Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

A chip off the old block

- IAN EVENDEN

THE LEGO SERIES has been hard to avoid since the first Star Wars game in 2005. Also includes Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Potter, Marvel, DC, Pirates... Lego has cherry-picked the jewels in the crown of modern entertainment, converted them into plastic blocks, and now returns to where it all began.

This isn't a franchise you’d expect to give up any new details or meanings after over 40 years but in Lego guise, it gains the charm Lucas always stretched for with his droids, porgs, and jizz music, but never quite grasped. The little moments are everywhere, from the beginning where a space traffic stop leads to the hiding of some suspicious Evil Plans, while the Death Star levels show what stormtroopers do on their days off—and we weren’t expecting tai chi.

Rather than choosing to simply boost the resolution and port the older games into a new engine, The Skywalker Saga contains fresh takes on familiar events, turning the linear levels of the past into open-world romps in which you explore to discover who to talk to and where to go next. All nine of the movies are here, split into five levels each, and even the ones we don’t like to talk about involving Gungans are rendered a lot of fun simply through the inclusion of one feature: local co-op.