Two popular franchises combine together to form Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4. As you can tell from the title, this is an adaptation of the first four Harry Potter books, done in Lego form (which is an interesting twist). Does it work together? The answer is: yes, assuming that you don't find it too kiddish. So, first off, the Lego elements are interesting, particularly the parts where you manipulate Lego parts with magic and it forms a new object. This fits in perfectly with the magic/wand aspect of the Harry Potter universe. However, the puzzle aspects where you manipulate Lego objects manually, such as moving large Lego pieces to form a staircase, was annoying. Why? The controls aren't fine-turned or tight enough for it to work well. More often than not, you'd want the piece to go there, but the game doesn't register and you loose the hold you have over the floating piece, meaning you'll have to pick it up again and try to put it into that exact spot. It feels awkward and you end up misplacing the pieces half of the time. This is compounded by the fixed camera angles. Sometimes, this can actually hide some object which would trigger the next part of the story/level, needless to say, the time you waste trying to find this object is annoying. It would be awesome if there was a controllable/free-roaming camera so that you can enjoy looking at all the details of the faithfully and beautifully contructed Lego world.
The fixed camera can also make some platforming sections more awkward. None of the platforming sections are hard, it's just with the camera angle, it can be hard to judge the distance and direction, you end up falling off when there's no reason that you should. The graphics feel simplistic, but it is a conscious decision due to the design of Lego rather than a lazy attempt. That said, you feel as if the graphics could be more polished and better. The design of each area is amazing, each filled with iconic elements from the Harry Potter universe. Hogwarts is well formed and being populated by NPC makes it alive and that you're part of it. That you're a student there, exploring Hogwarts, attending classes and revealing secrets. A critical thing that you need though is an in-game map of Hogwarts so that you can know where everything is, particularly if you wanted to go to a specific room (that isn't part of the storyline). This is more for free-roam than the storyline (since there are arrows and a ghost leading the way to tell you where to go for the next story level). For other Lego inspired game play, stud collecting (this game's substitution of 'money') is cool for the first level or so, but then it started to get repetitive and tedious since each level has so many bits to break to collect the studs, but they're all similar in nature (just break everything and collect).
What does this mean? It means that after the first two years (or even earlier), you start to feel bored because each level plays out similarly, transverse the linear path breaking everything in sight, fight boss, solve similar puzzles, move on to the next level. Sure, you're getting your money's worth in terms of game time, but the levels feel too repetitive, the designers didn't manage to keep 'refreshing' enough to keep your interest. There's a ton of collectibles, so many that it would seem overwhelming at the start of the game. As you get a feel for what you need to do to get everything, it starts to get better. It ends up feeling that there are too many collectibles, what with 150+ characters to unlock, 200 gold bricks, 96 crests, 20 red bricks and 50 students to unlock, that's a LOT of stuff. You end up having to at least play all levels twice in order to have a hope of collecting everything. That said, I got the most fun out of finding all these collectibles and getting the platinum trophy (takes around 20+ hours), as there were some clever ways the collectibles were hidden. Ah yes, there's the magic spells that you constantly learn. It's nice to see in the early levels, stuff that is currently out due to your character not having enough proficiency, by the time you're near the end of the game, it gets annoying coz you want to get those things so you don't have to replay the level. There's a ton of spells for you to learn or buy, although for the ones you buy, there is no description on what it does...
The game is a bit on the easy side because even if you die, you respawn without heavy penalty (you only lose some studs which can be easily regained). Boss battles can be a pain at times since the controls/spells that you can can glitch and not work when you want them to work. The story is actually fairly well told, when all things are considered. Despite no dialogue at all, it manages to tell the key moments of the Harry Potter universe extremely well. It helps if you have read the books or watched the movies, and the humor is solid (it ramps up as the story gets going). The game seem to use the movies as inspiration instead of the books, which is a shame. Once you get into Year 3 and 4 though, as the books are longer and the plot is more detailed, the team had to truncate a lot and as such, the story feels really rushed and skips a lot of plot devices. It stops being coherent, it's way more noticeable in Year 4 where basically the levels are just each of the Goblet of Fire events one after the other. They should have scaled the number of each levels for each year instead of must having six for each year. Maybe they could have had more levels for Year 4 at the expense of some levels in the first and second year. The ending wasn't that great, purely because it is hard to make a good overall ending on game like this. Overall, it's a neat game but something that you can get bored of quickly.
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