captaind's Full Review: Lego STAR WARS 2 for Windows, Mac
The first LEGO Star Wars game was a lot of fun, especially in two-player mode. It featured the Star Wars universe made up of LEGO (the famous children’s building blocks), and featured a whole host of characters going through sequences from the first three films in the series. This hotly-awaited sequel brings us more LEGO Star Wars action but featuring the original trilogy, which I’m sure most fans like myself infinitely prefer to the more recent films.
Like the first game this has a central hub of activity where you can roam about and get a few extra studs (the LEGO currency) while viewing the vehicles you’ve managed to assemble (more on this in a minute) and choosing your episode / chapter to play. There are 6 chapters for each of the three episodes, for instance Escape from the Death Star in Episode IV (A New Hope), Battle on Hoth in Episode V (The Empire Strikes Back), and Pit of Karkoon in Episode VI (Return of the Jedi). Each chapter is based on a well-known sequence from the film but puts its own twist on things for the sake of gameplay. There is an intro movie sequence to each, as well as one at the end and some along the way – these are both informative as to what’s going on and funny – well, mainly they’re designed to be funny and they mostly are.
The gameplay itself has you running around, defeating the bad guys, solving various puzzles and trying to complete objectives to get you to the next part, and ultimately the end of the chapter. You have to play the chapters in Story Mode first of all, where you’re limited to certain characters, the ones you would expect to be in that scene if you know the films. It doesn’t take too long to complete a chapter in the sense of getting to the end of it – we completed all 18 chapters in about 12 hours in total, on average they take about 3/4 of an hour each. But this is where the genius of the game design comes in. Finishing the levels isn’t the end of the story – in fact, it’s less than half of it. To truly “complete” a chapter, you have to achieve 4 things (getting 4 “Golden Bricks” in the process after you finish the chapter) : attain “True Jedi” status in both Story Mode and Free Play Mode, find and get the Red brick, and find all 10 mini-kit pieces. (These are the vehicles that can be viewed later at the Mos Eisley Cantina later on, the hub of the game.) Some of these mini-kit pieces are tricky to get to, and some are actually impossible if you’re in Story Mode. This is where the Free Play mode comes in – you can swap between different characters along the way, allowing you access to many extra parts of the chapter. For instance, R2D2 and Boba Fett can fly short distances, Jawas and Ewoks can crawl through tunnels too small for other characters, and Bounty Hunters can blow up obstructions that are unaffected by the weapons of any other character. These characters are unlocked to use in Free Play Mode when you complete the relevant Chapter that they first appear in. There is a whole host of playable characters, over 60 in total (though many are variations of each character type, you should get one of each major type available in any Free Play game although the individuals will be different each time). The Red Bricks are also pretty tricky to get hold of, but once attained they unlock an extra that can be purchased – i.e. x2 scoring, invincibility, super blasters, etc. There are other extras too that can be bought, and some characters can be bought for use in Free Play Mode.
If 60+ characters isn’t enough for you, if you have a save game file from the first LEGO Star Wars game with the characters unlocked, you can have another 60+ to play with! The Golden Bricks that you get can be used to create items in and around the Mos Eisley Cantina – doors to access extra levels / features in the three episodes, and other goodies. I’m not going to tell you what they are because half the joy of this game is in discovering things. This works well because there are so many things to discover, and the gameplay – which is mostly quite simple but includes some more involved action sequences and trickier puzzles – is easily addictive enough to keep you coming back for more. What really makes the game so enjoyable however is the little touches – try putting hats (which can be used as disguises in some levels) on different characters and see their different reactions and the ensuing animations, buy the “Disguise” extra for nose glasses on every character, animal, and even space ship, or a number of other whacky features. One addition to the first game is that when you see a pile of LEGO pieces lying on the floor, your characters can assemble them into useful objects – somehow this is always funny to watch, no matter how many times you’ve seen it before.
