The LEGO series of games has been around for 11 years now, and each entry in the series follows a very similar format regardless of what minifigures may be the stars. While LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens doesn’t completely change the formula, a few nice additions and tweaks to the gameplay make it feeling fresh and different.
During my demo on a PS4, I had the opportunity to play through a few of the early levels of LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you’re familiar at all with the movie, the levels I played involved Rey scrapping junk on Jakku and meeting up with Finn. The demo ended as the two, along with BB-8, escaped the planet aboard the Millennium Falcon.
If you’ve played any of the previous LEGO games, you’ll know what’s going on perfectly. You take control of one minifigure at a time, collecting LEGO studs, breaking everything in sight, solving puzzles and knocking enemies around. It’s all familiar territory, but still somehow fun after all these years.
The changes to the formula are slight, but important. One of the big additions are the multi-builds. At many points during the game, players will come across a pile of LEGO bricks that can be built into an item to use. Normally, players would simply hold a button while the minifigure quickly threw the bricks together to make whatever was needed.
In The Force Awakens , these piles of bricks sometimes allow for you to craft multiple items instead of just one. Players are presented with building one model or another, and the outcome can change depending on which item gets built. These multi-builds also create additional puzzles, with different objects being needed at different times to clear areas or move to another room.
Another big change is the addition of flying arenas. Previous LEGO games have had flying sections, but those were heavily on rails. These new flying arenas open up a big area for vehicles to maneuver around and get in solid dogfights. It actually played about as well as Star Wars Battlefront, which made me happy since I love the Fighter Squadron mode in that game.
Another thing to note is The Force Awakens looks positively stunning. It makes sense that the newest game in any franchise will look the best, but The Force Awakens truly shines. Must be all the plastic.
LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be releasing on June 28. It will be coming to just about everything, including PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, 3DS, PS Vita, Wii U and PC.
So what do you think? Are you excited to play through the latest Star Wars movie in LEGO form? What other LEGO games would you like to see get made? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
