What Is LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is the latest in a long line of LEGO video games, this time covering all nine of the Star Wars movies that make up the Skywalker Saga: Episodes I through IX. Although Episodes I through VII have been released previously, this isn’t a simple remastering of those early games. Instead, every movie has been developed from scratch, giving the whole saga a new lease of life.
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LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Trailer
Age Rating
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is rated PEGI 7 and ESRB E 10+.
Available Formats
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is available on:
- Windows (via Steam and Epic Games)
- Nintendo Switch
- PlayStation 4
- PlayStation 5
- Xbox One
- Xbox Series X/S
System Specifications
The following are the minimum and recommended system specifications for PC, this information is taken from Steam.
Minimum:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce GTX 750 Ti or Radeon HD 7850
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 40 GB available space
Recommended:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-6600 or AMD Ryzen 3 3100
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce GTX 780 or Radeon R9 290
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 40 GB available space
Expansions and In-Game Purchases
There are no in-game purchases such as loot boxes, however, a number of expansions are already available if you bought the Standard Edition of the game, with some due to become available on later dates. These expansions are already included in the Deluxe Edition.
The LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Character Collection is a bundle of seven character packs that gives you:
- The Mandalorian Season 1 (yes, this includes Mando and a non-playable Grogu)
- The Mandalorian Season 2
- Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
- Classic Characters
- Solo: A Star Wars Story
- Star Wars: The Bad Batch
- Trooper Pack
If you don’t want all of these, you can also purchase The Mandalorian Season 1 Pack and the Solo: A Star Wars Story Character Pack separately.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Gameplay
If you’ve ever played a LEGO video game before—and who hasn’t at this point—then the gameplay here will be instantly familiar, even if the actual controls have subtly shifted here and there. So here I’ll focus mostly on what’s new or significantly different. Otherwise, this review could probably become a novel.
In LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga you’ll get to choose from three starting points, The Phantom Menace, A New Hope, or The Force Awakens, allowing you to instantly play your favorite trilogy of the saga. As usual, completing a movie unlocks both the following movie and also Free Play mode for the one you just finished. Initially, you’ll be playing through your chosen film in Story Mode as the correct characters (as in, whoever actually appears in that scene in the original film), but once Free Play is unlocked you’ll be able to switch things up and play as whoever you want. Ever wanted to see Jar Jar Binks and BB-8 take on Darth Vader, now’s your chance. You will have to play through each film at least twice if you want to unlock everything because certain areas and items will initially be off-limits, requiring characters you don’t have in Story Mode. We’ll get to character types (classes) soon.
As with every LEGO game, you’ll work your way through iconic scenes in the films, smashing your way around to gather shiny studs and earn Kyber Blocks (translucent blue LEGO bricks) that you can trade for additional characters and upgrades. As usual, the upgrades range from the useful (a stud magnet to speed up collection or stackable multipliers to increase the value of what you collect up to a frankly ludicrous 3840X for every stud) to the daft (exchange your lightsabre for a baguette—admittedly this has made for the greatest TikTok I’ve seen in some time—or play the Cantina song on an endless loop in the background). Studs and crystals can also be used to upgrade your characters, either through Core abilities like increased health and speed that are shared across every character or through upgrades to individual character classes.
There are nine character classes including Jedi and Dark Side, Hero and Villain, plus Bounty Hunters, Scavengers, Scoundrels, and both Astromech and Protocol Droids. Each class has its own abilities and skills. Jedi characters can use lightsabers in combat and control the force to move and throw items, Scavengers can assemble helpful items such as gliders and net shooters whenever they choose, and Astromechs can use data points to unlock doors. In addition, every class also has unique upgrades available. For example, the Hero class has the following options available:
- Improved Shield Generator – Increases the shields on ships
- Armoured Disguise – A Defense boost for equipped armor pieces
- Rebel Heart – Hearts are dropped more frequently
- Hero Terminal Expert – Skip the Hero socket interactions or choose to receive bonus studs for completing them
There is also an Extra class filled with a diverse collection of characters who simply don’t fit anywhere else, including Babu Frik, Shmi Skywalker, a Wampa, and Max Rebo.
These character classes and abilities are key to exploring the galaxy and also where much of the new content lies. Of course, you can still wield a lightsaber and shoot enemies with a blaster as we’ve been able to since the first game, but now Scoundrels like Han can use their eagle eyes and intuition to spot things others can’t while Scavengers use their supplies to build access to otherwise unreachable areas.
Once you’ve completed your first film, you’ll unlock Galaxy Free Play where you can choose to visit any unlocked planet and play as any unlocked character, exploring the galaxy far, far away just about as freely as possible. Unlike previous LEGO Star Wars games, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga shies away from the old format of a small hub area with doors leading to different levels. Here, the entire galaxy effectively acts as one ginormous “hub” with those “doors” to levels located where the action takes place—although you can move through the story easily by entering the game into the film you want to play instead of the galaxy at large.
The actual levels are only a part of each film too, with much of the gameplay even in Story Mode taking place outside of them. For example, after completing the first level of The Force Awakens and ending up on Jakku with Rey, I had to solve an elaborate puzzle to collect scrap that we could then take with us to Unkar Plutt in order to progress the story. (I ended up needing my twelve-year-old’s help with that one!) At any point outside of defined levels, you can choose to wander off, so halfway through progressing Attack of the Clones in Story Mode, you could choose to hop in a ship and visit Jakku to do a spot of scavenging, assuming you’d unlocked the necessary locations and characters first.