Vehicle control an aspect which is given more emphasis than in the first game, with several levels putting you charge of a space ship, and other vehicles / animals that you can control if it takes your fancy. Most of these are there to solve specific puzzles or get to particular places that can’t otherwise be reached, but one or two of them seem to be there just for the hell of it. The control system is a bit fiddly, but you do get used to it eventually. With 180° loops possible though it’s a bit tricky with two players as you often find yourself suddenly going in the opposite direction because you automatically reverse to keep both players’ vehicles on the screen! Many of these levels (and especially some of the bonus levels that you will gain access to later on) are really manic, enjoyable but difficult to work out where you are at times! (Two player cooperative games let either player drop out or back in at any time, which is great for tea breaks :-D) There is also an option to let you create your own character by mixing and matching elements from existing characters – so you could have “Bespian Princess Darth Fett” or something. Quite fun when you’ve done most other things. Some playable characters really can’t do much but are still quite fun – i.e. Gonk Droids, Womp Rats, and the Mouse Droid. Gamorrean Guards are also quite fun, and very powerful (though slow). Obviously the Jedi (particularly the Dark Jedi) can do a few extra tricks that help you out on the Free Play levels.
The graphics are great with lots of detail, and fortunately a lot of different screen resolutions are supported (including widescreen), which you might need as it is a very technically demanding game. The sound effects are great with all the authentic Star Wars sound effects, weapon sounds, etc that we have come to expect from LucasArts productions. The music is of course terrific (can't get the Cantina music out of my head at all now!!), and while there is no intelligable speech as such, the inflections in the speech sounds are quite funny at times.
Overall, LEGO Star Wars 2 is an extremely enjoyable game – but there are a few problems that could really do with an update patch (there is none yet available, although there is an updated installer though we didn’t have any trouble installing it so didn’t use). The graphic speed is a bit erratic – at times my graphics card was quite happy displaying 1024x768 resolution, 4x anti-aliasing, bump mapping, bloom filtering, and plastic reflections on, whereas in other parts that weren’t noticeably different graphically it struggled to keep up a decent frame-rate at 800x600 even with the effects turned off. The movie clips were really slow at times, resulting in a slow-motion effect where I’m sure none was intended! The music switched off near the end of each movie clip – only a few seconds, but still somewhat annoying.
Other problems we have experienced (bear in mind this is in over 30 hours of playing time overall) are that we have experienced one crash, and had one level where something happened that prevented the level from being completable (we definitely did everything required to complete the level). The controls seem a bit sluggish at times. None of these bugs render the game permanently unplayable but are pretty irritating – especially when you’ve just completed the level in every sense only for the force field that should now be open remain stubbornly shut!!
These bugs are annoying enough for me to give this 4 stars instead of 5, but I would still thoroughly recommend LEGO Star Wars 2. It does improve on the first game in many ways, and with a decent patch to solve most of the above niggles it would definitely be a 5 star game. All Star Wars fans who are young at heart will really enjoy this!
Age rating: 3+
System Specs
(Minimum)
CPU: Pentium 3 / AMD Athlon 1.0GHz
Graphics card: 64Mb 3D card with Vertex and Pixel Shader
Memory: 256Mb
DirectX 9.0C (included on CD-ROM)
HDD space 3.5Gb
(Recommended)
CPU: Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon 2.4GHz+
Graphics card: 128Mb 3D card with Vertex and Pixel Shader
Memory: 512Mb
HDD space: as above + 0.5Gb
I tested on Windows Vista with no problems - or at least, no more problems than I had running it on XP. The system used was Packard Bell imedia J2489 Desktop PC with a WME scores of
Processor (calculations per second) - 4.8 for Processing Power, 4.1 for Memory Operations, 3.3 for Graphics, 2.6 for Gaming Graphics (on an nVidia GeForce 7500LE), and 5.7 for the Primary Hard Disk.
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UPDATE - even better than the LEGO Star Wars games, LEGO Indiana Jones is a must for your gaming collection.
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