
Look, you can smash up a ton of things in this game, including character models. Spoiler warning for movies from two decades ago Just one more thing before I go celebrate what’s left of Star Wars Day. TT wholeheartedly embraces the ridiculousness of Star Wars to deliver perhaps the best game in the franchise to date. The Skywalker Saga does an outstanding job of pulling together nine whole movies into a single game without getting too mired in the lore. For one thing, I enjoy the dogfighting sequences far more here than in Star Wars: Squadrons. But that’s a minor quibble given that the devs absolutely nailed so many other elements. With the combo-heavy melee system, time-to-kill often felt a little bit too long. I don’t think all of the new mechanics are entirely successful, though. Its take on the “Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?” line is just one of the many jokes that had me cackling. The Skywalker Saga is ridiculously funny at points, especially when it riffs on with iconic moments from the Star Wars canon. It has gorgeous environments and ran smoothly for me on PS5 (save for a couple bugs that were fixed by restarting). It feels better than ever to fire a blaster or hurl a lightsaber thanks to the vastly improved aiming. The camera is now almost always positioned behind the character you’re controlling, and you can aim from a third-person perspective. The changes from previous games are significant. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is packed with gorgeous visuals. Without reinventing the wheel entirely, they’ve put together something that reimagines what a Lego game can be, while both embracing the series’ roots and deftly capturing the essence of Star Wars. The conditions under which the game was reportedly made have cast a huge shadow over a significant accomplishment by a talented team of creators. I think most of those time-sapping trips could have been covered with existing cutscenes. There’s some extraneous back-and-forthing between objectives in order to advance the story as well. It often feels like there’s too much to do in the game anyway, so streamlining things a bit, especially in the open-world areas, may have lessened their workload.

Extending the schedule by several months, or even longer, so that team members had a healthier work-life balance would have been a far better option. Sure, The Skywalker Saga already had a protracted development cycle. No game is worth putting developers’ physical and mental well-being at risk to push it out the door on a relatively arbitrary schedule. Some staffers claimed that workweeks of 80-100 hours were not rare at certain points. Polygon reported in January that TT’s developers have had to contend with a long-standing culture of crunch, whereby they were expected to work long hours to finish the game.
