Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is at its best when it veers from the films

polygon.com:

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a nostalgic adventure, riffing not just on the movies that inspired it, but the Lego Star Wars series itself. The game wavers between cinematic accuracy — with levels pulled right out of the movies — and fun twists on more minor Star Wars set pieces. But the game is ultimately at its best when it doesn’t worry too much about emulating the films perfectly and focuses instead on showing fans something new.

In The Skywalker Saga, each numbered Star Wars episode is only five linear levels long, and each level is just a bite-size piece of the movie’s overall story. The rest of each episode consists of open-world adventuring where players fly through space or roam around the planets solving puzzles, riding vehicles, visiting iconic locations, and getting the lowdown on the area’s wider lore.

In many cases, this can lead to some pretty fun Lego vignettes. Walking through Luke, Owen, and Beru’s house on Tatooine — complete with the iconic droid maintenance room — really hits that nostalgic mark. Walking outside their home and unlocking bonus upgrade points by chasing around a Womp Rat feels like a fun and natural extension of that meaningful space.

But these large levels are too often used to shuffle the story forward just as it occurs in the movies. I’ll fly down to Ahch-To just to follow Luke from The Last Jedi around for a bit, and then leave. Instead of launching exciting levels, some mission objectives will just continue the story, showing a movie scene rebuilt with Lego bricks. Much of the game’s dialogue is even taken verbatim from the films — even if there are some comical Lego background goofs.

While I watch the movies to engage in the lore and the science fantasy aesthetic, the