Review (Windows)

Legos.  Star Wars.   A textbook example of the chocolate-and-peanut-butter scenario.  I mean, who doesn't like Legos?  And Star Wars, well, until a few years ago the same question about America's sci-fi sweetheart would have been equally rhetorical.  But I'll skip the prequel bashing here, since it's essentially irrelevant.  Yes, Lucas buggered it up royally.  Let's leave it at that.  For this game, the failings of the borrowed story arc aren't really even tangible.  In fact, I suspect that it was indirectly those failings that allowed this game to even exist in the first place.  One would expect that Lucas Arts (and whatever borgish conglomeration of corporate entities holds sway over the Star Wars license) takes their stewardship of the 'real' Star Wars property very seriously.  That goose has been laying golden eggs for going on 30+ years now.  But the movie prequels themselves (Star wars I/II/III) and the associated dreck of games that bubbled up around them have caused such an unraveling of confidence around the brand that expectations are nearly at rock bottom these days.  Am I the only one that was left totally befuddled that seemingly not a *single* game tied to the prequels was any good?  How can that much marketing and development effort be squandered so thoroughly?  It boggles the mind.

At any rate, the gaming public (if not the general public) has learned to stop expecting anything related to Star Wars I/II/III to be any good.  And I think that it was in the wake of these deflated expectations that the prospect of doing a Star Wars video game with Legos got the green light.  Legos are pretty frivolous, after all (as though video games somehow aren't), and I wouldn't be surprised if initially the idea of a Legos game was pitched to the Lucas camp and it got rejected on the grounds that it wouldn't 'respect' the Star Wars iconography - that somehow letting people (gamers, rather than little kids) see things like Jedis and Stormtroopers in Lego form would mock or undermine the brand.  But by 2004 the bar had slid pretty low.  I mean, why *not* let someone make a Star Wars game using the Lego motif, so long as they use the prequel material?  What's the worst that could happen - *another* sucky prequel-based game?  So my suspicion is that the Legos game didn't show up until 2005 because it wasn't until then that the collective corpoate Star Wars hubris had shriveled enough to allow it to happen.  But even then, as a precaution, they paired the concept with the prequel material, just in case it didn't work out.  Maybe nobody would notice.  And if somehow it did work out, if they managed to finally strike oil on something that wasn't made by Bioware, well then they'd still have the family jewels in the safe (i.e. Star Wars IV/V/VI) with which to exploit the thing six ways to Sunday.

Or not.  What do I know.  I like to pretend I can surmise how this stuff really goes down behind closed doors, in the minds of the industry's power brokers.  For all I know, they jumped on the idea as soon as it was proposed, and smacked themselves for not having done it sooner.

Now on to the actual game.  It's fine.  A nice way to kill 6 or 7 hours.  It doesn't do anything egregiously wrong, which these days seems the exception rather than the rule.  But perhaps that's because it doesn't really take any chances, either.  It takes a very safe approach to both the gameplay and the material.  It's a straight-forward lightweight action platformer.

Good

• Very low barrier to entry.  Just pick up the controller and start playing.  The game doesn't beat you over the head with a difficulty cudgel (eschewing any real 'platformer' label).  This is a terrific game for little kids, or anybody who is intimidated by games.  They can be in the game, making progress, swinging a light sabre mere moments after spinning the disc.  Avatar death is communicated and then casually brushed aside.  If your health is low, the game seems to notice and dispatched enemies eject a heart more frequently than they might have otherwise.

• The auto-saving and progress management in general is inviting.  Again - it reinforces the 'just play' philosophy.  Don't burden gamers with 'lives', restarting, save-games, etc..  That's not why they've signed up.
• Jedis.  Unlike other games that make you eat multiple servings of vegetables before giving you the desert of Jedi powers and light sabres (*cough* Jedi Knight), LSW knows why you're here.  You want to swing a light sabre at cute little Lego stormtroopers, and the game serves that up as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
  

Bad

• The Windows version needed some additional quality control.  I experienced far too many crash-to-desktop incidents, for what is a straight console port.

