LEGO® STAR WARS™: The Force Awakens

I'll be straight with you: LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not here to test your reflexes. There is no netcode to stress-test, no ranked mode to grind, and your mouse's polling rate is completely irrelevant. What Traveller's Tales shipped in 2016 is a couch co-op action-adventure aimed squarely at families and Star Wars diehards who want to replay Episode VII at a pace that lets them breathe. Knowing that going in makes the whole thing a lot easier to enjoy on its own terms. The core loop will be familiar to anyone who has touched a LEGO game in the last decade: smash plastic scenery, collect studs, swap between characters to unlock ability-gated puzzle sections, repeat. What this entry adds on top of that formula are three mechanical wrinkles worth noting. The Multi-Builds system lets you take a pile of bricks and construct different objects from the same raw material, occasionally opening alternate routes. The Blaster Battles drop you into light cover-based shooting sections where characters duck behind objects and pop out to fire at Stormtroopers, though auto-targeting means there is zero precision skill involved. And the flight sequences, particularly Millennium Falcon dogfights and TIE fighter engagements, give the game some genuine speed and visual punch that the on-foot sections cannot match. None of these additions reinvent the franchise, but they stop the experience from feeling like a straight copy-paste of every prior entry. The roster is huge, over 200 playable characters including Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Kylo Ren, Captain Phasma, and BB-8, each with character-specific abilities that gate exploration and collectibles. The freeplay mode lets you revisit any completed level with any unlocked character, which is where the bulk of completionist hours live. There is also a prologue set during Return of the Jedi's Battle of Endor, plus several original story levels covering the gap between the original trilogy and Episode VII, including Han and Chewie hunting Rathtars and Poe Dameron rescuing Admiral Ackbar. That bonus content is genuinely the most interesting part for lore-curious players. Crucially, there is no online multiplayer at all. Local co-op only, split dynamically on a single screen. If your play sessions happen on a couch with a second controller in someone else's hands, that is exactly the format this game is built for. The weaknesses are real and consistent across critic coverage. Combat outside the flight sections is button-mashing with a pulse, puzzles rarely hold you for more than a few seconds, and the new Multi-Build mechanic mostly results in different animations leading to the same outcome rather than meaningful choice. The game carries an 84% positive rating across nearly 7,000 Steam reviews, which reflects a satisfied audience, but that audience is very specifically families, younger players, and Star Wars fans who find joy in seeing Jakku and Starkiller Base rendered in plastic bricks with self-aware humor. If you came here hoping for something with depth, the game will feel like it runs out of ideas by chapter three. For what it is, it delivers cleanly. The voice cast is authentic, the slapstick cutscenes land more than they miss, and the flight missions carry enough kinetic energy to feel like a different game entirely. Experienced shooters and competitive players will find nothing here. But if you are a parent, a Star Wars fan looking for something low-stakes, or someone with a co-op partner who does not play much, this is one of the better entries in the LEGO series at the time of release and holds up reasonably well as a completionist-friendly session game.

Fred · Scout Team

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