Last Week's Games: Beating Lego Star Wars with a 4-Year Old

 Many of you will have noticed that I’ve had a lot of time this week playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga with my daughter Jessie. Last week, we managed to beat the story mode of the game! It was an interesting journey, to say the least; beating a game of any significant length with a four-year old as the co-pilot is a fresh challenge on what by now is a very familiar game to me, but we managed it! But I’ve covered Lego Star Wars a lot on this blog so I’m going to use this one to assess what Jessie thought of it:

May or may not be a
screenshot from the game.

She liked playing her favourite characters from the films, and as they all appear in the game at some point, she had a lot to choose from. She initially preferred the Jedi characters: apart from the fact that everybody loves the Jedi, these are the characters that are presented to you first so she’d got to grips with their mechanics and preferred to play as them where possible. She also liked playing as the droid characters, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. Later in the game, she liked playing as Chewbacca and Wicket because she thinks they’re cute, which is as good a reason as any. Of course, the Ewoks are adorable, but Chewie has some great additions to his character. He doesn’t handle any differently to Han Solo or Princess Leia, and you play as those characters a lot in the second half of the game, but his melee attack involves pulling Storm Trooper’s arms out of their sockets, and when he tries to put a Storm Trooper helmet on, it doesn’t fit properly.

Jessie also really enjoyed the parts of the game that didn’t involve combat, including the “build-its” and the puzzles. Putting those elements in the game was a great idea: In many cases, you need to do these to progress the game, but as they don’t involve any fighting, it was a great way to help Jessie feel like she was getting through the game. It also helped on those situations where the build-its have to be done during a fight, since I could use the “other” character to keep the heat off Jessie while she did the build-it – occasionally it worked the other way around as well! Therefore, Jess likes the droid characters: They’re necessary to get through the game by activating their switches and doors, but with little-to-no combat ability, the fighting can be left to someone else.

Post-Game Hero Shot.

She wasn’t so keen on the boss battles where it was necessary to fight. This only happens a few times – certain sections of the fight with Darth Maul, Count Dooku and the final battle with Darth Sidious – but the boss characters are harder to deal with for someone still getting to grips with 3D movement in video games, and she doesn’t like the feeling of being in way over her head. She liked it better in those boss battles where she could play as a droid, leave the fighting to me, and use the functional aspects of the environment to help the fight along.

She didn’t like the flying levels – those levels where it is necessary to pilot a flying vehicle – much either, because the speed of the movement and the smorgasbord of obstacles that very often litter those levels made them frustratingly hard. She did, however, enjoy them a lot more when it becomes an option to play with the Millennium Falcon. Even though it doesn’t handle substantially differently to most of the other ships you can play, she loved the idea of playing it!

Our Victory Pose!

It’s also worth noting that in most cases we wouldn’t do more than a couple of levels in a day. With games, stories, films, lessons or whatever it happens to be, the level of engagement lives and dies on its pacing, particularly with young children. Trying to beat entire sections of the game completionist-style would have sucked a lot of the fun out of it for Jessie!

I’ve got some other Lego games – Indiana Jones, Batman and Harry Potter – and we might play these in the future, once Jessie has been introduced to them!