Thought I could maybe experience the nostalgia of playing the old LEGO games, unfortunately, I just couldn't get on board with this game. The graphics are good, and the tried and true LEGO game silly humor is still there, but It's very different from the old LEGO games. It's got new mechanics and level building, which isn't a bad thing, it just wasn't for me. I may eventually come back around and try this game again though.

i like star wars, and lego. its like. autistic bliss

WOW. This game sucked all the way until the end. I understand if you're not a completionist like I am, but I’d still like to give you a review you can consider if you even think about playing this game, regardless of price (spoiler: it's not worth your time). I'll start with the base story mode. When you start, you can choose to start in episode 1, 4, or 7; however, the content in these episodes is lackluster, only including 5 levels per Ep. cutting TONS of content that was previously in the original saga and replacing it with the "fly here, then walk here" mechanic (truly the most advanced).
One of the best examples of this was the first level. They not only get rid of the first level from the original saga, they make you walk through the ship, watch a cutscene getting to the next planet, they make you walk through the swamp and then through the underwater area, talk to someone, watch another cutscene, then you get to the first level. You wanna know what the first level is? Escaping a fish and moving up down left and right while occasionally pressing the left bumper.
Now, replaying these levels for the collectables gets EVEN WORSE, where originally all you had to do was get minikits and a red brick, you now have to replay some levels multiple times to get the Cursed Level Missions. I'd often need to look up how to do the level mission because they were either so incredibly vague I'd replay a level twice and give up, or they were bugged beyond belief to the point of utter perfection of a level to get the mission.
So, the levels and their collectibles aren't amazing, and I was already talking about being excited. I must have at least liked the open world right? Well... that's not entirely wrong. In fact, even until the end, I tried my best to love the scenery of the star wars universe that so many people probably put a lot of time and effort into making. Unfortunately, the thing that makes you forget these vast and beautiful worlds is something this game couldn't get right in the levels as well: COLLECTIBLES.
Let's start with the side quests. Seeing the low count of 140, I assumed I could do all of them within a reasonable time, and that each side quest would offer me something new. I couldn't be more wrong. Each quest IS short, but almost all of them are exactly the same: go to THREE different planets while waiting for load screens just to hop off the ship and collect it within either 10 seconds or 10 minutes, talk to this guy on a different planet, or talk to this guy on a different planet AND THEN collect something that may or may not be on the same planet. Every moment felt excruciatingly slow, and most of the time there were prerequisites for quests as well, which slowed down completion even more.
Next, time for the 380 characters they felt they had to add through completing levels and side quests. When I started collecting all the characters, I had already completed all the story, so I already had all the characters I wanted to play. So when this game asks me to go through another 40 hour grind just to get the rest I'd probably never use in my life (and in other youtube videos, people often use the same combo of characters I do) it gets tedious and annoying and no longer whimsical and fun. It goes from "hey I know that guy" to "okay get me out of here what's the next one".
Next there's the 1200 kyber bricks and ships (I don't care to even give capital ships a mention. they're annoying.) Each planet has around 20 to over 100 bricks you can collect, where the higher brick counts are because of different areas on the planet. Thankfully you really only need around 400 to fully upgrade the core abilities tree, but trying to collect all of them becomes the same thing as the side quests.
There are only a handful of different things to do when it comes to collecting these kyber bricks. These consist mostly of: stack these jedi crates to get height, climb something, shoot these targets, go on a scavenger hunt for levers, buttons, etc., or (for a less common one) go to a DIFFERENT PLANET to collect a SINGLE droid code so you can go back and put the code in. The ships are pretty much the same thing, but sometimes your game can glitch out and say you don’t have all the ships when you really do. I have found no way to fix this.
Finally, there’s the completely useless character upgrade system (besides bounty hunter)(I’ll also talk about the ones that aren’t useless at the end that you’ll want to get first). To fully upgrade every single tree (including the core upgrades but those aren't useless), you will need nearly every single one of the 1200 bricks, meaning you by no means NEED every skill, but eventually collecting the bricks became so monotonous and tiring BECAUSE there was no good use for them. Upgrading characters meant marginal things like the hero skill that makes you take only 27% less damage (fully upgraded) with a disguise on, and then you have to consider you’re NOT always fighting stormtroopers anyway, so this becomes useless 70% of the time. Once you get the upgrade to have 3 health bars and quick regen, upgrades like those become useless 100% of the time since at some point you can only deliberately kill yourself.
Since I also promised the good upgrades I’ll list them here: Jedi Reflexes, Expert Climber, Advanced Gliding,Business Opportunist, ALL OF BOUNTY HUNTER, and Dark Rise. These upgrades will make combat and exploration so much easier and faster because it’s painful without any upgrades (specifically the BH upgrade that highlights enemies. Makes ♥♥♥♥♥♥ quests much easier).
TDLR: If you didn’t want to read everything before this I’ll try my best to sum it up into just a couple sentences. As a completionist, this game feels like a slog. Everything is the same in the end and the things it tries to throw at you to feel new get old in only a few hours. If you aren’t a completionist even slightly, then I at least hope to shed light on the poor game design and lack of quality this game has.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. :P