Overall, the gameplay in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga maintains a great balance. Sure, you can unleash various combo attacks to deal extra damage if you’re the kind of player who is prepared to learn them, but those players content to simply button mash and hope will also be able to make their way through the game with no problems. Despite each character class having different abilities, the buttons stay the same no matter who you’re playing with one button (the circle on Playstation) always acting as the “special abilities” button. This limits the learning curve needed to play the game substantially as you’ll only need to learn one set of controls for every character type and will allow young players to play with minimal frustration. Another great feature of the controls is the ability to not only map them to your preference, as many games do, but also to adjust flight controls so if the direction of movement “feels wrong” you can switch it to something that feels more natural, as well as adjusting the sensitivity.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Verdict
After what felt like endless delays and literal years of waiting, it’s fair to say that a lot of expectation was riding on LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. Now we finally have the game in hand, could it ever possibly live up to those hopes and dreams?
Let’s start with the positives. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is almost certainly the biggest LEGO video game so far with a universe vast enough to feel almost entirely open-world. The scope of the galaxy is truly mind-boggling with literally hundreds of puzzles and side quests scattered across every planet you can think of that appeared in the films, many planets being so large they require transportation options to move you around to different districts. If you can think of a location that appeared in one of the nine core movies, you can almost certainly explore it, and covering just one planet could easily fill several hours of casual play.
The attention to detail is also incredible with every part of the game well-thought-out and put together by people who are obviously fans. Womp rats scamper around on the ground at Mos Eisley, a Naboo pilot throws a tantrum when kid Anakin takes his ship, Luke’s grand reveal at the top of the hill on Ach-to is infiltrated by a bunch of cheeky porgs, and there are endless gags and one-liners written in Aurebesh for those with the ability to read it—be sure to translate the Aurebesh that pops up under Kylo Ren’s name at the beginning of his boss battle at the end of The Force Awakens story mode. That attention to detail continues in the environment too with little things like BB-8 leaving a trail behind him when traveling across sandy terrain, and the sounds of footsteps changing depending on what material the character is walking across. It all adds up to a very immersive experience.
All that is before we even get into the silly humor that has always been a staple of the LEGO games. Walking past the caged Rathtars in The Force Awakens we can see them doing stereotypical prison activities like weight lifting and playing the harmonica, while opening the wrong door on Starkiller Base revealed troopers in a hot tub. But my favorite gag so far was an ongoing one related to Padme’s decoys. Beginning with a Spartacus reference (“I am Amidala,” “no I’m Amidala,” “no I’M Amidala”) as ever more ridiculous people make the claim. The disguised Padme is played thereafter by a bearded elderly Naboo citizen—all the way into Attack of the Clones.
Now the bad. First, despite the game finally coming out years after its original release date, it remains riddled with bugs—some of them game-breaking. At the time of writing this, my own game is soft-locked due to a glitch that has trapped me in Coruscant Space with no ability to move or access menus. After speaking with other Twitter users trapped in the same location, I’m currently debating whether or not to lose all my progress so far and start afresh or hold out in the hopes of a patch being released to fix the issue. Other players have noted issues with multiple missions around Attack of the Clones that prevent them from being able to progress the game, and Nintendo Switch users are reporting repeated crashes. Not all the bugs are as problematic. My twelve-year-old ended up forming a small army of Mandalorians after discovering a glitch with the non-playable Grogu character, and it was pretty hysterical to watch him running across the Senate plaza on Coruscant pursued by a crowd of his own clones.
Away from technical issues, I struggled with the game for a long time before finally starting to warm up to it. Having repeatedly played and loved the original LEGO Star Wars game that covered only the prequels, I missed the simplistic style of always opening in a hub area and simply choosing a door to walk through in order to access my level of choice. Now, it feels as if much of the heart and soul of the game has been lost in the pursuit of adding more. More menus, more places, more character classes, more progress trees, more unlockables, and more things to do to unlock the unlockables. Meanwhile, despite all this extra content, so much of the actual story is missing. I get that making some of the political/senate-based scenes in The Phantom Menace into playable moments is more challenging than the battles, but having the entire section of the film that took place on Coruscant whizz by in about 5 seconds of stunted dialogue felt jarring in the extreme—why even bother to take me there in the game only to leave again after a cut scene? And as for the dialogue, the voice acting was truly terrible in parts with kid Anakin’s voice especially irritating. I only wish the Mumble Mode (which you can activate to replace all dialogue outside cut scenes with mumbling as in the original game) could be activated for specific characters!
Overall, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a game of highs and lows. It’s a game that’s designed to appeal to everyone from the obsessive nerds who know the type and class of every ship that ever had a few seconds of screentime to the six-year-old who just likes running around with a lightsaber pretending to be their new hero, and any game trying to appeal to such a broad swathe of gamers is inevitably going to suffer. It’s impossible to give every type of fan what they want from a game like this, but LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga does an admirable job of trying. Yes, there are going to be elements you don’t like. Maybe the combat is too simple for you or the endless lists of things to unlock are too complicated or repetitive. However, for those niggles and minor issues, you’ll almost certainly find a lot to love. Once you’ve got the hang of moving around, you’ll be able to go wherever you want and explore the parts of the galaxy that best appeal to you with the characters you love most. Most importantly, the humor that attracted so many of us to the games in the first place is still there and continues to poke good-natured fun at these movies we all love so much. Is this a perfect game? No, it never could be. But it’s one filled with a lot of love by the people who made it and that comes out in the gameplay, even if some of the heart of the storytelling had to be sacrificed to the gods of good gameplay. Now if they could just fix those bugs so we can all get back to playing, I’d be as happy as Grogu with a tasty new snack.
GeekMom received a copy of this game for review purposes.
