Game Review: Star Wars: Unlock! The Escape Game

 Star Wars: Unlock! The Escape Game published by Space Cowboys

We have played many Unlock! games in the past, with mixed results. Most of the experiences were good but two or three of them had puzzles that made no sense to us at all, even after seeing the solution. So we are cautious about new Unlock! games. But the Star Wars theme was a "take my money right now!" moment. Or at least, "put that on my Amazon wish list right now!" Christmas morning saw me opening a highly anticipated gift.

The game has three separate escape game decks inside, along with a small intro deck to help new players learn the various game mechanics (like adding red and blue cards together, using lock codes on the app, and using machines on the app). We've played enough games that we jumped into the first game. 

The first games is Escape from Hoth. It covers the first act of The Empire Strikes Back, i.e. the battle on Hoth. All the story beats show up--riding a Tauntaun, fighting the Wampa, locating the probe droids, fixing the snow speeders, fighting the AT-AT assault, and escaping the Hoth base. The puzzles were fun and not too difficult. The play felt thematic and brought back a lot of happy memories of the movie. We had a few minor errors and scored four out of five.

A solid performance

The second games is An Unforeseen Delay. Players are smugglers for Jabba the Hutt who have been captured by an Imperial cruiser. The first task is to break out of a prison cell with the help of a cellmate. Then players sneak around trying to free their astromech (like R2-D2) and their impounded cargo before finding their ship and getting away. At one point, we had a Stormtrooper blaster rifle and my son wanted to shoot everything in sight. We held him back until we had a good reason to shoot. At another point, we had to communicate with the droid, played by one of us. The droid player was not allowed to talk and used the app to answer yes or no questions with R2-style beeps and boops. This game had some really fun puzzles and ended dramatically and satisfactorily. Our rating was five of five!

We were better as smugglers!

The third game is Secret Mission on Jedha. Players are Imperial agents looking for a lost case of kyber crystals. A ship crashed in the desert and the hunt is on for clues to where the case wound up. The variety of puzzles is fun. The story provides a nice narrative and was satisfying to finish. We played half one night, leaving the app open on my phone. The next day, we tried to finish up but the app had closed, losing our progress. My wife and I did a quick catch up to unlock the clues we had already discovered. Our score was five of five, with an asterisk since we didn't repeat our initial errors in the first run. Also, we probably had record time solving it.

22 minutes must be a record

This game has its own app which is good since the regular Unlock! app has a lot of games already in it. The music on the app is from Holst's The Planets, which surprised me. I guess the Star Wars license did not include the iconic music. Some of the iconic sound effects make it in, like the R2 beeps in the second game. Some puzzles are solved in the app. The variety of those puzzles is good and they take advantage of the touch screen and the ability to move the app device around. The app is indispensable for play and does add to the enjoyment.

The individual games also feature special ability cards for that particular game. Players choose three of the six cards, like "Droid expert" or "Ace pilot." The cards give hints on how to solve some of the puzzles. I didn't think they were necessary. The kids enjoyed picking out new abilities.

Recommended, highly for Star Wars fans.