Lego Star Wars 3: Clone Wars Preview
Love Star Wars? Love Lego? Lego Star Wars 3: Clone Wars preview is the latest in the fun Lego game franchise to combine the two, delivering a toy block-shaped dose of sci-fi fun. It promises to be the best Lego console game yet. Ahead of its March 25 release, Stephen Ebert equipped his lightsaber to give it a go.
There’s just something about the Lego video game franchise that ensures it never gets old. Even after three previous Lego Star Wars games, the latest, Lego Star Wars 3: Clone Wars – available in shops from March 25 – feels like an old friend you never grow tired of welcoming back.
Developer, Traveller’s Tales, say it is the biggest and best Star Wars Lego experience yet, with bigger levels, more combat moves, more enemies, intense multi-layered space combat and new gameplay features.
Based on what we’ve just played, they weren’t kidding. From our first encounter with the giant spaceship – Malevolence, which will be familiar to Star Wars: Clone Wars viewers, the scale of levels here are easily the biggest in the entire Lego game series. You get to fly in a spaceship, that compared to the size of the enemy spaceship you are tasked earlier with invading, is the size of an ant. The sheer scale becomes even more apparent once you dock inside it to switch between air and ground combat. Air combat is multi-levelled this time around, so there’s even more enemies to shoot at.
Graphically Lego Star Wars 3: Clone Wars is easily the best looking Lego Star Wars game yet, right down to the realistic smoke effects once you’ve infiltrated the enemy space fortress.
As usual puzzles play a key role. Robot and droid R2-D2 and C-3P0 take care of unlocking doors, while Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi use their lightsaber and Force telekinesis powers to take on enemy robots guarding the base.
New powers and moves we got to try included being able to throw your lightsaber sword at enemies by holding down a button, targeting them and letting go of the action button. It’s great for those times you don’t wish to get too close to enemies. It comes in real handy when for unlocking seemingly out of reach buttons to solve puzzles. There’s also the ability to climb and cut through doors using the lightsaber – all moves authentic to the films.
If you’re a Star Wars fan you won’t stop thinking to yourself ‘I’ve seen them do that in the movies’. Every effort has clearly been made to make this feel like more than just a Lego game, right down to each moves and action. Enemies can also be thrown around the levels and into each other using the Force, as can R2-D2 to help him reach impossible to jump to areas. Doing so never got old in our 30 minute play.
Really hoping to add to that Star Wars movie feel is a new gameplay mechanic we got to see in action called SceneSwap, letting you switch between two separate playable scenes involving different characters. During certain scenes a picture-in-picture display will appear in the top-right corner of the screen showing the events of another character’s story. Holding down the action button lets you switch to that character’s events, taking up the whole screen and minimising what you were just playing into the picture-in picture display in the top-right of the screen.
With bigger levels, more combat manoeuvres and new Star Wars movie-esque gameplay features, Lego Star Wars 3: Clone Wars feels more like a dedicated Star Wars title, than a Lego title. In a good way. The Lego games have always been great fun and we’ve no reason to believe that Lego Star Wars 3: Clone Wars will be any different. Look our for our full review very soon.
