More of a yearly update than a true sequel, but more Lego Star Wars is never a bad thing.
Straight of the bat, LEGO Star Wars II is very easy on the eye. While not jaw-droppingly beautiful, there are some very nice particle effects during explosions, the frame-rate is smooth, and the character models are blocky and detailed. The environments are mostly made from LEGO, so you may even recognize pieces as you progress. The characters move just as you would expect, with Stormtroopers skipping around, and Luke Skywalker holding the Lightsaber ready to strike. While it can’t really be described in words, it is this really exceptional level of detail that makes LEGO Star Wars II a whole lot of fun.
When you first load up the game, you will be playing as Princess Leia, and accompanied by Captain Antillies, the rebel captain, and you will placed in the centre of the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, which Star Wars fans will instantly recognize as the time we first meet space smuggler Han Solo and the wookie Chewbacca. Inside the cantina, there are three areas in which to access the three episodes of the Original Star Wars trilogy, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The LEGO Star Wars series has a very strict gameplay formula, where a group of Star Wars characters use their different abilities to get from A to B, but there are lots of collectables to gather along the way, such as the LEGO currency (studs), Mini-kits (pieces to build a Star Wars spaceship) and a Red Brick, which will make an amusing Bonus feature available for purchase.
These things are great, but the best thing about LEGO Star Wars II is the sound. Combining Ben Burtt sound FX, the epic John Williams score and a lot of original music for good measure, the series has always shone in the audio department. The Star Wars theme belts out to give an epic feeling to the battles, and while puzzle solving there are some melodious tunes to increase a sort of dramatic tension. The sounds of LSW2 are impeccable.
The length and lasting value of the previous LEGO Star Wars was a big issue to some players, and kept it from reaching the heights that it could have made had it been made harder. The developer, Travelers Tales, have done several things to rectify this for the sequel. The first of these is to add a free Adaptive Difficulty extra, and the game gets harder depending on how good you are. This may sound great in theory, but in practice is handled rather sloppily. The difficulty can only get so hard, and that means that the maximum is still too easy for most game players. The second attempt at making this game harder is to add a whole lot of Bonus features and collectables, and they pull this off in style. Each level has about 4 Golden bricks to be earned by simply finishing a level in Story mode, in Free Play (a mode which lets you play through any level as any unlocked character) with the maximum studs collected, and for finding all of the Mini-Kits. Getting 60 of these Golden bricks will get you a very cool bonus level, and getting all 99 will unlock something really, really awesome.
There are modes other than Story and Free Play in LSW2 that weren’t in the original game, such as the Challenge modes which ask you to do things within a certain time limit, but these levels aren’t nearly as much fun as the all-new Bounty Hunter mode, which sees you trying to take down a certain LEGO character within a set amount of time.
LEGO Star Wars II is out on almost every system known to man, with versions released on Playstation 2, Nintendo Gamecube, Xbox, Xbox 360, PC and Playstation Portable. On the current generation consoles (PS2, NGC and Xbox), the game looks about on par with its predecessor, and having come out a year and a half later, this is slightly disappointing. On the next-gen Xbox 360, the game looks fabulous, with some wonderful blurring effects that, while not necessary to a game of LSW2s visual quality, look awesome. With the good comes the bad, though, and the Xbox 360 has some frame-rate issues not found in the current-gen versions, namely when there are lots of enemies on screen or when particles are flying around after an explosion. The PC looks about the same as the current-gen stuff, while the Playstation Portable looks just underneath those versions, which is mighty impressive for a handheld. There are also separately developed versions for Nintendo’s handheld courtesy of Amaze Entertainment, these being for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. These two games don’t stand up to the quality of their console counterparts, and could have been so much more.
In conclusion, you should buy LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy for a child who may only play games casually, because while they are unlikely to get through it for a bit, it provides them with a fair challenge. For more experienced game players, though, LEGO Star Wars still feels too easy, even though there are a plethora of Bonus Extras to keep you playing for well over 20 hours.