An Epic Analysis of A Familiar Game

Released in 2005, Lego Star Wars - The Video Game takes the player on a long, treacherous journey through the first three action-filled episodes of the series.

You're just playing through the movies. But there's one difference. Legos!

Everything from the characters and blasters to even the sets and currency are consist of virtual legos. This difference allows for hilarious adventures and amusing fights! Furthermore, the game is meant to be played at all ages, so no matter how old you are, you can join in the fun.

After having first beaten the game almost four years ago, I return to it now to examine it and provide critical analysis. That said, my second time playing was not a disappointment.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

Graphics: 7 / 10
The graphics are of lesser quality, but they do serve their purpose. It is easy to distinguish characters and the lego recreations of familiar buildings and objects are astoundingly accurate.

The movement of characters and objects have no glitches and are smooth. The lightsaber and blasters are well designed and their movements look surprisingly realistic.

There is very little to complain about the graphics besides fine detail, which only negligibly impacts gameplay. Other components of the graphics easily make up for this downside.

I have no doubt that graphics deserves a 7 / 10.

Sound / Music: 10 / 10
The music was taken directly from the movies. Its recognizable songs make the game more enjoyable.

With the complexity of the songs, I worried that they might get annoying. However, I was surprised to have enjoyed the tracks and I left them on the full time that I played.

Without a doubt, they add to the gameplay and provide an appropriate atmosphere to each level.

The sound effects are ubiquitous. Every object, character, and weapon seems to have their own noises. Whenever I play, not a second goes by without hearing three to four of them. With any other game I would expect this much noise to be annoying.

But it isn't. The sound effects perfectly match the weapons and the characters. They make the power of the light-saber apparent and immerses the player into the game.

If the same strategy for music and sound effects were used in almost any other game, they wouldn't work. I’m amazed by how the designers found a way to make them work here.

Needless to say, I was very impressed. 10 / 10.

Addictiveness: 6 / 10
This version of Lego Star Wars was no less fun than any of the other four versions I own for different consoles.

However, it runs into the same problem that the others do. It is easy to forget which way you need to go to progress and the levels can be long and tedious. I’m often tired after playing only 1-2 levels.

It is addictive, but not enough to play it for hours at a time. The times that I have tried to binge play it have only left me with headaches for my trouble. Because of this problem, the score lowers.

6 / 10.

Story: 8 / 10
Unlike other games produced from movies, LSW uses recognizable scenes for game-play. The story-line stays true to the series with virtually no contradictions.

Any inconsistencies are minor and often overlooked. Because not all of the movies were released at the time, the ambiguity in scenes were meant to keep much about the upcoming movies hidden.

The story-line itself is short but interesting. The objectives are not horribly tedious and the game can be beat within 6 hours for an amateur gamer (without speed-run). If you play a little at a time, it takes longer, but the overall time should never cross 12 hours.

The clear cut objectives takes away any sense of aimlessness and each minute playing is set towards achieving a broader goal.

While playing, you might feel distanced from some objectives, especially on longer, harder levels. This problem hurts the story negligibly.

I have no doubt about my rating. 8 / 10.

Depth: 9 / 10
With many, many objectives and longer levels, there is plenty of depth. When moving through a level, one sees multiple passageways and, while this makes gameplay less straightforward, it adds to the depth of the game.

Within levels different characters may be needed for different tasks, so the game requires the player to switch between characters used.

Strategy remains a component and simply trying to fight each enemy does not provide the fastest win, so thinking helps.

However, the possibility of destroying every single enemy before progressing adds depth to completionists.  

Story mode is not all there is within the game. Free play allows you to choose the character you play as during levels.

As part of the first Lego Star Wars video games to be released, the game clearly set a precedence for depth that was expanded upon in future games.

9 / 10.

Difficulty: 6 / 10
I have never found the enemies to be annoyingly difficult. I manage to beat them without much trouble and few deaths. However, the game still isn’t a breeze.

The levels have multiple doorways and it is very easy to forget where you are located or where you need to go next. Countless times I found myself walking in the wrong direction after having missed the passageway to progress.

While trying to find your way through the level, you face numerous enemies who shoot at you. While in regular play they are merely an annoyance, attempts to speedrun makes them exponentially more fatal.

They can prove especially tedious when trying to find the way to progress. If you don’t pay attention, they will slowly take away your hearts until you die.

Since the difficulty is a byproduct of complex levels and large amounts of weak enemies, the difficulty deserves a rating of 6 / 10.

Overall: 7.5 / 10
A holistic comparison of important categories leads to an overall score of 7.5 / 10.

While the game had its weaknesses, the strengths outshined them. It’s major strengths were the gameplay and depth. The major weakness was the reasons behind the increased difficulty, tedious sections, and lesser quality graphics.

While not perfect, I would recommend still recommend this game to anyone who wanted a game:
1. that could be beat in a few hours

2. or wanted to play a game over many days.

3. that was the initial release of a game that is today popular around the world.

In all three cases, the game is an excellent choice.

I definitely enjoyed it. I hope you do too.

Thank you for reading!

Thank you for putting the effort to dig deep in the breakdown of the game. I love to see when members actually dive into the game and actually throw out line after line of reasoning when making a review. My one personal critique on this is that your ratings seem too nice on some of your categories based on what you said. But this might be simply just be me. To me, I wouldn't easily give a game a high grade on graphics simply because they "serve their purpose" or "have no glitches." I would really want to see how it is as an art or as the medium. I would say the same with the sound part. I don't just give perfect scores because they match the characters or actions. That just tells me it is competently made, but it doesn't tell me if it is outstanding or close to perfection.

Finally....nothing about it being lego or the features in this game is based on what you do with legos?

play4fun : I understand what you mean about the ratings and I agree. I tried to analyze the game without bias, but my personal enjoyment of the game led me to rate too highly on two of the categories, but I've fixed those.

I also added more information about the ubiquitous nature of Legos in these games. After having played so many lego video games, I took that aspect for granted

Thank you for the help!