There’s risks inherent with going back to the very beginning. Revisiting your first attempts at writing, composing or making games can make you cringe at how bad you used to be. There’s no such worries for Traveller’s Tales, who practically managed to perfect the core Lego game formula at the first attempt.
Even so, they’ve come a long way in the last 11 years, and are putting all they’ve learnt to good use as they return to the Star Wars franchise and adapt The Force Awakens.
Partly because of that initial success, TT’s Lego games are often tarred with the same brush and always dismissed as being the same thing time and again. It’s true that The Force Awakens will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played a TT Lego game in the past, but there are three attention grabbing new additions.
Perhaps the least revolutionary of these is the concept of multi-builds. In the process of smashing every breakable object in sight, you regularly uncover little piles of jiggling blocks that can be built into an object to help you progress. In the past it’s always been the case that the puzzling only went as far as smashing stuff, but multi-builds ask you to pick from up to three things to build.
It could be as simple as picking between two sure fire distraction methods, with varying degrees of comic effect, or it could be a puzzle where you first have to build something to create a new path for BB-8, then tear that up and make a little BB-8 powered catapult to send the lovable droid up and over the next obstacle in your path. It’s a simple idea, but an effective way of adding more taxing problems within a familiar framework.
More overtly new and interesting will be the new Blaster Battles. Should you encounter an impassable hail of blaster fire, the game will switch angles and adopt a form more akin to a cover shooter, as you move from cover to cover and avoid fire, before popping out and trying to take out the stormtroopers that inevitably stand in your way.
Where flying sections in previous Lego games have largely been quite uninspiring, those of The Force Awakens go in a different direction, filled with stars and a hint of foxes. There’s a mixture of on the rails shooting, where you dodge around incoming fire and obstacles, avoid the crosshairs of the occasional chasing tie fighter, and try to take out anything in front of you. And then it opens up into a big arena, handing control over to the player to fly around and dogfight with enemies, pulling flips, loop the loops and, yes, even the occasional barrel roll. Disappointingly, there’s no audio cues to suggest that you do one.
The flight sequence I played quite excellently adapted the Millennium Falcon’s escape from Jakku. There’s way, way more than two Tie Fighters, but they absolutely nailed the presentation and the recreation of iconic little moments from the film. The Lego games have always had tongue firmly in cheek, and that’s clearly still the case here, with cute little visual easter eggs tucked into every nook and cranny of the levels, as well as clever and humorous twists on key story moments during cutscenes. These diverge from what actually happened in the film in little ways, but there were definitely a couple of laugh out loud moments for me.
One excellent point has the stars of the film, like John Boyega and Daisy Ridley returning to add extra lines of dialogue to the game. There is an odd juxtaposition of lines that have clearly been ripped straight out of the film and those that have then been recorded in a sound booth much more recently, but there’s an added layer of authenticity from having Rey lightly tutorialising for BB-8 and hinting at the solution to a puzzle.
However, Traveller’s Tales have been given a lot of freedom to go way beyond the film. It’s not just padding out the escape from the market on Jakku into a sizeable chunk of level with puzzles and moments of brawling, as seven of the eighteen story missions are actually original content for the game. They dive into some of the backstory of the film, with levels that will explore Poe Dameron’s previous adventures, just who Lor San Tekka is, and how Han and Chewie managed to capture those rathtars. In other words, if you were worried that a single film wouldn’t give them enough story to play with in a meaningful way? Think again.
And there’s nothing stopping them from drawing upon the wider universe of characters, either. Naturally, the first time you play through, you’ll be using appropriate characters and their abilities, with Finn able to interact with the Empire’s computers and machines, while Rey is agile and able to swing between beams and even do a little wall running. However, there’s 200 characters in the game for when you turn to Free Play, and they’re not all numbered and identical looking stormtroopers, but will be drawn from the original and sequel trilogies.
This is a game that goes beyond just being for The Force Awakens, even if that film is at the core of the retold story, the visual gags and the twists on the familiar gameplay. Instead of just focussing on one film, Traveller’s Tales seem to be making a loving celebration of all things Star Wars.
ron_mcphatty
Nice preview Tef, looks like a lot of simple fun, which is the whole point of these Lego games. I like the sound of extra story too, and the flying levels look excellent in the trailer!