Lego Star Wars kicked off the Lego games, and it’s still one of the best. It even seems to have become its own sub-franchise, with several runs of short animated movies. This is a game based on one of those movie series, or tying into it somehow, I don’t know it’s confusing what they’re doing with these cross-media initiatives.

I was eager to see if this attempt went anywhere towards capturing that addictive gameplay of the other Lego games. There was a previous Yoda Chronicles game for iOS but it got boring quickly because of its half-assed execution on simplistic strategy gameplay. Turns out this one uses no more ass but at least switches up what you’re doing between levels.

There’s very basic autorunning 3D combat levels, quite basic free-falling levels, boringly basic space combat levels… I began to get a picture of who this game is for. Small children with no standards. Of course, they also want to make it simple so it can run in web browsers. It’s just that the game is not really very fun to play and so imprecise.

Half the time you don’t know when your attacks are going to land, or if you’re going to be hurt by falling into a bridge. And if you do, then there’s very little impact communicated. The level ends when you collect enough holocrons, which in this interpretation of the universe are strewn around everywhere, the most common object in the galaxy. Handfuls just fall out of crates. But this end can come at any time, resulting in a feeling of anticlimax.

To cut a long story short, this game is nothing like Traveller’s Tales’s (now that’s a confusing possessive) Lego games. It’s a quick and dirty cash-in for a mediocre kids’ cartoon series. Happy belated Life Day!