Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy

Get a gamepad!

The game allows you to play with a mouse and keyboard attached but quite frankly, this is horrible. It would be like playing football in ballet shoes – it isn't comfortable, effective or worthwhile (unless there is no other option, however we recommend playing with no shoes on Brazilian style, so as not to be laughed at by footballing team mates).

The keyboard-mouse combo makes playing multiplayer difficult if not impossible, with four hands simply not fitting on the keyboard.

We played the game with a gamepad and found it most agreeable, and so the advice I offer you is to consider buying the game for one of your console systems if you don't already own a gamepad for your PC. The game on the 360 will certainly look just as nice as on your PC and is designed to be played with a gamepad.

Controls are very simple, with no memorising of button combinations required to perform moves. There are separate buttons for attack, jump, change character and interaction making controlling the game simple, in a delicious and delightful way.

Conclusions

I enjoyed my many hours spent playing Lego Star Wars II immensely. The game is refreshingly simple to pick up and play, yet offers some fiendish puzzles that never cross that invisible line in the sand between enjoyably puzzling and frustratingly annoying. It's a difficult balance, which many games fail to get right. I also enjoyed a game that didn't make me restart the level every time I died; I get so sick of having to play through entire levels for making one mistake – it's such a basic developer trick to make their game prolonged.

My main concern is that gamers will look the other way when it comes to Lego Star Wars, casting it aside as a child's game. Give it a chance, it will certainly offer you a minimum of ten hours of gameplay which more than justifies the price tag. By the way the game isn't set for release in the UK until next week (11/09/06). We found the cheapest it was listed was £17.99 at Play – which considering the fun this game will give you, you'd be bricking-mad to miss it!