Buildum Lego-uousa!
First comes Years 1-4, and... it's an absolutely horrible adaptation of the movies. If you haven't read the books at least, you'll contend with a lot of scenes that do a poor job of conveying the plot. Even the two of us, having recently seen every movie, had a hard time understanding just what they tried to do with some scenes. And yes, the fact that this game comes from an era before Lego was doing voices and dialogue doesn't help.
What is kinda neat is that you get a Hogwarts playground to mess around with. The entire building is pretty large and it houses a ton of secrets, be it cheats or unlockable characters! And since you very slowly unlock new spells, you'll slowly be able to get everything, culminating with your first Dark Mage who'll be able to interact with a ton of objects you couldn't before.
The brunt of the game is your basic Lego affair, explore highly destructible environments, collecting studs to purchase goodies, and finding Lego pieces to build objects required to continue through the stage. Since you are a wizard, Harry, the entire motif is spells. You get an assortment of about 8 spells that can be used to interact with various different objects, and thanks to this there's an interesting variety of obstacles to contend with. That said, more than a few times we found ourselves completely stumped with how to proceed, and it was usually something we didn't notice we had to break.
The game is relatively decent, but honestly, it's just another Lego game. That said, I've a huge bone to pick with some HUD choices. For instance, there's a single spell slot allotted to 'joke spells', sure, they aren't necessary to progress... but you can't pick the one you want, as you must hold down the spell wheel and wait until the red slot turns to the joke spell you want. And pick it too late and you'll get the wrong spell. And what about the character store? There are over 150 characters, witch classic Harry Potter characters such as 'Milkman', 'Boy' and 'Slytherin Girl', however, in order to buy them... you have to go from left to right, one by one, as you go from character to character. Who thought this was a good design choice?
Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7 is pretty much identical to the first. I preferred the new spells in this one, like Aquamenti. I really liked the new Lego figures, as the grey and black looks pretty neat, as well as the new more natural looking lighting, however, it also did quite a few things I didn't like...
Just like before, the cutscenes are sometimes bafflingly vague, and it's hard to follow EVEN if you know the story. Understanding the plot itself, much like the previous games, requires you to be familiar with either books or movies.
This game, much like the latter movies, has some scenes taking place outside of Hogwarts, and to make up for that.... Hogwarts is much smaller than before. It's really lame, you could visit the Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff's houses in the previous game, now you only get part of Slytherin's area, as well as the entire Gryffindor common room. It was so disappointing, and since they recycled so many rooms... why not recycle the entire thing and only add to it? Why remove rooms, rooms which were also entirely optional in the previous game, but added so much personality to it? Sure, now we have more and better puzzles and rewards... but the previous game's HUB was much more engrossing.
And there are also duels... which are terribly boring. You are forced into a circle and must pick the right spell, which is color-coded on the semi-circle behind the enemy, to then enter a 'spell struggle' and mash a button to win, do this four times. Not only is it boring, for much of the game Harry is the only character with the Yellow spell, Focus, so if you are playing in Co-Op it's entirely possible for the second player(Or the one not using Harry) to need to use the Yellow spell... which they don't have, so now they must wait for the game to decide which other spell they need to use. Lame.
Oh, and the character store is still terrible. Now we get a proper character grid, but when it comes to characters with multiple forms... you have to wait for the slot to automatically switch to the form of the character you want to buy. It's such a terrible design choice that makes it hard to find what you're still missing. Why would they do this?
Lego Harry Potter Collection is a decent time, but I figure it's only fun if you are playing it with somebody else. Years 1-4 are slightly more entertaining than years 5-7, but not by much. Regardless, I don't see myself playing these games by myself any time soon.
6.0
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