Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy

Lego Star Wars

I would like to meet the genius who decided that mixing Lego and Star Wars was a good idea - I'd shake his hand and ask him what divine source had bestowed upon him the knowledge that such a bizarre combination would work. It's like milk and cereal, marmite and toast or chips and gravy (a Northern delicacy), they shouldn't work well together, yet they do.

As I said in my preview a couple of weeks ago, there is just something innately funny about Star Wars in Lego form – a something that truly makes this game unique and original.

The first game was good, but it was based around the heavily criticised recently made trilogy. We all wondered, after the short experience (a few hours at most?), whether Travellers Tales would be ambitious enough to take on the original trilogy.

It's only been 18 months and the developer is back with a product that, amazingly, is even more fun to play.



Where the original game was quite short, this is a brick-fuelled behemoth, where the original game included Jar-Jar Binks this game has Chewbacca, and whilst the original was criticised for its Episode 3 spoilers this game is based on the movies we all know and love, by the way Luke's father is…

Anyway, on with the review! We've taken a look at the gameplay, examined how well the developer has translated all the different episodes, the new vehicle control moments, how it has captured the characters and storyline, the best moments as well as having a look at the graphical options you can tinker with and finally why the game plays better with a gamepad.

Wretched hive of scum and villany

Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy is a fusion of the platform, action and adventure genres. To the untrained eye it has the look of a child's game, silly looking characters doing silly looking things in a cartoon stylised world. That perception of this game however, would be naïve. Within the huge selections of levels include; fiendish puzzles, hidden characters, secret areas and a whole host of features that make this game perfectly suitable for the adult gamer.

The game starts in Mos Eisley's famous cantina, the place where Han memorably shot the alien first and then met Obi Wan and Luke. You begin by taking on the first mission of Episode IV, a mandatory task to progress in the game. Once this level has been completed the game unlocks all three episodes, so if you weren't a fan of 'A New Hope' you can skip it and jump straight into 'The Empire Strikes Back'. You won't do that though, as you'll be missing out on a master class on how to design levels that are original, challenging and fun to play.

You control a different group of characters depending on the level, all familiar from the movies: Luke, Obi-Wan, Leia, R2-D2, C-3PO to name but a few. You can take control of any one of the characters in your little squad at any time and use them all to get through the various puzzles on the level. The robot characters can operate door locks for instance; the Jedi characters can move things with the power of the force, whilst all other characters have a grappling hook of sorts and can reach to high areas. You need to utilise these different skills, often making the team work for one another, to get through the levels.



This gets even more fun when you throw in multiplayer. Two people can control two of the characters at once. Don't worry about your characters dying either, there is no limit to the amount of lives you can lose, you simply respawn every time with less studs. "Studs?" I hear you cry. Yes, studs are one of the many collectible objects in this game, they are either lying around or pop out when you destroy things; the incentive to collect them being that they allow you to unlock some of the many secrets that reside in the game.