Game Reviews

Lego Star Wars: Microfighters

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Lego Star Wars: Microfighters

I am a sucker for lasers.

Pew pew lasers flying everywhere, making things explode, leaving scorch marks on walls. I cheer whenever I see hot beams of light crash into spaceships and turn them into space debris.

But even I found Lego Star Wars: Microfighters a bit dull. For all of its chits and super-cute X-wings, it's a slightly repetitive slog through uninspired waves of chunky AT-ATs and TIE Fighters, with an uninspiring grind-heavy core.

Yawn-da

The game is set during a variety of important battles in the Star Wars saga. Some are in space, some are on the ground, but all of them are hewn from the same basic template. Things fly towards you; you shoot them until they explode into bits of Lego.

You control the game with one finger, poking whatever ship you're playing as around the vertically scrolling background. If your finger is on the screen, then you're firing. If it's not, you're just trundling forwards, minding your own business and getting shot to bits.

In the first chunk of levels, you re-enact some scraps from the dull prequel films. Fittingly, they're pretty dull. Rather than the snappy quick-bite shoot-offs that would be perfectly suited for mobile devices, these are sluggish crawls through identikit brown sand backdrops that go on for far too long.

Things pick up a little in the original trilogy levels, but there's still no real spark to proceedings. Your lasers get bigger, the chit-collecting count gets higher, but you're never excited enough to really care.

And in an action game, that's pretty much unforgivable. Even the loading times between the jokey cutscenes and the actual blasting feel like they've been designed as soporifics.

Sky-napper

In effect, all the lasers in the world can't blast Lego Star Wars: Microfighters into life.

There's a big chunk of content here, sure, but most of it is repetition... or thinly veiled repetition. The ships you fly feel the same, and the ships you blow up all look pretty similar.

Even as an app aimed at the younger market, it's really tough to recommend Lego Star Wars: Microfighters. There's a lack of heart, a lack of ideas, and, more importantly, a pretty major lack of fun here.

Lego Star Wars: Microfighters

A dull mash-up of licences that never fires into life, Lego Star Wars: Microfighters just doesn't have enough fight in it
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.