LEGO Star Wars III was the first ever LEGO game I owned as a kid, and even as a kid I knew there was something off about it. At multiple points I would reach an area that gave 0 explanation on what to do and I would aimlessly run around for 20 minutes until giving up and looking up a walkthrough online. As I got older and stopped playing, I thought that I was just too young to understand the flow of the levels, but upon revisiting LEGO Star Wars III as an adult to play with my younger brother, I realized that my criticisms as a child still hold a lot of weight today. About 1 in 3 levels contain a segment where what you're supposed to do to make progress and reach the next level is completely unclear; leaving you to randomly run around destroying things until you by chance figure out what you're supposed to do or give up and google how to complete it. I think the developers went a little over the top in changing up the level design to be more complicated than the earlier games, because if an adult with thousands of hours on challenging story-based games is confused how to make progress in a KID'S platforming game, something went wrong in the design process. Also, the battlefield levels and segments are insanely tedious, time-consuming and just plain boring; yet they're the central focus of way too many levels.
That being said, this is still a LEGO game, so the expansive character roster and brilliantly fleshed out hub world is just as good as any other LEGO game, and the majority of levels are straight-forward and very enjoyable! The humor in the cutscenes is peak LEGO game humor, and even as an adult I still laugh out loud at most of them. This is one of the last LEGO games where the cutscene jokes didn't boil down to stuff like "oh look a chicken! There shouldn't be a chicken there!", and I wish newer LEGO games had the sense of humor this game does. All in all, LEGO Star Wars III contains most of the elements that make LEGO games fun to play, and I appreciate that it doesn't hold your hand and set the difficulty to baby mode like some of the newer games do. However, there's not really anything special that sets this game apart from the other games in the LEGO Star Wars series, and it has multiple flaws that can make progressing feel like a chore. LEGO games should be fun, light-hearted experiences, not boring & confusing puzzles. This game feels like the latter a tad too often, and so I give it a 6/10.
