Lego Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars Review

Between the shooters, role-playing games, and action-adventure titles were inundated with throughout the year, I always look forward to a Lego game to break up the wealth of playing the latest big budget video game. It's almost a genre unto itself: Lego. Not quite adventure, action, or any other singular category, the games are like Lego bricks: useless until they're combined with another piece, and then another, and then another...When I start playing a Lego game, I already have a good idea of what to expect, so I can examine the tiny refinements that have been made to the gameplay, level design, and character animations. But above all else, I just enjoy the hell out of them.

Lego Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars is in some ways the best Lego game I've ever played, but it's also one of the most difficult. That's something I never thought I'd say about a game in which you can't die, but it's true. The difficulty mainly stems from limited information from the game itself on how to access Space and Ground battles from the main menu -- a simple pop-up dialog box could have remedied this. For a game that works so hard to appeal to the largest audience possible, Clone Wars takes a very old-school, "figure it out yourself" approach; it's probably a tough sell for the younger audience and one hell of a challenge for the not-quite-so-young audience. This in turn makes it hard to determine who the game is specifically designed for.

Anna Paquin Diane Kruger Magdalena Wróbel Connie Nielsen Melissa George