• The camera frustrates occasionally.   There are two industry-standard implementations for a roving 3rd person camera: (1) make anything that gets between the camera and the avatar become transparent, or (2) automatically push the camera position in front of any offending object.  This game uses (2).  I don't like (2).  Invariably, you get presented with an up-close-and-personal view of the side of your avatar's head for no other reason than that you happen to be standing in the wrong corner of a room, which makes it hard to play.
  

Ugly

• You know the adage: 'easy to learn, difficult to master'?  Well, this game changes that to 'easy to learn, nothing to master'.  There's nothing that challenges a player in terms of developing, well, anything really.  Yes, the low barrier to entry that I already mentioned is a good thing, in principle, but the key part of that phrase is 'entry'.  Anyone interested in sinking their teeth into the game a bit deeper finds that it's just a hollow shell.  That doesn't mean the game 'fails'.  If its only objective is to deliver 5-7 hours of baby-sitting for an 8 year old, then it succeeds in spades.  Anything beyond that and the game just sort of throws its hands up and says, 'eh, that's all I've got.'  There's just no meat on the bones.

• Not only does the game ultimately fail to offer anything beyond the rudimentary, even what it does offer seems to fall a bit flat.  The gameplay has no punch.  It's like listening to a handheld transistor radio circa 1960 instead of a modern surround sound audio system with a powered subwoofer.  Wading through your enemies as a Jedi should be a lot more satisfying than this.  There aren't really any wicked moves you can pull, nothing that leaves you feeling like you just did something really cool.  Compare this for a moment with God of War.  In GoW, at an average of roughly every 8 seconds you do something in that game that is undeniably cool and viscerally satisfying.  And it doesn't necessarily rely on the gore to achieve that effect (though that's obviously a big part of the overall aesthetic).  The problem with LSW, by contrast, is that nothing you do or can do is particularly satisfying in any way.  When a game presents no significant skill challenge, as is the case with LSW, it means that the player isn't ever going to have mere survival or accomplishment be a primary mechanism for psychological reward.  And in that case the game needs to provide something else to fill that role.  In other words - a game that isn't likely to hold sway via objective-driven gameplay can compensate by providing experience-driven gamplay.  I don't mean 'experience' in the RPG sense, where you're just accumulating some arbitrary numerical abstraction, I mean experience in the good old classic sense, where you are motivated to do something because you enjoy the actual experience of doing it.  I believe LSW needs that to make up for its nearly flat learning curve and fundamentally shallow goal mechanisms, and unfortunately it doesn't have it.
  

Beautiful

• The Lego aesthetic is nearly perfect.  They got it completely right.  This is the very incarnation of what Legos are like in the imagination.  I was actually glad that there wasn't any voice acting, as I enjoyed the clever use of non-verbal expressions and light sense of humor that was present throughout the game.  Actual voices would have felt incongruous, perhaps especially so even if they'd gotten the actual actors from the movies to reprise their speaking roles.  If anything, I thought perhaps even more of the environments could have been Lego-constructed than was the case.  But even so, the overall effect was spot-on.

Summary

LSW isn't bad.  It just isn't much of anything.  It delivers a handful of innocuous hours of having your boyhood playtime with Legos come to life on the screen.  But that's all it does.  Incidentally, I think the Star Wars governing body would be more than a little surprised at how appealing this aesthetic might be in MMO form.  I can easily see myself thoroughly enjoying an extended romp in a wider, more interactive, deeper, Lego Star Wars world.  It'd be a perfect excuse to break loose of the chains of the classic MMO mold.  Something with a little more free-wheeling fun and frivolity would almost have to emerge from a Legos-based MMO design.  And I haven't even touched on the fact that LSW totally abandons what it really means to play with Legos!  Building!  Legos are for creating stuff out of simple pieces.  Imagine an MMO that let you actually create things (ships, buildings, environments) out of Lego parts, and have them be instantly part of the gameworld?!  But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to see the light of day...