For the five or ten minutes I was a child, before transforming into the cynical, truculent monster I am now, LEGO was my most favouritest thing in the whole world, ever ever. Well, LEGO and this small, bronzey thing I found lying about the house that I carried with me everywhere like a magic talisman until my hysterical mother snatched it away one afternoon, screaming at my dad for leaving his bullets in reach of the ****ing children.
Anyway, I still think LEGO is pretty much the coolest toy anyone any kid could have, and the LEGO series makes up pretty much the coolest video game collection anyone any kid could play.
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is fundamentally more or less exactly the same sort of thing as previous LEGO titles like Star Wars and Indiana Jones – it’s mostly a lot of scurrying around, smashing everything up, and stuffing millions of LEGO stud cash into your itty-bitty plastic pockets. New – and obviously integral here – to the series, though, is a spellcasting system, featuring over twenty spells from the books and adding a clever layer of complexity to the game’s puzzling bits.
As the name suggests, the game is based around the first four Harry Potter novels – The Philosopher’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and The Goblet of Fire – but if you’ve not read these or seen the films, you won’t be cribbing any useful book report notes from this. Actually, the story presentation is utterly inscrutable, to the point of being an infuriating unskippable cutscene distraction more than anything else. Elsewhere, you’ll be packed off to classes, and getting busy with plot points that are clearly significant, but you’ve no idea how or why. Scurry, smash, stuff.
The game makes up for this, however, with an abundance of… stuff. There’s so much to do in this game, it’s almost intimidating if you’re a bit of a completionist or Achievement/Trophy whore like me. There are dozens of hidden character tokens to find (unlocking them for the Free Play mode), for example, as well as Red Bricks, Gold Bricks, and Hogwarts’ Crest pieces. Bizarrely enough, there are loads of cheats and the game almost seems designed to encourage using them.
While it generally plays well enough, the game has a few issues. It’s somewhat prone to instance glitching, mostly minor and resolved with a reload, but quitting one particular level mid-game can apparently make completing the game impossible (at the time of writing this, no title update has been released to fix this). The physics are also a little sketchy here and there, most notably – and immensely annoyingly – when it comes to building structures with LEGO blocks, where the things handle like five-ton trolls, with the temperament to match.
These problems aside, LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is every bit as charming and inexplicably compelling as its LEGO predecessors. Kids will love it, and adults will secretly love it when nobody’s looking. And with around 40-50 hours packed into it, there’s rather a lot to love. Accio!
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