Story 4/10
To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what the basis was for
this game which, in terms of the Star Wars timeline, takes place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, so I had to look it up
and found that there is currently an animated TV series. As I had never watched
the series, I found it hard to relate to any storyline that was taking place in
the background in between the LEGO related fun which caused me to switch off. I
thought the cut scenes were a lot less engaging and humorous at the ones in the
game’s predecessor.
That said, I did enjoy the clone/droid battle that takes
place on the opening screen. It is quite amusing.
Picture 8/10
This one has to go up from Pirates of the Caribbean because the graphics have been given an
overhaul. The look of the game is a lot smoother and they’ve made a lot more out
of the destructible objects element. When you destroy objects, instead of the LEGO
bricks disappearing almost instantly, they hang around for a bit and very often
get in your way which is much more realistic, although I’m not sure fans of the
series play the games for the realism aspect... but more on that later.
Sound 8/10
Not really a lot to say here, it sticks to the Star Wars tradition with a little up-tempo
version of the all-familiar soundtrack and it is very fitting to the game.
Gameplay 4/10
Things can get a little samey in the LEGO world, especially
when you are on number three in a series relating to the same franchise. I’ve
got a lot of respect for the fact that LEGO
Star Wars III tries to mix things up.
There are now two elements to the main game. You have the
standard normal levels where you battle through various LEGO environments to fight
bosses and save people. However, now you also have these ground battle
environments where you have to fight across a load of enemy bases and have to
destroy certain buildings or targets.
In short these new additions are really... boring. These
levels add an unnecessary exploration element to the game which slows it down.
On top of this, if you strive for the 100% completion, you have to do these
types of battles twice for both the good and evil sides which I found to be a
royal pain in the ass, unnecessarily repetitive and soul destroying.
There are also space missions on each planet which are
another repetitive ball-ache where you have to fly around in space destroying various
bits and pieces.
Picking up from where I left off earlier, the new destructive
blocks that constantly get in your way may be an improvement in some areas but
they also hinder the player’s ability to sensibly navigate through levels.
Also, they seemed to have changed the functionality of how
the force is used. When using the force you can now move things around
freely... in a constricted kind of way. Getting these objects to where you want
them to go can be frustrating but it is also quite forgiving in places.
However, there is one level where you have to build a stairway out of four LEGO
blocks and the user-friendliness of the force was so bad that I could not
select the blocks I wanted to move despite trying to stand in about
four-hundred different positions. This produced a lot more than the usual
expletives to come pouring out of my mouth.
Achievements – 1,000
points – 48 achievements
The biggest problem I have with LEGO Star Wars III is that it is similar to Soul Calibur in that I
was done with new stuff about 5 hours before I got to 100%. The last bits were grinding
out the stupid space missions and ground battles which was a bit boring to say
the least.
The achievements themselves, bar the last two, are quite
varied and force you to try most aspects of the game in order to get them all.
I want to take a moment to talk about codes, those useful
little things which can aid gamers to get to full completion without having to
work too hard.
In LEGO games, you can collect Red Bricks which give you
special abilities such as invincibility or stud mulltipliers. I don’t consider
using these bricks as cheating if they are unlocked through gameplay,
especially as they remove a lot of the monotonous aspects, such as having to replay
ground assaults because you constantly die and run out of time. However, I do
consider it cheating to use codes to unlock the bricks and I was quite
surprised to see that using the codes does not disable the achievements like
they do in lots of other Xbox360 games.
The amount of studs you need to unlock all the red bricks is
really high and it takes a while to do even using the stud multipliers as they become
available. So I don’t really like that my hard work and effort can be mimicked
by someone typing a few codes off the internet. Oh yeah, and there is an
achievement for unlocking all the red bricks which is incidentally called ‘Cheat!’
Downloadable Content – N/A
Summary
It’s not as good as LEGO
Star Wars II but it is another alright game to pass the time, especially if
you don’t want to think too much about what you’re doing. This will probably be
it for me on the LEGO front for at least another year and unless the next LEGO
game I play is remarkably different, I doubt I will post a... a long review
about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment