Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy

Lego Star Wars Graphical Review

The specifications for Lego Star Wars II are fairly low, and considering that the game has been designed to be multi format the scalability options are limited but not non-existent.

The minimum system specification is a 1GHz processor, 256MB of RAM and a DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card. Assuming most of you guys have that, the recommended specs are still pretty low, 2.4GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and a graphics card with 128MB of memory and Vertex and Pixel Shader capability.

The in game graphical options are pretty limited. Anti-aliasing can be turned up, with reflection, Lego plastic, bump mapping all options to turn off.

We had a look at how the game ran with the various option settings turned on and posted up some screenshots to let you have a look. Click to enlarge all the pictures to get a closer look.


Anti-aliasing turned off: By far and away the most detrimental effect on graphics is turning off anti-aliasing. We managed to get hold of a Playstation 2 version of the game which, although identical from a gameplay perspective, looks absolutely awful without any anti-aliasing. On the PC things aren't quite so bad, with the high resolution making image quality certainly better than the aged console. However, our advice is to try and avoid turning anti-aliasing off at all costs.

2xAA & 4xAA: As you can see, the difference between no anti-aliasing and 2x or 4x anti-aliasing is substantial. However, the difference between 2xAA and 4xAA is very small. It's difficult to see the difference in the screenshots but it did look slightly smoother when you were actually playing the game. If you're struggling to get you card to push out 4xAA though I wouldn't worry, turning the anti-aliasing down a notch won't harm your gaming experience too much.

Other options I found the other options slightly underwhelming. Turning off shadows and reflections didn't have a drastic effect, as it does in other PC games. Turning Lego plastic and bump mapping did have a slightly bigger effect, making characters look slightly less smooth and (obviously) less plastic. Again though, system requirements are so low you will almost certainly be able to afford to switch these options to 'on'.


Read on to find out our opinion on the best way to play the game and our conclusions…