LEGO Star Wars The Force Awakens review

The original LEGO Star Wars was the game that started off LEGO games as we know them, that is a licensed game closely following the plot of a movie, but with distinct self-parodying humour. Since then we’ve had LEGO versions of Batman, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park and Dimensions come onto our consoles, but now it’s back to where it all began with LEGO Star Wars The Force Awakens, and this is definitely one of the best.

What’s slightly odd is that the first level you actually play is actually the last scene from Return of the Jedi, still, it gets you into the swing of things with what is now a very known story and some truly funny scenes based around Luke and his daddy problems! Then it’s into the main game as you begin at the beginning with Poe hanging about with BB8, jumping in his ship and heading down to Jakku where things start to turn really bad.

What’s good about this game is it delivers the usual bashing the crap out of everything and collecting studs, hot-swapping of characters with different abilities and simple combat with some brand new ideas which mix up the gameplay. Of course, it’s all very kid friendly with humour which adults will enjoy and the team have excelled here. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll laugh out loud at some of the clever observations they’ve played with here, and the game’s all the better for it.

They’ve also added some fresh gameplay elements into the game that, whilst they won’t truly challenge you, mix things up. Flying around in spacecraft to blow up the Death Star or to escape enemy ships in the Millennium Falcon over Jakku are truly exhilarating experiences. There are also cover shooter elements during points in a level where you press a button to take cover and then pop up over chest high barriers to shoot Stormtroopers and blow up explosive blocks to take down barriers and move forward. It’s no Gears of War but still great fun.

When building, there’s also another new tweak which is the ability to rebuild. Go to a spot with bouncing bricks and you see ghosts of where you can build. For instance you can build a bridge, then once you’ve used that, knock it down and rebuild the bricks elsewhere to form a turret. Yet another addition that’s clever and very on theme with the LEGO brand.

This being Star Wars, you’ll be glad to hear voice acting from what sounds like the genuine actors. I think the prologue is actually clips from the films, whilst some other dialogue has been recorded specifically for the game. What’s weird is the variance in quality. Rey’s voice over on Jakku where she traverses the junkyard level with BB8 is pretty dreadful, both in delivery and audio quality. Thankfully this seems to even out over the course of the game as things hot up.

It also seems that the game is slightly easier in terms of combat than before. It was frustrating being killed over and over again as you leak studs, but this seems to have been dialled back a bit, so you can still feel like you’re giving the bad guys a good bashing without breaking into bits yourself.

With LEGO Dimensions seemingly having an infinite amount of content for it, I was expecting a Force Awakens pack, but it’s a pleasure to be presented with a full game that has all the collecting fun, combat and replayability as you dive into freeplay and try to get every red brick and mini kit for that 100%. It’s a fun game for adult and child Star Wars fans alike so it gets an excellent 8 out of 10.