After years of development and multiple delays, it finally happened– the release of Lego Star Wars: A Skywalker Saga is now upon us. A video game series that in the past has touched on all three trilogies, this is the first time that all nine movies will be in the same game all in the form of Legos. Spanning from skyscrapers on Coruscant, to the deserts of Tatooine, to the frozen tundra of Hoth and numerous other planets across the Star Wars galaxy, the game provides 380 unique characters from the universe, including Jedi, Sith, Bounty Hunters, scrappers and smugglers just to name a few. The game includes an open world where each planet has its own side quests allowing for endless gameplay.

And as for me being so excited for the release of the game, I decided to miss the Tuesday it came out to primarily focus on playing it. Throughout my intensive gameplay, the game impressed me on many levels. First off, the number of characters in the game was very pleasing with almost every memorable and even unmemorable characters from the movies. Also, there are different costumes for these characters; for example, Han Solo has numerous variations such as his normal jacket, him on Hoth and even him frozen in carbonite. Another major plus is the immense size of the playable realm. Multiple planets from the Star Wars Universe are on full display with large cities, forests and villages to explore. Not to mention you can travel through space to get to these planets where you can get impromptu missions, fight in starships battles and navigate through asteroids. With each planet housing a ton of unlockable content the drive to explore these planets is present. Furthermore, each planet feels like its own with each having its own unique independent landmarks, terrain and species. And to see these developers put so much content into this game is heartwarming and shows that their main priority isn’t to capitalize on the Lego Star Wars license but to make an enjoyable game for its consumers.

However, with anything there are its negatives. One of my personal pet peeves is the character menu. Due to the fact that there so many characters through the game, the ability to file through all the characters is just not up to par. You must go through all the characters in alphabetical order regardless of whether or not you have them unlocked. This means that if you are looking for a certain character, you better hope that its name starts with a letter at the beginning of the alphabet, otherwise you will be scrolling for a while, though this is a minor issue and something that personally annoys me. One of the biggest outcries from the community is that some of the levels lack in content. For example, the battle of Genosis seems to be lacking that large battlefield with a limited number of droids where in past Lego games, including the likes of the Complete Saga and Clone Wars the battle always felt high octane by always being surrounded by droids just like how the movie portrayed it.

All in all, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a phenomenal gaming experience and one I would definitely recommend for fans of the Lego or the Star Wars genre. With the abundance of collectables, planets and characters, the game is full to the brim of content and should be able to occupy it for hours and days to come. I would rate the game 8.75/10.