Fun new features but clunkily put together and awkward pacing.

Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a Lego game of the movie with the same name. I assume their original plan was to make a game for each sequel movie but realized people probably wouldn't buy the others since people hated the other 2 movies. Personally, I think they should have waited and made a sequel trilogy game but who knows maybe we wouldn't have gotten the Skywalker Saga if that happened.

Gameplay: This game changes a lot of dynamics from previous Lego games or Lego Star Wars games as we see actual space battles, side quests, mini games, races and so much more. Now I'll be honest I've played a bunch of Lego games but not in order, so I have no idea which Lego games did this stuff first, but I know when it comes to star wars ones this one does a lot of this stuff for the first time. A lot of the gameplay mechanics or platforming, hack and slashing and gun battles all stay the same with some notable additions like cover-based gun battles, and a bit more in depth puzzle solving. All of these are fine additions that made the game fun and run longer but also hurt the game at the same time and actually as fun as this game is a lot of these changes and smoothed out mechanics also have a bunch of problems and clunkiness that really bogged down my experience. For one the puzzles to solve felt really complicated for a kid’s game and there were a few puzzles I actually had to look up because I could not figure them out. For example, the dreaded Maz Kenata puzzle in her basement just to get to the light saber was absolutely ridiculous. Since this is just one episode and not 3 or 6, they felt the need to drag out every single scene or in-between scene from the movie and turn it into a complicated shadow of the Tomb raider environmental puzzle to figure out and man does it really slow down the action and fast pacing of the movie. This is easily one of the most annoying and biggest problems with this game. Obviously, they improved this with the Skywalker Saga by making each movie a 5-level story with an entire galaxy and open world to explore. This game does the same thing but with one Episode, so it really drags out each area to the point where I started getting bored. Another big problem with the gameplay that the Skywalker Saga solved when it was released was this game’s use of the characters and character classes. This game still has the old-style character classes where every character in the game is thrown into one big category, and you have to scroll though like 130 different characters to find the one you want or need for the puzzle. Like previous installments each character has different abilities and weapons you need to either get around obstacles or open doors, but this game decided to give some characters a bunch of abilities and others less but then another character has a mix of both with too much variation and no way to organize and find what you need. So most of the game I spent my time scrolling though each unnamed hero on the screen trying to figure out what everyone does and where people are on the menu. This system worked in the old games where there were only like 5 different hero types but in this game its like physically painful to sit though and because of this it took me like a year to finish this game. I would play, get bored or confused and put it down for months and it's a shame because it is a lot of fun at times too. Again, all of this stuff was improved or fixed in the Skywalker Saga and I'm sure will only get better with each game going forward but at the time this game was driving me crazy with the system they created for it.

Graphics, voice acting and music: The graphics look great for a Lego game or as good as they probably can look and personally, I think this game looks just as good if not close to how the Skywalker Saga was when it came out. Voice acting is another interesting area. The first phase of Lego games didn't have voice acting and instead had grunts and goofy cuts cutscenes to explain the stories but sometime ago the games started to include voice acting and I do like it for the most part. This game uses both lines from the movies, extra voice actors and movie actors to play the rolls of everyone and expand the story and some of it sounds great while some of it feels a bit off from the rest of the game. Overall, I did enjoy the acting in this game, and I personally think they did a good job here. Musically this game sounds great, and I mean of course it's all music from the new movie and classic Star Wars OST so there isn't much to say there other than it's just as good as it is on the big screen.

Story/ No spoilers: story wise well it's the story of the force Awakens. I won't spoil the movie but for the most part this game follows the movie’s storyline with a bunch of extra dialogue and storytelling to really stretch out one movie into a long game. One really cool aspect of this game is the improvement in story telling the force Awakens receives with the extension of each level of the story. I also bought the DLC for this game, so I got a bunch of prequel and side stories that I guess are considered Canon that tell more lore to the movie. Pretty cool stuff if you actually like the sequel trilogy and I mean as much as I don't personally care for episodes 7, 8 & 9 I still liked the effort put into this game and expanding the story for the film. Overall, I still think this story was told better in the Skywalker Saga and the gameplay does add a lot of great features but some of them are clunky and throw the games pacing off track. If you like Lego Star Wars, Lego games or the sequel trilogy then you'll probably have a fun playing but I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up putting the game down because of how annoying some parts can get.
7.5/10

It's alright, not awful but certainly not great. No matter what your opinion is on the film, the game is heavily held back by only covering a single movie. Many scenes from the movie are painfully stretched out to pad the game out. Also, the shooting gallery sections are neat the first few times but become dull fast. The roster also suffers and is pretty weak (when not including DLC).

Now onto the good. The levels despite my earlier criticisms are pretty good, maybe a bit on the long side. And I guess the game looks nice. Not much to really say about this one other than just that it's okay. It's understandable if you just skip this one.