It’s a kind of magic.
The Lego game franchise has become a very popular film-based series covering Star Wars, Batman, Indiana Jones (twice) and now Harry Potter. Of course the beauty of the Harry Potter films was how they appealed to both a younger and older audience, something the Lego games have also managed so far. A winning combination then surely?
Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 does exactly as it says on the box – mimics the first 4 films from the series following the slightly posh kid with a wonky scar who gets sent to school to become a wizard. The game takes you from the opening moments of the Philosopher’s Stone to the end of the Goblet of Fire, allowing you to play through the main key moments of each film while exploring Hogwarts and its surrounding areas at your own pace. The basic gameplay remains the same as the previous Lego titles – find your way through the levels, picking up studs and smashing anything that looks remotely smashable. The big difference this time round is you can’t immediately rebuild blocks that you find hanging around – to do so needs you to learn the Wingardium Leviosa spell, although this is one of the first things you do, so you can start building stuff with the spell pretty quickly. This sets the theme of the game pretty well – you’ll regularly see things that clearly need a spell of some sort, be it a pixie holding a chest just out of reach, or a plant that sits in the way of a doorway. Initially you might find it frustrating, such as when I spent 20 minutes trying to get a chest down from the air before giving up, but once you realise that everything will become clear later on down the line you learn to just remember these areas to come back to later.
And you’ll most definitely be revisiting the same areas several times over as you wander round Hogwarts moving from one level to another. This has the potential to become laborious and boring, especially after every other Lego game giving you such instant and straight forward access to whichever level you fancied, but such worries have been skillfully dodged. Hogwarts is a living, breathing environment which remembers everything that has happened earlier in the game. If, for example, you’ve already arranged some fallen books back onto a bookshelf then they’ll still be on the shelf later. And those areas that you spotted earlier that you couldn’t do anything with because you didn’t have the right spell? Well this makes you want to revisit areas you’ve been to before just to see what your latest spell will let you do. Maybe you’ll be able to make a new potion to access a new area, or get rid of the flying pixies to reach some more collectible stuff. Curiosity will get the better of you more often than not, and you’ll find yourself wandering around for large chunks of time just trying to find ways to use what you’ve been learning.
This exploring is the key element of the game. Fighting between yourself and other characters is kept to a minimum, and apart from the main boss battles at the end of each year you won’t need to fend off many other characters. This gives you more time to enjoy Hogwarts and its surrounding areas, which make up a huge playground for you to play in, and the proven formula of collecting Lego studs to buy new characters and costumes later on only adds to the determination to find every last corner of the map and collect everything in sight.
While you’re doing so you’ll come to realise just how good everything looks. As always, everything in the game is made from nothing more than simple Lego, yet on the whole characters look like their movie counterparts (although some “lesser” characters sometimes look a bit samey) and environments both indoors and outdoors look fantastic in all their block-built glory. The music has been lifted straight from the films too and do a great job of setting the atmosphere, and although the characters don’t actually speak, the dialogue between them during cutscenes is nothing short of remarkable.
By not including any voices in the game, Traveller’s Tales have had to rely on other ways to tell the story and inject some humour into the game, and despite some of the cut scenes being quite long you never really lose track of what’s going on. It certainly helps if you’ve seen the films themselves, but an incredibly clever combination of facial expressions and sounds from the various characters tell a story without a single word being spoken. Some of the cutscenes are genuinely funny too, a theme which continues through the game and provides some moments that will make even the most Potter-sceptic gamer laugh. I never got bored of drinking the strength potion, something that triggers a Popeye-esque muscle growth in Harry and makes a bulked up Ron do a series of quick press-ups before carrying on.
There are the usual two ways to play through the game – the lone gamers amongst you will be pleased to know that playing by yourself is now a far less frustrating experience than previous Lego games due to the fact that the AI has been hugely improved. If for example you stand on a bench to reach a high area, the other character will come over and work their magic to make the bench glide up into the air – there’s certainly more of a teamwork feel to the AI characters. It’s not perfect, and I spent a good chunk of time getting annoyed during the last scene of Year 2 trying to work out what to do when all along the AI character should’ve been helping me out with a 2-person spell, but it certainly makes playing through without a partner more satisfying from previous Lego titles.
But these games aren’t designed to be played alone. Play with someone else, be it an adult or a child, and the game comes alive. Working together to find potion ingredients or finding your way across a deep chasm feels great, and the split screen system works fantastically well to allow players more freedom to separate and do their own thing. It does take some getting used to as it’s a dynamic system, so as you move around the angle of the line splitting the screen changes and sometimes stays on the screen even when the two characters are close to each other, but it’s probably the best way to go about it and does at least eliminate the tug-of-war evident in most other Lego game when the two players wanted to go in opposite directions.
Between each level you can either choose to carry on with the story, or return to the Leaky Cauldron which acts as the game’s hub. From here you can replay completed levels to collect more studs or find extra hidden sections of the school crest, or take a step outside into the street where you can visit other shops and buildings to spend your studs. You can also visit the bank which gives you access to some quite cool bonus levels as well as a level builder which lets you put your own areas together using a wide range of Lego pieces and objects. It’s a nice thing to have available, but there’s already more than enough play time in the game itself so it may not be something you really spend much time with.
How long the game actually takes you to finish depends entirely on how thorough you want to be. If you race through to reach the end it could still take you in excess of 12 hours, but take your time and explore a little more and you can easily double that. Revisit the levels with new characters and spells to try and find all the crests and you can probably almost double it again. That’s a massive amount of game for your money, and considering it’s suitable and accessible for both younger and older players it really is good value for money.
Yes there are a couple of gripes, most notably with the AI and the way the screen splits in two, and there are moments when things feel slightly repetitive, but it’s a beautifully crafted and totally charming game which you’ll keep coming back to even after completing your 4th year. It looks great, sounds great and plays great. You can even chalk it up as some quality family time if you play it with your kids. Everyone’s a winner.
Lego and Harry Potter? Most definitely a winning combination.
8/10
Review by Iain Alexander
