by: Billy Kirk

January 15, 2008

I reviewed the first Lego Star Wars several years ago on the PlayStation 2. At the time, I said that it was a fun but short game that was both made worth the time it took to play it, yet also held back by, its simplicity. Traveller’s Tales tried to correct this in the sequel, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, but instead they ended up with a bigger problem. The longer levels and new vehicle gameplay which is meant to make the experience slightly deeper only proceeds to make the game less fun to play.


The source material available for Lego Star Wars II is so much greater that the developers should have been able to make a better game. In a few ways, they did. I really like the new ways you can customize your character. The blaster characters have been made much more effective. Everything is much better balanced. Unfortunately, that’s about where the improvements over the original game end.

The biggest flaw in this game is the length of the levels. In the last Lego Star Wars, you could beat most any level in around fifteen minutes. This time around, many of the levels can take upwards of a half hour to beat. In most games, that’s not that long for a level, but in Lego Star Wars it’s an eternity. This is a game which thrives, by the nature of its simplicity, on short bursts of action. Seeing lots of different areas for a short time was the formula that made the last game work. Some of the levels in this game could easily have been split in two, which probably would have helped.

The other major flaw this time around is the new vehicle levels. I can see where the developers were going here - they wanted to provide gamers with a wider array of gameplay variety, and they thought that was the solution to moving this series forward. They may have been right. But the problem is how sloppily these levels are handled here. The controls for one are a mess. There’s a serious learning curve here to adapt to and even when you do, they never feel precise. Young children who are a large part of this game’s target audience are going to have problems with them for sure. They may have problems with more than that. The difficulty of the original game was seriously ramped up this time around. I know that I had a blast playing through the last game and feeling like a true jedi, just destroying anything that got in my way. It doesn’t work this time around. You will die a fair amount, the adaptive difficulty does not work well and if you start doing well the game’s difficulty will become ridiculous. Now you can’t actually die in the game, which means anyone with some persistence can complete the title, but when you’ve been “killed” five times and miss the True Jedi rank because of it, it can get annoying.

Lego Star Wars II looks good, even if there is nothing in the 360 version that sets it apart from the versions on last generation hardware. Stylistically, this game just looks cool in the same way that the last title did. This is a game that you’ll be able to pop in twenty years from now and it’ll still look good. It just has a cool style and presentation to it. There are no high resolution textures or fancy graphical tricks - no one is going to use this game as a showcase for their next generation game machine - but it looks good.

I also really appreciated the humor that was brought to the title. Just like the last game, the sound effects and sense of humor here are spot on. At times openly mocking the Star Wars universe, this game should get laughs from anyone who is familiar with the planet Hoth. Even those who aren’t will probably have a good time. Nothing much like watching a tiny Lego Chewbacca cower, only to be slapped upside the head. The game keeps a light hearted tone throughout that makes the game fun for all ages while still keeping it appropriate. Sound effects are perfectly done, from the blazing of the lightsabers to the way things sound breaking or the sounds of the vehicles. The music is as good as it was in the last game and works perfectly for this title.

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Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy moves the series forward in a few crucial ways, namely balance and replay value, but it’s one step forward and two steps back. By changing the core formula that made the original title work, Lego Star Wars II, for all its additions, just isn’t as much fun as the original. You’ll still have fun playing drop in/drop out co-op with your friends and you’ll still enjoy the humor, but there’s not much here that wasn’t done better on the last generation hardware. Gamers who are interested should definitely rent first here. You’ll be glad you did.

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