With nine movies’ worth of content and a veritable mountain of unlockables, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga may seem daunting at first. Breathe, just breathe, and take note of these tips that will make your journey that much easier.
At long last, TT Games’ ambitious reimagining of the biggest film saga of all time is here, and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is brimming with things to do—from reliving the entire story and saving the galaxy, to taking on unique challenges and scouring every nook and cranny for collectibles, or just messing around as your favourite characters. If it all seems too much, or if you want to put your best foot forward, this starter guide will help set you on the right path.
1) Get up to speed with the new combat
Previous games in the franchise may have had fairly simple combat, but LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga steps it up a notch, and the same old tricks won’t exactly work anymore.
First and foremost, you’ll need to adapt to the new melee combat in particular. Simply hammering the attack button (Square, in the case of PlayStation consoles) will lead you nowhere. Enemies will start to block you if you’re not switching it up by using other buttons during your combos. Get in the practice of starting a combo with Square, then occasionally using X mid-combo for heavier air attacks, and Circle for more acrobatic moves like leg sweeps, depending on your active character.
Blaster aiming is also much more important now, so experiment with targeting different body parts. Headshots will obviously deal more damage, but hey, this is a LEGO game, so try targeting hands or toes to see what responses you elicit. Also, don’t be afraid to hop over to your partner character mid-battle to switch things up as well, especially if they have a different move set. It’s easy to fall into the loop of using Jedi characters, but people without lightsabers have some neat tricks too.
And if the combat isn’t gelling with you, don’t sweat it, because the stakes are fairly low. Dying won’t set you back at all, really.
2) Expand your roster of characters
Class abilities have been refined and expanded in a considerable way, so you’ll want to get a spread of characters available to you as early as you can, to facilitate nabbing collectibles along your path.
Obviously, Force-users are big for solving puzzles, and for their strong moveset—it’s hard to argue with a lightsaber. There are many puzzles that require you to use the Force for manipulating objects, and even sometimes people. It’s easy to unlock them as well, as you’ll receive Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi immediately in The Phantom Menace, and then the Prequel chapters are rife with other options.
You might also want to get a Scavenger fairly quickly as well, as they come with a suite of unique tools that are required for certain puzzles. They can blast down specific walls, make walls scalable with a net launcher, or glide from heights.
Bounty Hunters come in handy as well, as you’ll encounter certain items that can only be destroyed by their blasters. Protocol Droids like C-3PO are essential for speaking to alien NPCs that don’t speak Basic, while Astromech Droids can also help hack terminals; neither will draw ire from enemies unprovoked, so they can help you sneak through occupied areas.
Simply progressing through the various story chapters will get you plenty of options quickly. However there are also unique passcodes for unlocking certain characters in-game; stay tuned for the end of this article to see how you can unlock the bounty hunter Dengar and Resistance Admiral Holdo!
3) Gather Kyber Bricks and invest in upgrades
Kyber Bricks are one of the most populous collectibles in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, but they’re also extremely important. They are your lifeblood in a way, allowing you to upgrade your skills. There are a couple of particular skills you should invest in right away to make your entire experience better, however, and they’re in the General tab.
Here you’ll find universal upgrades that affect every character on your save file. On the third tier of this tab, beneath the first life upgrade, is Attract Studs. This will draw studs to you from a distance like a walking LEGO magnet, instead of needing to directly walk into them. Not only will Attract Studs help you get them all before they disappear, but it will greatly decrease the amount of time you need to spend walking in circles or swerving all over paths to grab every last bit—this, in turn, makes it easier to get True Jedi status in each mission, which then earns you more Kyber Bricks in one trip through a level. Efficiency! I highly recommend at least two ranks in this, if not all three.
After that, its neighbour on the General skill tree will identify collectibles on the map. The highlighting effect can be very distracting, but you can toggle it on or off once it’s unlocked. At tier three, it will even show you the location of Datacards, which can be either a very powerful unlockable, or a very entertaining one, depending on how you spend them.
All of this will take a considerable sum of Kyber Bricks, but there’s one trick that will make it very easy. Every planet in the game has a “local space” area with its own missions, and also one Kyber Comet. Track them down and blow them to smithereens to instantly receive five Kyber Bricks in one go—enough to unlock one first-tier upgrade. Make it a habit to check for one every single time you reach a new planet or system.
4) Multiply your Studs
Speaking of Kyber Comets, they’re also handy for banking plenty of suds, the basic currency. Once you’ve claimed your five bricks from a system, those comets will be replaced with Bit Comets, which will shower you with about 25k suds. If you seek these out every time you hop to a new system during the story, if you use the magnet upgrade, and if you smash most breakable objects in your path—this is a LEGO game, after all—you’ll be raking in the dough in no time.
I recommend banking about 1 million suds, in fact, and tracking down a Datapad with the collectible scanner upgrade, and investing them in the Studs x2 Datapad upgrade from your holo-projector. As advertised, this doubles the amount of currency you pick up. A million suds is nothing to scoff at, but you’ll be able to make that money back in no time, while also making it even easier to earn True Jedi on missions.
(You can take this further by unlocking the other multiplier extras—x4, x6x, x8, and x10—and stacking them to make money at ludicrous speed, but in previous games, combining every multiplier did tend to suck all the fun out of the room.)
5) Play your way
When you first boot up the game, you’ll be able to access The Phantom Menace, A New Hope, and The Force Awakens‘ story chapters, and the remaining parts of each trilogy will unlock as you complete them. Whether you start with your favourite movie or trilogy, or aim for a certain chronological approach, you can’t go wrong—chase that bliss.
But also, don’t feel like you’re locked in to whatever you choose. Most of the time, you’re virtually uninhibited from hopping to and fro between stories. I thought I’d stick a pure episodic/chronological approach, but halfway through Attack of the Clones I felt compelled to go unlock Rey for her unique set of Scavenger tools.
And when in doubt? Destroy everything you can, and check every nook or cranny you can.
Passcodes
From the in-game datapad you can access a Code Input system to unlock certain characters. We’re going to get you started with two passcodes that might come in handy very early on in your LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga journey:
- Dengar: OKV7TLR
- Admiral Holdo: XV4WND9
How refreshing to see good old-fashioned passcodes in a game again, huh? I found Dengar especially came in handy, as I was able to use his unique Bounty Hunter skills to earn some Kyber Bricks early on in the Prequel chapters. (A big thank you to Warner Bros. and TT Games for providing us with these codes—no Bothans died to bring you this information.)
Now that you’ve passed these trials, go out into the galaxy, young padawans, and experience your own adventures! LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a sprawling epic that’s going to keep us hunting and replaying missions for a long time—especially with post-launch DLC bringing even more character packs based on The Mandalorian, Rogue One, Solo, and The Bad Batch—so let us know if you find any tips of your own. Good luck, and may the Force be with you, bit by bit!
