LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

I went in expecting a pleasant nostalgia loop and came out forty-plus hours later still hunting Kyber Bricks on Tatooine. TT Games rebuilt this one from the ground up, and it shows the moment you notice the new over-the-shoulder camera sitting right behind your character instead of hovering above like the old games. That shift makes a real difference: blaster shootouts now involve actual cover mechanics, lightsaber combos have light, heavy, and counter options rather than a single mash button, and Force-wielding Jedi can use mind tricks to briefly possess enemies. None of it reaches action-game depth, but it is a meaningful step up from the franchise's button-hammering past. The sheer volume of content is the headline. Nine films, each condensed into five missions, means 45 levels total. Between those you have 20-plus explorable planets serving as open hub areas, 140 side missions, 731 puzzles, and a playable roster that pushes past 380 characters. Progression runs through Kyber Bricks, collectibles scattered across every battlefield and hub, which unlock class-based upgrades for nine character types including Jedi, bounty hunters, droids, and dark-side users. Droids get a funny passive perk: enemies mostly ignore them or talk down to them. Jedi can throw their lightsabers like a boomerang. The toolbox is wider than it first looks, even if most of the story missions never really pressure you to use the deeper end of it. The humor deserves a separate mention because it is doing a lot of work here. The writing is sharper than any previous LEGO game in the series, layering classic slapstick with jokes aimed squarely at adults who grew up on these films. Voice acting talent is strong throughout, with several actors reprising roles from The Clone Wars and other productions. The set-pieces land consistently: the Death Star trench run, the Duel of the Fates, the Hoth AT-AT battle all feel like genuine highlights, not checkbox recreations. Where it stumbles is familiar LEGO franchise territory, amplified by the bigger scale. Boss fights outside a handful of standouts are repetitive, cycling through the same dash-and-AoE patterns. The open hub areas, praised for their size, can feel thin on meaningful activity once you strip away collectible hunting. The HUD gets cluttered, the menus busier than they need to be, and character customization from older games is absent entirely. Co-op in split-screen takes a hit from the new camera angle, which narrows the view noticeably. None of these are dealbreakers, but they explain why the critical reception landed in the high-70s rather than the high-80s that a game this ambitious was probably aiming for. For the audience this is built for, those gaps barely register. Kids get an endlessly forgiving, funny Star Wars playground. Adults who have any affection for the original trilogy or the prequels will find themselves grinning through the parody cutscenes whether they expected to or not. Solo players and couch co-op pairs both have plenty of reason to keep coming back. Just know you are signing up for a very wide, occasionally shallow galaxy rather than a tightly designed action game. Alex, Scout Team