“Double Score Zone” – Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy

**Lego Stars Wars II: The Original Trilogy** (Tt games/LucasArts, PlayStation 2, 2006)

There is a 2019 episode of the BBC’s preschool maths show Numberblocks called Block Star. It teaches the different ways of dividing 12 by essentially having the anthropomorphic representation of the number twelve carry out the Death Star run from the original Star Wars, splitting into component parts to complete tasks along the way. It ends with the line “now witness the power of this fully operational disco cube”, and may or may not have been conceived entirely by working backwards from the pun “use the fours”.

The references are obviously more for the parents and grandparents watching than for the primary audience of four-year-olds. But it still proves a point about the longevity of Star Wars as a cultural force. I only actually watched the films once, decades ago, and I could still identify exactly what was going on from all the other stuff I’ve seen drawing on the same material, even before playing the many, many Star Wars games to have topped the UK chart. And the other point is that referencing Star Wars, the occasional meme aside, still means referencing the original trilogy.

That longevity made a previous parodic coming together of blocks and Star Wars, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, the safest of safe bets. In Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, Traveller’s Tales had successfully combined a joint branding exercise with a real sense of fun. Now they got to expand on that with not just the same iconography but far better-loved source material. If they did all that with Jar-Jar Binks, what could they do now?

Applying the same formula to the three different films would have been more than enough to make Lego Star Wars II a success. But there are a lot more improvements besides. Cutscenes are refined into triumphs of slapstick humour, with the rubbery character models perfectly suited to the purpose. There is a simple pleasure in Leia bashing a disc against the side of R2-D2 in confusion about where to insert it, and somehow the blank-faced lego model captures early Luke Skywalker in a way no level of detail could match. The same sense of playfulness extends into the gameplay as well. Having Chewbecca put on a stormtrooper helmet, skewiff and wobbling, to pass a photo recognition lock is a perfectly daft combination of conceptual and physical comedy.

Levels have an increased playground feeling with alternate routes and things to play with everywhere, sometimes to the point of exhaustion (trying to collect everything is a serious time commitment). The new ability to take piles of lego bricks and have your character quickly assemble them into objects only adds a little in terms of gameplay mechanics, but is very satisfying and one of the more successful ways of making the lego aspect more meaningful than just an aesthetic filter.

The co-op aspect of the original game is layered in even more thoroughly, and I know from experience that it can work well for someone new to games in general. I enjoyed the moment of realisation that I was going wrong in blaster battles by doing anything other than just standing still, repeatedly pressing square and letting the game automatically handle all of the dodging for me. Consequences for failure are even lower than in the original and it’s absolutely the right decision.

There are limitations. The game does a much better job of mixing things up (I liked flying ropes around the legs of AT-ATs on Hoth) and has some inventive puzzles which involve a certain amount of thinking, but it is still repetitive by nature. Progress is generally dependent on blasting everything in sight to gather the necessary materials. The story missions involve figuring out a pretty linear set of required actions. And for all of the welcome chance to build things, and the ability to mix and match heads and bodies to create combination characters, there is not a whole lot of opportunity for creativity on the part of the player.

Traveller’s Tales came from making stuff like Toy Story 2, and there is still a pretty traditional licensed game collectathon under the aesthetic trappings, even if it’s closer to the better, Madagascar end of things. Even in free play mode, you are interacting with someone else’s ready-assembled toy set rather than having the freedom to really play. That matched to the direction that Lego was heading in, of course. And as far as playing out someone else’s Star Wars toys comedy fantasy goes, Lego Star Wars II is better than it had any need to be.