Lego Star Wars Dubbed ‘Lego May Cry’ As Players Continue To Discover Brutal New Combos

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is out now and, videogames being videogames, the first thing folk worked out was that you could take advantage of the fact that Lego kiddies are unkillable. Not that anything ever dies in a Lego game of course, they just dissemble into component bricks, but the fact the kids don’t even do this means that players can use air-combos to skip parts of the map (opens in new tab), a technique which has been dubbed “Child Flight.” (opens in new tab)

Lego Star Wars introduces a new combat system to the series that takes more than a few cues from classic action games, and in particular Devil May Cry’s air combos. That is, you can stay airborne by landing repeated hits—and if you can work out a particular sequence of hits, potentially create a loop that both keeps you aloft and will demolish anything.

This being a Lego game, and such a comprehensive one at that, it also includes a metric tonne of Star Wars characters you can play as. The Child Flight exploit was brought to notice by one Red Orb, who continues to experiment with different characters’ air-combo strings and produce surprising results. Take Queen Padme, for example:

And now, for a somewhat cursed phrase: Here’s the Jar Jar tech.

I’m sorry, you want more Jar Jar tech? Yousa people gonna cry?

The above user, Revolthell, has been more widely testing out the system and writes (opens in new tab): “You can use Qui-gonn’s Dive Kick the opposite angle to have reverse magnetism and kick forwards while bringing enemies towards you, and side switch by buffering force abilities. This game is actually just DMC with a Star Wars skin.”

All that needed, of course, was the Devil May Cry overlay and soundtrack:

This one… I just don’t even know how this is a Lego game.

Finally: a true unblockable reset tech from General Grievous. 

Expect this from a Lego Star Wars game, I did not.

One slightly odd bit of context to this is that, in January this year, a Polygon report (opens in new tab) highlighted issues of crunch and disagreement among staff on the project. One of the ‘problems’ was the revisions to combat, including a 27-hit combat tree, which was apparently removed after focus tests showed users were only using one button to fight.

“The director would request new mechanics on a whim, then ask that they be changed, whilst never actually fixing anything that really mattered,” one former employee said at the time (opens in new tab). “Read every review of a Lego game. They always say the same [things]: ‘Platforming is pants, the camera is terrible, no online co-op.’ So let’s add a God of War-style combat tree! Five-year-olds will love it.”

Game development is a strange beast indeed. Who knows what the five-year-olds think of Qui-Gonn infinite-combo-ing Anakin over a large gap, but the big kids seem to love it.

---

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years’ experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”