Lego Star Wars Battles is a mobile game for iOS, exclusive to Apple Arcade. The gameplay consists of Real Time PvP Tower Defense gameplay where players must use various units from across the Star Wars galaxy that they've collected to destroy the opposing player's main base ship while defending their own. All of this is, of course, skinned over with a cutesy Lego look.
When entering a match, the game randomly chooses, in typical Star Wars fashion, whether you are playing as the Light Side or the Dark Side. This helps determine what units you will be using. For example, only the Light Side can use Rebel Troopers and Clone Turbo Tanks while only the Dark Side can use Storm Troopers and AT-ATs. The main gameplay element is building turrets, which increase the size of your deployment area and therefor how close to the enemy base you can place your troops. While the ideal win situation is to destroy the enemy base, you can also win by having the most turrets in play once time runs out so it is just as important to protect your turrets and destroy enemy turrets as it is to protect your base and destroy the enemy base.
The game also features a gacha element, though it lacks microtransactions. Winning battles unlocks scans, essentially reskinned loot boxes, of which you can have three at a time. Opening these scans takes a certain amount of time but you can also open them early by winning a certain number of medals (obtained in battles). Opening scans early also boosts them, allowing you to get five prizes as opposed to three. The scans contain different units and, like in battle, there are Light Side and Dark Side scans and contain the appropriate units. Unlike most games, duplicate units can not be placed on your team and instead are used to upgrade the unit they are a duplicate of along with studs, the game's main currency.
Like its console bound big brothers, the game contains a lot of tongue in cheek humor, poking fun at the Star Wars universe and making lots of bad Puns.
Lego Star Wars Battles Contains Examples of...
- Airborne Mook: Both sides have an air unit that can bypass the barricades and have an advantage against certain units. The Light Side has the Duros Alliance Fighter while the Dark Side has the Probe Droid.
- Anti-Air: Of all things, Porgs. They are also the game's only anti-air unit and Light Side exclusive so the Dark Side is unfortunately out of luck in that area.
- Badass Adorable: Porgs. They're surprisingly strong, being the game's best anti-air unit, and unsurprisingly adorable, being porgs.
- Cosmetically Different Sides: For the most part the Light Side and Dark Side units are just reskinned versions of each other.
- Emote Animation: Downplayed (somehow). The game has emotes unique to each side (with each champion also having unique emotes dedicated to them) but they only appear as little speech bubbles containing the animations.
- Fire-Breathing Weapon: Both Flame Troopers and Flame Towers both use fire to attack, using a flamethrower and bring a giant flamethrower respectively. Both are also weak to air units as they can only spread flames in front of them.
- Friendly Sniper: Against all expectations, IG-88. Upon being placed he lets out a friendly sounding "Let's go." The Light Side Sniper, Cassian Andor of Rogue One fame also counts.
- Gatling Good: Moroff's weapon is a gatling gun which is slow to charge but does a continuous stream of damage.
- Hero Unit: The game has these in the form of Champions. As of this writing there are six Champions: Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Yoda, Boba Fett, Princess Leia, and Captain Phasma.
- Literally Shattered Lives: As expected from a Lego game, all units shatter into pieces upon death.
- Loot Boxes: The game has scans which contain a random number of random units.
- Tower Defense: The entire point of the game is to defend your tower while destroying the enemy's tower.
- Zerg Rush: The point of multiple units such as Porgs, Ewoks, and Battle Droids. They all have low health but there's so many of them that it may not even matter.
