xBox360 Game Review: Lego Star Wars II - Some heinous things have been done to the Star Wars franchise in the last decade or so. The Phantom Menace, for instance. The original Lego Star Wars game from Traveller's Tales was a huge surprise. They'd remembered what it had seemed so easy to forget: Star Wars was supposed to be about fun. With Lego Star Wars II being based on the 'second' three movies, there's even more potential for laughs, especially for thirty-something nostalgia junkies.
The combination of Star Wars and Lego is inherently funny anyway. Hitting things with your lightsaber and watching them disintegrate into their component Lego bricks should make anyone smile. This time you get what we wanted since we saw the first game. Lego Han Solo Lego-swaggering about with a cocky smirk on his little yellow face. Lego Princess Leia in the gold bikini.
The basic game-play is much the same as the first game. Fighting, running, a little puzzle-solving, some platform work. There's really no learning curve: this is a game that's ostensibly for kids, after all. Traveller's Tales have made a few minor tweaks, though, and they're all for the better. Combat is still ridiculously easy, but the game isn't so dominated by the Jedi characters. Leia and Han's long-range blaster attack is really useful, and they'll also auto-dodge incoming fire. Several characters have unique special attacks, and they're hilarious. Leia has what appears to be the Bitch-Slap of Doom, and Chewie does what Wookies do best: ripping the arms off Stormtroopers.
Building isn't just restricted to Jedi characters in the sequel either: it's for everyone but droids, who lack the necessary thumbs. Smashing some things up and building other things out of debris is an essential part of the puzzle-solving, and you can pretty much see fiendish game designers giggling as they decided what completely stupid thing to do with it next. That sense of fun pervades the game and effectively disguises the slightly repetitive nature of the gameplay.
The source material provides several vehicle sequences (most notably blowing up Death Stars and the speeders in the forest sequence from Return of the Jedi). These have been opened up from the first game and taken off the rails. They're a bunch of fun, but do occasionally highlight problems with the game's unresponsive camera.
You start off in the Cantina, of course, from which you can access Episode IV. Once you've finished that, you unlock both Empire and Jedi. When you've finished a level in story mode, you can go back and do it again in free play, which is your opportunity to find the enormous amount of secret content. The game itself is relatively short, but it's full of extras and unlockable levels. You can create your own characters, too, by swapping body parts about. There is no head that isn't funny on Princess Leia in the gold bikini's body.
The drop-in style of the co-operative play in the Lego Star Wars games is brilliant, ideal for families and casual gamers. You're swapping back and forth between a cast of characters anyway: the second player just takes over one of them, for as long as they feel like. Still, it seems odd that the multiplayer is limited to both two players, and local play: there's no online component at all.
This is a cross-platform game that's available for the original Xbox, so it doesn't stretch the 360's capabilities, or even make much use of them. There's a slightly better quality to explosions and reflections, but even the 360 version occasionally suffers from stutters in the frame-rate. It's odd considering the game's style makes it not exactly demanding.
Lego Star Wars II is a brilliantly fun game with a wicked sense of humor, full of amusement value for both adults who grew up with the movies, and their kids. It's not a deep experience and the gameplay is maybe overly simple, but it is deceptively addictive.
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