Lego Harry Potter
With the success of Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, and Lego Batman, most people who enjoy games even casually have a pretty good idea the sort of play entailed in Traveller's Tales' popular plastic brick adventures. We control beloved pop culture icons in Lego form as they run around recognizable scenes solving building block puzzles, collecting thousands of Lego studs, and engaging in the occasional sight gag.
Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 doesn't deviate from this formula. We may be using magic rather than the Force to manipulate Lego blocks, and Harry and Hermione may be taking the place of Indiana Jones and Marion, but the general mechanics and overall vibe are more or less the same.
That said, it is easily the biggest, best designed, and most enjoyable Lego game to date.
We take control of a rotating cast of more than 160 characters, switching at will between, say, Hagrid the giant, Harry, Hermione, Ron, and a goblin banker during the game's opening level. Each character has his or her own set of abilities, such as a wand that can be used to move bricks, a set of keys to open doors, or a tumbling ability that can break certain Lego constructs into their basic elements.
Several of the game's environmental puzzles require players to make wise use of multiple characters' abilities in a single puzzle in order to progress. It's entertaining enough for one player to do on his or her own, but loads more fun with a pair of players cooperating. All the action takes place on a single screen that elegantly splits in two and shifts to follow both players if they move too far away from one another. Still, one of my few beefs is that only two players can play at once; this is that rare game in which my entire family showed interest, and there's more than enough in any given area to occupy three or four players.
Indeed, the game is virtually bursting with challenges and collectables. The steady stream of intricate tasks that pop up throughout each mission-like solving a trio of smaller puzzles in order to find the ingredients for a potion required to solve a larger puzzle-is nothing short of awesome. And it will take dedicated players dozens of hours to do things like search out every Hogwarts crest piece and re-explore old areas to see what secrets their newly learned spells and abilities have unlocked.
Meanwhile, Hogwarts serves as a perpetual hub for all the action. We wander the castle halls and staircases looking for Rowlingian spells to learn, stuff to break apart and rebuild, and new story levels that are gradually unlocked in chronological order. It's easy to get caught up in random tasks around the school-lighting torches, stacking books, or saving Hogwarts students in peril-and forget where you're supposed to head next, but ghostly Lego studs always appear to act as a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you back on track.
And lest I neglect mentioning, it's also the best looking game in the franchise. The graphics have been polished to a next-gen shine. My family has primarily played the Wii version, which looks lvely, but we've also given the Xbox 360 edition a go and it positively radiates with realistic textures, believable lighting effects, and sharp attention to detail (you can see individual wares inside the frosted windows of Diagon Alley's shops).
The simple fact is that Harry Potter and Lego make for a great fit. The former is a wonderfully imaginative work of fiction, the latter is one of the most imagination-enabling toys ever made. Using magic to manipulate individual building blocks to create staircases and bridges almost seems like something that J.K. Rowling could have written into one of Harry's early adventures in the belly of the castle.
I can understand the inclination to pass this game up simply because you feel as though you've been there and done that. But it would be a shame. Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 may employ some familiar tricks, but Traveller's Tales has refined them into its most graceful and playable game yet.
Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Platforms: Wii (reviewed), Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, DS, Windows PC
Developer: Traveller's Tales
Publisher: Warner Brothers Games
ESRB: E10+
Score: 8.5/10
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