Lego Harry Potter: Years 5 - 7

I’m slowly coming to the end of the Lego franchise, or at least I thought I was. It seems for every backlogged completion I knock out, another two new ones take its place. At this current time, following the completion of this stupid thing I have finished 13 out of a possible 23 released Lego titles and despite the colourful facade these are far from leisurely pleasure cruises.

So, specifically Lego Harry Potter Years 5 -7 (LHP57) – I was at a major disadvantage story wise because I had not watched the movies and this meant that none of the cut scenes or interactive story bits made any sense to me. On the bright side, when I played catch up, I hadn’t ruined the movies for myself either so every cloud. Needless to say, the storyline follows the movies so if you’ve watched them you already know what happens. If you haven’t then you won’t know what’s going on.

The gameplay... just. I don’t know. You learn spells and you go through levels using the spells to get to the end. And you do it all again on freeplay if you want the achievements. I have to say I had to look up what to do twice when playing the game normally because I couldn’t work out what the game wanted me to do. I’m not sure if it was my own stupidity or lack of Potter knowledge that caused this. But that aside it’s for the most part very cleanly put together. I only had to start the game three times after getting stuck on shit and, on the bonus level, getting forced out of the map. But it’s essentially the same Lego formula that I keep going back to – the levels take ages and it’s repetitive.

I won’t talk about the graphics because Lego but the music was insanely repetitive, cringy and just shit to listen to.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

26 Achievements are gained from playing through the story and there’s not a lot of note outside of that either, other than the fact that the open world sections of the game could potentially have you searching for hours and hours to get the last character token that you missed on the first run through. As always the 100% is the biggest ball ache of the Lego franchise as it requires you to play through every fuck ass level twice.

Bizarrely for a Lego game, there is a missable achievement. When playing through Year 7, you have to deliberately visit Hogwarts as you don’t actually go there. If you don’t do it during the story, you will need to replay the first 2 years of the game. Not cool but chances are you will do this by accident. Thankfully this isn’t a secret achievement either so the game at least warns you about it.

There are a few other annoying ones. There are some instances where you are required to duel with other characters within the game. However, these only happen at certain points and you have to use certain characters to win the duels. The duels are the most overly convoluted, drawn out process in the game so having to do them twice is a ball ache anyway. But having to pick a specific character and play a specific level and then duel a specific character?? It’s not difficult, it just irritating.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The easiest way to sum up the game is an irritating repetitive adventure that’s not fun. I played it for the achievements and I no doubt will play more Lego games in the future... and I’ll probably dive straight into Lego Batman3 next. I will complete them all. Eventually.