In the end, collecting became a chore, but it didn't totally diminish the charm that was earned on first impression.
A breezy feeling game with lighthearted humor that covers the first three Star Wars movies using stylized LEGO characters and levels that wouldn't be out of place in any star wars platformer aimed at an all audiences demographic.
Sound: 8
You know the music. You know whether you like the music, you probably do. You know most of the sound effects (lightsabers, droids, blasters, X-Wing and TIE fighter laser fire, etc.). Buy a bucket of LEGOs and poor them in a pile on the floor, now you know the rest of the sound effects. I only gave the game an 8 for sound. I did this because while on your first play-through you will love its familiarity, by the 6th playthrough the vehicle levels with all their constant multiple sources of laser fire (which don't count as sound in the options menu, I turned sound option all the way down, toggled the music option off and the SFX were still there) will drive you batty and drown out any attempts to play your own music.
Graphics: 9
You want to say something hostile here, the game just isn't pushing many polygons and that must make it look bad, right? Nope, it looks great. The expressions are nice and even though the animations are blocky, the sheer amount of characters who animate differently and in distinctive familiar ways will have you appreciating them. This game will be an attractive game 30 years from now. Its look is timeless.
Controls and Design: 7
The camera is stuffy, but no more so than most action/adventure or platform games. The button controls are very simplistic A to jump X to do most things including attack, B to interact in certain ways, throw grenades as a bounty hunter, and use the force. The force is slow and therefore not very useful because difficulty=volume of laser fire in this game. You feel clunky, because you are made of LEGOs, does that make feeling clunky better in a platformer with lots of jumping? I honestly don't know, mixed feelings. Levels are well designed, environmental puzzles are very common, but are never overly tricky, if you need to back track because you did something in the wrong order you can, and there's never an I should have did this before that now I have to start all over feel. The levels are short, none take anywhere near longer than 15 min. on speed runs. Vehicle levels are decidedly not epic, but they are action packed and between mini-kits bonus stages and vehicle stages you can be in pretty much every vehicle in the canon, even if the difference between a super destroyer and a landspeeder is far smaller than you'd imagine. Lightsaber duels are simplistic, and lightsaber hit detection has issues. Some blaster characters have a dodge, never enough not to die in certain levels so lightsaber characters are a must to deflect incoming fire in certain situations.
Story: 10
Why would you buy it if you thought differently. No V/O, it would be inappropriate and you don't want to hear other people voicing these roles. Funny little cutscenes, won't spoil them but think cute funny not laugh out loud funny. Sometimes people will say about a movie "for the kids, but adults can appreciate the in jokes" not funny like that, even kids will get it.
Value: 6
This is the game's greatest strength at first, but for me became its greatest weakness. It has co-op, good. You don't even have to log in to join, great.
It makes you beat every level in the game without dying to get many of the achievements. The game feels breezy but it's harder than it feels with all the random laser fire from a million directions and medium-clumsy platforming. It becomes tedious flying in the vehicle levels while constantly tapping the A button to do loop-de-loops that make you invulnerable or inching your way through the rest of the missions with x depressed 100% of the time to make sure your lightsaber deflects the billion blaster shots coming at you. These things don't make it hard, they make it tedious. The more patient you are the faster you will succeed, rather than the more skilled you are.
Ok, so you've beaten every level in the game twice, but wait, there's more. To get the achievements you need to collect all the mini-kits, power bricks, and golden bricks which means beating the game in free play mode probably more than once for most levels since some of the stuff is pretty cleverly hidden. That's ok, I like to explore.
Ok, so you've beaten the story mode, played through on free play to collect everything and again to get through each level without dying (several times for each of the vehicle levels, since you didn't get through them without dying the first couple of tries) but wait, there's more. After you beat each movie you unlock 3 bonus missions, two to collect a million studs (the games currency) in 5 min (no you don't get to keep it) and 1 to...you guessed it, replay the whole story again. You have to do it for the achievements and gold bricks, too. Now you have a one hour time limit to complete each movie (there are 6 levels in each), which means you can beat the whole game in under 3 hours.
So after you've beaten the game 5-6 times you must be done, right? Nope. Now comes the "fun stuff" and the first stuff I hated rather than just had a mixed reactions about. To unlock all the games extras (permanent power-ups like invincibility you can toggle on and off at will) and characters (there are a LOT), you need a LOT of studs. It feels like they're everywhere, they're overflowing in all the levels and you need to collect hundreds of thousands of them to complete story and free-play modes anyway, but it's never enough. After you are 95% of the way complete and have all your gold bricks you can build a fountain that gushes unlimited studs, to get the last of my extras, which unfortunately included all of the stud multi-plier power-ups I had to run around that fountain in tight concentric circles for about 40 min. and thats with turning on all the multi-pliers as I got them. That was not fun, but it was the most efficient way to finish the game and by the time I got to this point that was all I wanted to do.
The game has a ton of charm, but it will test your patience