperatively, or one can flick between characters as necessary. The usual coin-collecting mechanic allows you to unlock numerous characters and vehicles for when you repeat levels in free play, and as usual there are enough special areas to encourage you to do so.
LSWTFA doesn’t introduce new game mechanics, but does refine them even further than January’s Lego Marvel Avengers.
Part of the puzzle
For a start, certain combat levels allow you to take cover and aim at particular enemies. And assembling machinery and other tools now offers a choice of what you’ll build and where — in some cases this leads to alternate paths, in others it’s part of the puzzle — you’ll need to break machines to reassemble alternatives in the correct order to progress.
Aside from those little adjustments, you get exactly what you’d expect from a Lego game. There are a ton of fruit jokes — invariably there’s a storm trooper armed with a banana, and Rey’s first face-off against Kylo Ren culminates with him using his lightsabre to prepare a fruit salad from the various things she throws at him.
Levels are varied, with aerial chasing through Jakku’s starship graveyard in the Millennium Falcon on Jakku, various objectives during dogfighting on Takodana, where you get to fly an X-wing, and more usual platforms and puzzles as various characters from the movie.
There was a time, around Lego Batman, when I felt TT were just churning out more or the same. The little refinements do add some spice to the formula, but I’ve mellowed somewhat. The Lego games work, and TT have obviously realised that if something’s not broken, it doesn’t need fixing.
Rating: 7.5/10
