The Skywalker Saga was, undoubtedly, the most anticipated game of my life upon its release. As you may have seen, I really, really enjoyed The Complete Saga, and having not played a new LEGO game in many years, I was very interested to see what a new LEGO Star Wars game would be like. While we’d obviously get to play the sequel trilogy for the first time, the first six movies were also getting completely remade from the ground up. There were also plenty of new characters from the sequels, as well as other characters that had still been left out, even from The Complete Saga.

The game was set to release in 2020, and I’m sure you can guess how that turned out. It was then delayed until sometime in the first half of 2021. It was delayed yet again, until sometime in early 2022, and a release date of April 5th was given in January of 2022.

Being in college at the time, I managed to have that Tuesday almost entirely free, with no classes and only one other engagement. Once I started playing, I was enamored. Unlike The Complete Saga, where the hub was more barebones, The Skywalker Saga had many hubs, as each planet with a level there served as a hub of sorts. There are plenty of Kyber Bricks, characters, and ships in each hub, either behind doing a quest first or just hidden somewhere for you to find.

There are 5 levels per film, down from 6 levels per film in The Complete Saga. Also reduced are the minikits per level, cut in half from 10 to 5 per level. On the flip side, there are now 3 tiers of True Jedi, up from just one. And most noticeable of all, the levels themselves are much shorter than before.

This brings up my biggest complaint with The Skywalker Saga, that the levels just feel way too short at times. However, with The Complete Saga, the levels were the entire game. Now in The Skywalker Saga, you have all these planets to run around in and collect stuff. The planets themselves are very fun, and there’s of course plenty to do. There are some puzzles you’ll encounter that require a certain character class, but once you unlock just 1 character in each class, you can complete basically any puzzle.

One last thing I’ll say about the game is that upon release, despite being delayed multiple times and reportedly going through intense crunch on the developers, there were still some nasty bugs present. The nastiest in particular I fell victim to, which completely prevented me from advancing through the story in Episode 7; the NPC I needed to speak with to proceed was just not there. I had to wait I believe 3 or 4 weeks for the bug to get fixed, which felt like a long time. During that waiting period I ended up making a brand new save file just to experience the story missions in the sequels in the meantime. Since this bug more or less forced me to play through parts of the game first, I would like to replay the game at some point where I go in whatever order I want, and where I can use some of the sequel characters and ships more.

Despite some drawbacks, The Skywalker Saga is a worthy follow up to The Complete Saga. I hope that there are more LEGO Star Wars games played, because there is plenty of Star Wars media to be adapted into LEGO form. The first season of the Clone Wars was turned into a game in 2011, and it’d be great if they turned the whole series into a game. There are also the shows on Disney+, notably The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, and Kenobi. While I doubt all of them get their own game, it would be fun to play through them, perhaps with some slightly longer levels.