I didn’t really care for the Lego Star Wars games. I played the original and thought it was okay and I played the Force Awakens and thought it was good. But within Lego video games, they always seem to go on sale and do re releases and collections, so I was never really able to get into it or think that it was truly great.

But yesterday, the trailer and info for The Skywalker Saga was released and even I think that it looks like an overall really great game.

The thing that impressed me the most was the amount of content in the game. I originally thought it was just a bundle consisting of the three main games (Prequel Trilogy, Original trilogy, and Force Awakens). Just that would be cool because the first two games only ever made it to PS3/XBOX360/DS/Wii.

That would be one great collection too with more than 80 hours worth of content across three games on modern consoles. But this collection also serves as a new game as well, because it also features The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, which never had a Lego game before. It’s basically an enhanced port of the original 7 movies and then two more.

But on top of that, there’s also a lot of improvements including better combat, more places to explore across all movies, 300+ playable characters, and voice acting.

The game comes out the first week of April for $60 and comes with an intense steelbook if you buy it from Best Buy. There’s also a Deluxe Edition that costs an extra $10 and comes with a Luke mini figure and six character packs.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (Switch)

Yeah Skywalker Saga is definitely a pleasant surprise. Traveler's Tales seemed to be hit badly by the Warner Bros acquisition and I wonder if this is their way of trying to fix their image? Not to say that the older entries like LEGO Batman or Star Wars were exceptional, but they had character. I think it mostly has to do with the limitations TT applied towards all their LEGO projects. A straight adaptation would be boring, so the games were often designed around what a LEGO could realistically do. Storylines would have to be mimed out through facial expressions and awkward LEGO movements. Like when Darth Vader has to whip out the old family photos for Luke. It's a cute gag among many other examples from the series. This charm really went along way in making up for lackluster gameplay. Then TT just stopped trying? Newer adaptations featured scripts lifted almost entirely from the source material. Voice actors became the norm too and it more or less became a straight adaptation featuring LEGO men. Combine that with their emphasis on samey open worlds and you have a bunch of utterly forgettable releases throughout the 2010s. Skywalker Saga seems like TT realized this. Not only has the classic miming returned with mumble mode, but the gameplay seems to have been totally overhauled. Like Luke was doing actual lightsaber combos, blasters had precision aiming and the dogfights look better than the ones in the first Battlefront. It's baffling but I'm not exactly going to complain. If TT wants to release a high quality co-op collectathon, I'm all for it.