Item - Lego Star Wars: Choose Your Path

The visual format of this book is definitely unusual. Every page is illustrated with a full-colour photograph of a Star Wars scene put together entirely using Lego bricks and figurines. The models - especially those representing ships, robots, and aliens from the films - are very nice to look at. Other than the visual aspect, being based on Lego toys does not make this any different from the myriad Star Wars-based gamebooks and solo adventures already out there, being a pretty typical SW romp. Still, it turns out to be an entertaining one.

The book's scope is quite large, including not only events from Episodes I-VIII but also other materials (such as The Clone Wars and Rogue One movies, as well as the Star Wars Rebels TV series). Each of the three adventures can be completed in several different ways (each involving a different storyline from the source films), which provides high replay value. Having previous knowledge of the source material can help achieve a successful ending, but fortunately the three adventures' challenge level does not depend exclusively on how well the reader remembers the films. Overall, the adventures are entertaining and challenging enough to provide a few evenings' worth of entertainment.

The book's biggest problem is the writing. The sections of text have even less flavour than your typical Fighting Fantasy entry. Moreover, every page includes a section of text with background information about a specific aspect of the Star Wars universe. These infoboxes do not integrate seamlessly into the narrative, and they also take up considerable space. The inclusion of these background text sections makes a certain amount of sense given that the book's publisher tends to market its products as educational, but the boxes can prove quite distracting and the space dedicated to them could have been used to spice up the narrative instead.

Despite the book's shortcomings, and while it is definitely not a classic for the ages, it still proves to be a competently designed collection of interactive stories which should be both entertaining for children and an enjoyable diversion for adults. It certainly won't hurt you to give it a shot.

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