I played most of the Lego Star Wars games, but this one always managed to slip past me so I decide to try it out since I've played every major Star Wars game so I might as well have a fresh experience with a Lego SW game I never played before. As a whole, the game is decent but the major problem is that at it's best, it's the same fun and enjoyable lego game that you come to expect. At it's worst, all of the game's major innovations barely add anything worthwhile and detracts from the adventure. I'm questioning this game's existence. It doesn't adapt the entire CGI Clone Wars show only the first two seasons and there is no seasons 3-5 content. On top of all this since it's adapting a show that not everyone has seen and adapts the much derided first two seasons so the plot is harder follow compared to the lego games based on the SW movies. I'm really not sure if watching 2 whole seasons of Clone Wars really adds a whole lot to the enjoyment of this game.
The basic run of the mil lego levels are still exercise of smashing everything in sight to build new pieces with some light platforming and physics puzzles.
One major improvement in Clone Wars is that lightsaber combat is much better now with the more continuous swing animations and especially the ability to deflect blaster fire. That's about the only major improvement.
The biggest additions are the RTS like wide open battlefield missions, open spaceship gameplay and the split screen with 2 lego characters on separate screens. Neither of these aspects add much to the game, at best they are tolerable and at worst they just bog the pace down.
RTS levels being the worst of the bunch since much of everything in these levels are poorly explained, at first, you'd be mistakened for doing these levels by mashing the attack button untill all the enemies and the red lego health bars on the enemy structures are depleted to take over the command posts. That's not really true eventually you have to gather enough studs to put up enough cannons to have on more units like troopers and vehicles. All you really need are troops and vehicles. Walkers to destroy silver structures, RX-2000 to destroy gold structures, rocket clones for the former and blaster clones for the latter, but the thing is, the game won't do a very good job at explaining any of this to you.
This was doubly so for the weapons factory level which is the longest mission in the game and a big difficulty spike since you won't be able to summon powerful units right away making it even longer. I'm not a fan of real time strategy games so at it's most tolerable, I was just mindlessly mashing the lightsaber attack button and then getting units to destroy silver and gold structures.
The open spaceship gameplay doesn't add much since all you do is follow blue arrows to do specific objectives to eventually have the ability for your ship to carry proton tropedos to destory enemy cruisers with.
Split screen gameplay is just traditional lego levels except you just need to solve puzzles with one character then prompted to switch and you are better off doing it when prompted since I had a game breaking bug where during the final Grievous level I had Anakin on the ship while Obi Wan was on the ground, I solved puzzles as Obi Wan but Anakin kept dying over and over and wasn't instead his fighter.
Final issue is that some of the game design can be really obtuse for it's own and show the limitations of the game design. For example, one level require me to destroy a wall to progress I had a rocket launcher clone, clones to radio in for demoliations or use the force but instead the game required me to build a turret to destroy a wall. Another example is how I could've used a turret to destroy apart of a level to progress but since the turret couldn't aim up I couldn't shoot it, but instead I had to destroy the turret and build it into a switch.
Then there was other weird level design like needing a droid mask to ride an LAAT gunship.
Overall, I wouldn't call this game terrible by any means but everything about it just feels like the devs were pressure to get a tie in CGI Clone Wars Lego game out then because it seemed like a game they geniunely wanted to make. I'd say Lego Star Wars Complete Saga, Skywalker Saga and even Lego Star Wars TFA are better than Clone Wars. When Clone Wars is good, it's just feels like I've played this already when it's doing something new it doesn't add much to the game and were better off not being there at all. It just feels confused.
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