LEGO Harry Potter - Years 1-4

I’m sure you are as sick of my Lego reviews as I am of the games. I bought Lego Harry Potter for another easy win and thankfully it was a lot easier (quicker) to complete than Lego Lord of the Rings.

As with all the previous Lego games, you follow the plot of the movie while exploring Hogwarts. You are familiar with the drill, it’s Harry Potter. It’s one of the early games and as such it’s not the best looking and occasionally bugged out. I only had the one crash that caused me major upset though, so it again wins points over Lego Indiana Jones 2. But scoring points against that is pretty much shooting fish in a barrel.

I’ll keep this quick and concentrate on the new shit. As you are Harry Potter, you are diametrically opposed to killing any other human being or their pets. This means the combat elements have been completely dumbed down and replaced with wand fun - and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

You can use your wand for pretty much anything; casting spells, picking stuff up, Lego building, picking your nose, picking on Ron, etc, etc. You have to learn the various spells that you need as the game progresses. In addition, there are also potions which allow you do to certain things such as; be as strong as Hagrid, turn invisible, become an old man... I’m out.

While there are main story missions that cover the first four books slash movies, there isn’t really a lot of action to be translated to the game and you can really tell as most of the levels lack diversity. You have to learn about eight spells and craft three of four potions, one of which you only use once in the course of the main game.

Achievements –1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

Aside from getting 100% (which like most Lego games, constitutes at least two thirds of the achievements) there are very few other things to do but some of the others feel like they are just there to be annoying. Notable examples of this are Chilled, Boo!, Good Dog, Arachnophobic and Lumos Solem. All of these achievements require you to do a certain action up to 50 times, which is in no way fun, and these can’t really be obtained through normal play.

Considering the game was published in 2010, I would have expected a little more thought to have gone into these achievements. I would have preferred level time trails to this repetitive, boring, doesn’t feel like you are achieving anything, style achievement.

While I say that the 100% covers most other things, there is one annoying exception in this game. Glitched and bugged achievements. There are two ones I know about. Some people have reported not being able to find one of the students in peril, which blocks the 100% and the achievement for getting all of the students in peril.

Another one, which is worse as it’s down to bad coding rather than an actual glitch, occurs in the game’s hub where you have to clean up a shop to get a gold brick to appear. The thing is, you cannot see the bits that need to be cleaned. I went over the shop about three times before the brick actually appeared.

It is these kinds of things that lead me to really hate on games and developers and unfortunately I think these kinds of things will just get worse with the ability to add patches and fix issues – an option that all game developers have but choose not to use because it’s not profitable to fix their previous mistakes.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Glitches and coding issues aside, it is an easy, if not under-rewarding, completion. The one thing I will say is that the collectibles are a lot more forgiving that other Lego Games as there are only seven collectibles per story level instead of ten. It’s the small things in life.