by Everything about Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles — from its overhead camera to its unit building mechanics — resembles a real-time strategy game. The adorable characters and familiar Star Wars iconography could have made this free-to-play affair a worthwhile introduction to the genre for newcomers, but for a game with all the trappings of a strategy title, it curiously lacks any real strategic decision-making.
The Yoda Chronicles opens with a choice between Jedi and Sith campaigns, but the two are nearly identical. Most of the available missions in both campaigns are low-impact to the point of being mindless. You’re given some units and can sometimes collect a few studs to build more, and then you’ll head towards a designated point where your units destroy the others. Sometimes you’ll need to then move to another location, where the process then repeats. If your units start to lose some health, simply tapping on a unit building facility heals them all instantly — even in the middle of a battle. Even with a hard mode code enabled, most stages were a total cakewalk. The LEGO branding is clearly meant to entice small children, but older kids probably won’t find the missions an engaging challenge.
Not all of the missions are such simple affairs, however. Though the majority of The Yoda Chronicles is composed of brainless simplicity, it twice makes a hard veer into absurd difficulty. Once, when pitted against either General Grievous or Mace Windu, the bosses were more than a match for a few soldiers. Later, when tasked with locking down three control points, we tended to lose one while trying to capture the last. Since all units move together and none can be left behind for defense, the mission devolves into frantically racing from one point to another until they’re all captured at the same time, seemingly out of sheer luck. These two missions don’t play like they were made to be more challenging; it just seems more like the game has severe imbalance issues.
While the strategy mechanics fall short, the game tries to offer some recourse with its charming cutscenes, which are marked by high production values. The LEGO brand has made a name for itself with quirky, off-kilter representations of familiar licensed brands, and LEGO Star Wars in particular is known for that quality via its action-centric entries on other platforms. It’s on full display here, which makes the adorable cinematics a reward for slogging through the missions. The clips are funny, likable little romps into Star Wars meta-humor, but it’s not quite enough to make this middling strategy affair memorable.
The bottom line. Some of The Yoda Chronicles may work as an extremely gentle initiation into the strategy genre, but the adorable cut-scenes don’t override the problems present in a short, awkwardly paced, and frequently dull adventure.
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