Lego Star Wars Demo Review - Page 1 of 2

Created on March 18th, 2005
Author: Orion

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Lego Star Wars the Demo

Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan,
& a Driod.Two things I love have come together, Lego and Star Wars. As a kid I remember playing with Lego endlessly, and when I was five or six I saw Star Wars for the first time at my Grandma's house on HBO. I think I watched it five times in the course of two weeks. Anyhow, that is enough about me, let's get back to the game and review. Lego Star Wars is just that, a game about Star Wars where everything is made out of Lego. Well it's made out of polygons on a 2D surface (your monitor) to make it look like it's out of Lego, to be technical. I am obviously not the target market for this game, even though Lego boxes say form ages 7-99. However, I have a feeling a lot of people outside of their target market might think about buying this game. But that aside it's a great idea, so I decided to download the demo (227 MB) and give it a try.

Synopsis

The lightsaber is
quite satisfying. Lego Star Wars takes place in Episode One. In fact you're playing as Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the game starts off with you heading to the Trade Federations blockade. It is quite interesting to play this as a Lego character and it adds a lot of character to the game. When you die your Lego parts come apart and when you break stuff or put them back together with the force its Lego bricks you see.

The demo sets your objective to find 10 canisters and explore your surroundings for coins. During exploration you can kill droids, control droids, jump, flash your light saber, move things with the force, knock over droids with the force, and more. The game is more along the likes of a puzzle/adventure game, as you have to figure out how to get things open, jump to a certain point, find the right path, and so on. That's not a bad thing, it's what I expected really, and met my wants nicely.

Controls and Camera Angles

Let's fight some
battle driods.Sadly, beyond the Lego and Star Wars charm is a game where the controls were not thought out well. It is very apparent the game is designed for a console system and that the PC version was a sad afterthought. There is no familiar WASD setup to use, even though you can bind those keys to movement. Instead of strafe or turning, you just go the direction you press on your keys. This makes it very odd to a normal PC gamer, I found myself pressing W to move forward and another key to turn and I ended never going the direction I expected. I did get somewhat used to the controls after a bit of walking around, but it will always feet off to me.

Along with odd controls was an odd camera position. The camera position is somewhat fixed. It rotates as you go around corners, but quite often you'll find yourself running towards the camera as you go down a corridor, or even worse, trying to look at a wall that you can never fully see because the camera refuses to turn fully away from its fixed angle. I could handle the controls, but the camera drove me nuts and I never got used to it. This is a game that could seriously be aided by a free look mode. But sadly since the PC version does not even use a mouse it is not likely to get this feature.

Graphics

Who buffs the floors?So how does the game look? Quite well for Lego, objects are obviously blocky as they should be, but other touches were added to make up for that. Light sabers flash and whir, many of the floors cast a wonderful full reflection and laser beams whiz by. The only odd graphic glitch I noticed that was that the intro movie was extremely grainy. I don't think it was meant to be that way, but I couldn't get it to look crisp, even though everything else in the game was. I'm assuming it's a driver issue with my Radeon 9800 Pro and whatever video codec they've used. Beyond that the game also ran extremely smooth; at 1280x1024 it ran without a single hiccup on my AMD Athlon 2400+. Which is good since it's not exactly Half-Life 2.

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