Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars
Bricking it
Review If you've got a winning, hugely popular formula, you don't dick around with it, right?
Star Wars creator George Lucas may have forgotten what made the first three movies so good - character, as well as effects and story - when he started work on the prequels, but the latest addition to the Lego Star Wars franchise, this time based not on the movies but on the first two seasons of the Clone Wars CGI TV series sticks with the programme.
Walkers, crisped
That's not to say developer TT Games hasn't made some tweaks having learned from more recent Lego offerings, such as the Harry Potter tie-ins, but essentially this is the same game as Lego Star Wars, released six years ago now, in April 2005.
Subsequent releases added the original three movies to the prequels, on which the first title was based, and they've even grown old enough to warrant being re-released as a six-movie compendium set which remains a must-have, especially if you have kids of your own.
No Rex please, we're Battledroids
Characters, spaceships and scenarios aside, each offers the same mix of exploration, close-quarter combat and mildy taxing puzzle solving. Secret areas and items abound, there are special bricks to find, and canisters to locate, each of which has a part of Lego kit you virtually build at the end of each level. The more you find, the more gold bricks you're rewarded with, the greater your success.
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COMMENTS
Thumbs Up
The interface is, as you say, clunky but I've wasted many happy hours on this. I love it!
Definitely one for the old farts like us who remember making things out of proper blocks. If only 7-year-old me had had the infinite bucket-o-blocks you get with LDD.
nice
but it looks like the simple "pick up and play for 5 mins" feel has been lost. I loved the way you could dip in and out of the older lego games. Adding RTS elements seems a bit off to me.
Anyway, did anyone else think that in the context of Lego, Kit Fisto sounded like a porn name?
2-player mode
My 11-yr-old son has the PS3 version and he and his 15-yr-old brother have been playing it in two player mode ... I think there's a major upgrade here in that unlike the previous versions where the two characters could not move off the same screen (or, worse, one character could cause screen to scroll and other character would get pushed in same direction by opposite screen edge and as a result fall off a ledge - cue major inter-sibbling squabble) now it seems to cope with split screen + its a dynamic split screen which can rotate from left/right through above/below to right/left as the two characters move there relative posiitons around - looked quite clever the way it worked + the way the split moves was also very reminiscent of the scene cuts in the original SW films!
N.b. I suspect that if (like my son) you've seen every episode of SW:TCW several times then the game may make a lot more sense!
85%
How can you give this 85% when you on give Black Ops / Crysis2 etc etc X%
Oh you mean you reviewed as a GAME i.e. how much FUN it is.
Sorry.
Interesting review. Take a look at this too...
http://ldd.lego.com/
Free. Slightly clunky user interface, but it's bearable, and quite a surprising find if you were never aware of its existence.
Different strokes for different folks, of course, but if you're an old fart who plays / used to play with lego, this might just hit the spot.
