Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens

If you were concerned another Lego game coming so soon on the heels of Lego Dimensions, Lego Marvel's Avengers and Lego Jurassic World might mean Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens would stick too close to the familiar formula, this new gameplay trailer offers a bit of hope. Since the first entry arrived more than a decade ago, the Lego series hasn't changed all that much. The core foundation has been in dire need of a shake-up, and that's particularly true in a time when four Lego games will have shipped in a calendar year. Though there have been small adjustments and additions made over the course of the last 10 years, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens appears to be making some significant improvements to the tried and true formula.

The new Star Wars expanded universe is about to drop some knowledge in an unexpected place. When TT Games' Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrives this summer, not only will you be able to relive the memorable moments from the sequel 30 years in the making, you'll also get to play through sequences that take place prior to the movie for the very first time. While video games helping to expand on the Star Wars universe is nothing new, most of those experiences (Dark Forces, Shadows of the Empire, Knights of the Old Republic) were wholesale adventures and not just side-missions in a larger game. It is a little bit shocking to learn that this expanded content will appear in a game aimed at kids, particularly given how not so seriously the Lego video games take their inspiration. That said, there's so much new material to mine with Disney and Lucasfilm wiping the previous expanded universe slate clean, and so much desire for new Star Wars details, injecting it in some unlikely places does add another element of excitement in discovery. In an interview with Game Informer, members of TT Games' development teamed dished on just how and where these additional story missions will take place in the grander scheme.

After teasing a major announcement yesterday afternoon, WB Interactive and TT Games officially revealed Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens this morning with a new trailer, showing there were still plenty of jokes to make at the Force's expense. While the film version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was decades in the making, the wait for a new Lego Star Wars video game has been nearly as long. It's been five years since TT Games last visited the brick galaxy far, far away, and while it's not quite a 30-year wait to see how the Skywalker saga would continue, the gaming landscape has changed pretty drastically since Lego Star Wars: The Clone Wars hit shelves. TT Games has been incredibly busy with the Lego franchise over the course of the last half-decade, developing a dozen different licensed Lego games, including the recently released Lego Marvel's Avengers and Lego Dimensions. If that seems like a lot of games for one developer to tackle, you'd be right. However, that hasn't stopped the Lego series from continuing to adapt the biggest blockbusters into humorous adventures of brick-sized proportions.