Video Game Review: Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy

There are times in your life when destiny seems to smile upon you. For some it’s that lucky break that gets them the big promotion at work. For others it’s getting the letter from your favorite college with a nice fat scholarship attached. Heck it could even be getting paid to babble incoherently about stuff on the internet! But for me destiny came in the form of a little DVD box with funny Lego people on it…dressed as Star Wars characters.

Now for most of my childhood I was lucky enough to have a nice variety of toys and being form the 80’s they were the cream of the crop! He-Man, Transformers, M.A.S.K., the list just keeps on going! But the two toys I was enamored with the most were my Star Wars figures and my Lego.

Now for a kid in the 80’s you can’t get much bigger than Star Wars. It was an institution! You waited in line to get the cardboard cut out for the characters for god’s sake! You sent in box tops to get the limited edition Anakin Skywalker figure (the old Sebastian Shaw one, not new fangled Hayden Christen-whatever.) You got Hammerhead, not because he was ultra rare and worth ten thousand dollars, you got him because his head was against the laws of biology, chemistry and physics all put together! And you took your toys out of their damned boxes and PLAYED with them! It was a golden age! I had Hans, I had Leias, I had Lukes, I had all sorts of video records of the movies because VHS was just a fad back then! Oh I liked me some Star Wars.

And then there was Lego, the granddaddy of all imagination! What could you not make out of those little bricks? I made robots, space ships, cars, houses, castles, and that was without the play sets! Getting the bricks to be the actually color they were supposed to be was just icing on the cake. And the Lego people, oh the adventures they had! I had knight fighting dragons with the help of race car drivers. Firemen tackling the dangers of zero gravity infernos on space stations! And astronauts… doing their laundry because lets face it all they have are those spacesuits and it’s going to take years to get to Mars!

And with those happy memories I looked down on this box before me. Originally a present for my nephew, Lego Star Wars II soon found its home at my house because he was scared his brother would eat it. Not saying my younger nephew eats everything in his path, but its close. So me and my nephew sat down at the ole TV and warmed up the ole Playstation. Now at first I wasn’t expecting much, I had gotten the gift because he likes Star Wars, video games and I had heard the controls weren’t too difficult to pick up and play. I know my nephew would love Lego as well, but then we have the eating problem again. Maybe in a few years…

So we warmed up the game and with a click of the menu I found my self smack dab in the middle of the Cantina at Mos Eisley, a decidedly bricky rendition if there ever was one. I was Princess Leia and he was nameless Rebel Guard #1. Obviously not the best choices, but then again this was just the beginning. The first discovery on our journey would soon become my nephew’s favorite part, shooting the other guests at the cantina. Doing so resulted in a bar wide free-for-all that could take up hours of your time in and of itself, especially after unlocking more of the recognizable characters in the movie series. Nothing feels better than hunting down Han Solo as Greedo! This time I really did shoot first! And did I have to feel bad teaching my nephew to shoot things? Heck no! The little guys just put themselves back together and we were off again!

Playing in the Cantina also demonstrated probably one of the best parts of Lego Star Wars, accessibility. This is an easy game to play. It’s not the deepest game on earth, but it doesn’t have to be. Devil May Cry 3 is there for that, and it’s good in its own right. Sometimes you just need a game that’s pure button mashing fun and this game has it in spades. The character will auto-target to specific foes, you can dodge bullets by simply pushing the fire button at the right second. Force powers don’t take ridiculous button combinations that will just make kids angry, they happen effortlessly. All the characters have specific powers that are easily identified on screen by special switches, doors, items or glowing auras. With in a few seconds anyone can know when to switch to a bounty hunter to get through a pesky metal blockade or when you need R2-D2 to crack that pesky door lock. It happens easily and with a fluidity that rarely gets in the way of the games fun.

Throughout the Cantina are doors that represent scenes from the Original Trilogy, each leading to its own mission. One of the big advantages of this is the non linear approach to game play it provides. Don’t like A New Hope? Save it for last! You can skip right to Return of the Jedi for a Ewok love fest! One of those elitist snobs that will only watch The Empire Strikes Back? Play that section and leave the rest of us alone! The only downfall of this system is that you will have to play through the scenes in each movie in order first, but after that you can skip to whatever chapter you had the most fun in and let’s face it, you’re going to have fun in all of them!

Each section of the game pays homage to a part of the movies, giving a comedic spin on the story lines you grew up with as a kid. From Storm Troopers taking over the Jacuzzi on the Tantive IV to Lukes amazing display of acrobatic skill on the plank of a skiff over the Sarlacc pit and Chewie’s perchance to pull the arms off those who anger him, you’ll find your self laughing as much as your kids will at the cute antics the crew over at Traveller’s Tale have cooked up for their personal Lego play set.

And that’s not all! Not only is this game Star Wars with Lego… it’s Lego with Star Wars! Building things with Lego blocks plays a big part throughout the game. Need a device to push several buttons quickly in succession? Build a car! Need to get across the deadly swamps of Dagobah? Build a bridge! Can’t get through a door? Build a control pad! Lego Star Wars even captures the joy of destroying your Lego creations buy allowing many of the items in the game to be destructible. Some parts of Lego Star Wars even force you to break down the game’s Lego creations so that you can build you own to solve the game’s puzzles! If that’s not the spirit of Lego, I don’t know what is!

The only true downfall of Lego Star Wars comes in its camera system, which can be frustrating when dealing with two player cooperative games. In some situations, the camera can pull your character along with another player, dropping you into chasms and other death traps that you could have easily escaped otherwise. Others the game will remove your control of a character entirely if you are forced off the screen for too long. During flying missions, the camera is always facing in one direction, making flying backwards difficult and control awkward in some of the heavier space battles. While this is a problem in the game, it does little to remove the true fun being able to play with a friend. Just make sure you take cooperative to the next level and do whatever you can to help out the other player. And yes, you can still shoot them if they’re really irritating you.

All in all, Lego Star Wars is a fun, easy to get into game that captures the spirit of both its properties in ways most games based on movies and toys can only dream of. From the amazing amount of characters, to the cute graphics and light hearted fun of the game, there is nothing that can stop me from whole heartedly recommending this game for your kids and your inner child. Go on! Take it out of the box and have a blast!

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