Jesse Mercer

There is no better game. Period.

Overtly racist, left wing propoganda at best - A mockery of the scientific process and my faith in humanity at worst.

Probably the best JRPG I've played since the PS2 era, it really scratched the itch for that traditional design made modern. I will say for me the bar has been low. This game also is flawed in that the last 20 hours severely lowered the experience. My biggest criticism is that at times the story pacing becomes overbearing, especially towards the end. You have entire segments of 50 min with no gameplay... then you have to go to a mission checkpoint, only to be interrupted by 6 different skits happening within 40 steps of eachother instead of just all at once. It's clear the later stage of the game is marred by COVID 19 hindering the dev team because they basically just vomit out their idea en masse with no regard. There is a big twist in regards to the origins of characters, and it just wasn't necessary and did nothing but add another "but WAIT, there's more!" moment. Alot of the twists were great earlier on, but the more and more the devs played on story twists as the driver of their plot, the less magic each had. By the end I didn't care at all about the Helganquin reveal. Total hogwash. The game's story overstayed its welcome.

To preface my complaints, I have to explain that I have played every single franchised LEGO game to date, even non-Star Wars. LEGO Star Wars suffers from the most stagnated creativity I have seen in ANY LEGO game. The most prominent example is the removal of the character creator - which is one of the most fundamental creative tools offered by the franchise. The issue permeates far deeper into level and puzzle design. Almost all LEGO set pieces in this game exist to be smashed for studs... otherwise LEGO exists only as visuals. When you replay old LEGO games, even Star Wars, you will play levels where you have to build your way through. In this game you just shoot everything and sometimes skip hack terminals. The only times this game lets you build is when it gives you the option to place turrets, traps or barricades in all of about 5 places in the whole game. Gone are the days of solving clever LEGO puzzles and building your way to wacky cutscenes of flower pots growing into bridges or whatever to progress the level. This game is completely devoid of Lego magic and classic LEGO gameplay. The levels are VERY short - literally 5 minutes without exaggerating. This game's puzzles are watered down compared to previous LEGO titles, with 60% being simple "step on the 3 red buttons in 15 seconds" puzzles. Many of the scavenger puzzles can be outright skipped by jumping into walls. And the new "hack" minigames can all be skipped with a single button after investing a single point into the respective skill - bypassing them entirely. This is the most reductive LEGO experience I've played to date... not very mentally stimulating UI changes like the new character selection menu change from the more classic system are just terrible and baffling. Combat has been changed to mirror 3rd person shooters in many cases. Overall this is one of the most positive changes. Combat in TSS is the best LEGO has ever delivered, undeniably. Everything feels fluid, and at times can actually present a minor challenge. Aside from combat, it seems the devs put all their eggs in the roster... except its missing tonnes of iconic characters and ships. Out of the 380+ some characters, only a small handful actually function mechanically different, with minifigs being shoehorned into defined classes with specific abilities. Unlike previous LEGO Star Wars where certain characters could do things of multiple "classes." There are no multipurpose characters in this game. (You can have Hero Luke and Jedi Luke... but Hero Luke can't do Jedi things and Jedi Luke can't do Hero things... in the old titles this wasn't true, characters could do whatever would canonically make sense) When you boil it all down, there is almost nothing about this game that makes it a LEGO game outside of the fact that it uses LEGO for graphics. As a huge fan of LEGO games, I believe that LEGO's games are far more than just using LEGO for graphics. They're a specific formula and creative design - and that half is sorely missing in this entry. This is the most mindless and low-intelligence LEGO game to date. Compound this with bugs abound, and it just isn't a good release (this is after a long delay too). The only reason it has been scored so highly by people is because they are just happy to indulge in some nostalgia. Unfortunately I'm too invested in LEGO games as a whole to rate this game any higher than what it truly deserves. This game is an okay 3rd person Star Wars game, using LEGO set pieces as visuals. I don't regret buying or playing it... but it's not what I expect from a LEGO game, very disappointing on that front.