Over the last few years I've collected dozens of free games from various online stores, most of which I've yet to even try. I think it's time I at least acknowledged their generosity.
I'd given up on the TT Lego games. They were good once, but that golden era has long passed. I saw they'd made one big Star Wars game to cover all the movies and decided I wouldn't bother. But if it's free...
No, I can't do it. This one is bad too.
The problem I've had with this series for a long time is that they're mostly playable, enjoyable games wrapped in a frustrating package of bad menu design, unskippable animations, bugs and inconsistencies, often over-burdened with new features that do little to enhance the core mechanics. However, with the Skywalker Saga, they seem to have tried to eradicate the good bit of the game too.
The fun bit was smashing bricks. Smashing bricks, collecting fallen studs before they disappeared, then sometimes being able to build something from the parts left behind. That's the core of these games - plus the charm of seeing a beloved fictional universe rendered in Lego bricks, but we're well past that being a novelty at this stage.
I start the opening level of Episode 4 and find myself aboard the Tantive IV above Tatooine. There's things to smash, but they're few and far between, and the studs seem to partly collect themselves. Sometimes when I smash bricks they explode and kill my character, but I'm not sure which ones are which - why disincentivise players like this? And enemies now have health bars, requiring multiple shots to take down. If you choose to fight hand to hand they can now block, making combos essential to fighting. The simple joy of smashing is almost entirely taken away.
Let's not forget all my original complaints though, because they're all here too. Configuring the keyboard with any keys other than the default set proved impossible, as some keys refused to be rebound. Attempting to change an option for how firing worked made no difference to the actual behaviour. And for some reason this is now a third person shooter, which means it's harder than ever to properly see the environment around you.
And yes, there's also the unskippable animations and sequences, worst of which is the 10+ second animation that insists on playing every time the main menu is opened - that means every time you load and finish playing the game. It's all worth it though - because you get a lovely picture of some characters on a rock while the actual menu is reduced to a few hard to decypher icons crammed into the bottom of the screen. It's like they didn't employ a playtester for more than one go at a time.
I'll admit, I haven't played the Skywalker Saga very much, hardly at all. But what I have seen was sterile, over-engineered, and very, very boring, and I've honestly lost all hope that there's a decent game to be found here. I didn't pay money for this, but I still feel ripped off.