Unfortunately, there are only a few unique games in the front lines offering fun to a family. Among them there are almost the whole LEGO series, and I don’t remember any more at the moment. A lot of people got shaking with nerves when they hear the terms LEGO or Harry Potter, but if you can step over your prejudices, you will have a good chance of having fun.
Once upon a time LEGO Star Wars gave pleasant experiences, but today I wouldn’t play with it. I wouldn’t, after the controls were much better in the second part, what’s more, a few games later we could push it on split screen. By the time they put the first four Harry Potter movies into a LEGO video game, Traveller’s Tales programmers could put all the pieces together proficiently.
Gameplay is the same here as what infants in nappy used to play with little colorful building cubes: go and smash everything apart. Of course, there are more difficult tasks than this, and sometimes the game puts your dexterity to the test, but on the whole you always move on a smash/collect line. This is not so enticing, is it?
However, LEGO stuffs are really not about gameplay. Maybe it sounds strange that the point of a whole video games series is not about what to do and how — but this is surely the point where LEGO series become family entertainments.
Littlest ones (I don’t write age, because it’s up to the parents when they let their children watch computer games) get pretty cute figures, and not so little ones can not only roam around in the scenes of one of the most popular movie series, but they can do it with a bro, a sis or a friend. Because LEGO games are basically cooperative.
After they here come the twenty years old kids, who don’t necessarily fill their free time with video games, but they doesn’t necessarily count as a targeted audience. Fathers (and in fortunate cases, mothers) replacing them on the game market, because the jokes balance between the “childish” and “adult” categories relatively good. And so we listed three groups which can have some fun with LEGO Harry Potter on rainy days.
Nothing proves this better than both of my seven years old daughter and my thirty years old darling who have equal fun when at some evenings we sit down at the PC instead of a board game. In an hour we walk through two or three levels, or we learn to use a few spells and after that we complete a level. Because even if you know LEGO video games, you can get some strong innovation in this one.
In LEGO Harry Potter you can not only run through the locations of the movie scenes, but the central area, Hogwarts Castle in itself can cause some surprises. Before some levels you have to learn the spells of the given year, which on the whole mean seven spells and a special ability (Ron‘s rat, Hermione‘s cat and Harry‘s cloak of invisibility goes here). Or rather, there is a spell available only for Harry, and in real the red hexing spell is a heap of funny tricks used randomly. Sometimes we do nothing else for minutes but joking on each other with these jinxes.
So, during touring around in the great castle and its courtyards, you nicely learn all the spellcasting and get to know some useful little things like handling a mandrake or collecting ingredients for various potions.
Like in the other LEGO games the world doesn’t stops at playing through all the story levels. After that there is the Free Play mode in which you can collect golden bricks by saving various characters and by other means — the golden bricks can be used to build gates to bonus levels.
Out of the levels you can walk around a really vast area, and the four stories are offering many many playing hours. On the levels sometimes you can find a few difficult tasks which at the end prove to be based on common sense. For example, in the library there are two very aggressive living books, simply immune to all your spells, but of course they are effectively blocking your way to a few important points of interest. I tell only that you need some common sense to find the solution out.
Potter’s world in itself offers a million of ideas, and to these, add a lot of gimmicks coming from the LEGO environment. The result should be an exceptionally fun family game, if there wouldn’t be baffling bugs harassing poor players on the way.
It was developed for a long time (they postponed the release date twice) in vain: Eventually, there remained a serious saving error ruining some hours of gameplay in the first story, and a pesky error of the controls. This latter one sometimes makes the keyboard taking over all the controls (the cooperative controls are: keyboard + gamepad), so the bug locks one of the players out and makes the two controlled characters moving simultaneously.
In spite of these bugs and regarding entertainment the game is head and shoulders above some popular titles: It is a relatively simple game of both logic and dexterity, and it is fulfilling the expectations held for a family game. This would be better only with a three (instead of two) persons cooperative gameplay. But I don’t hope this version will ever see sunlight, because split screen would be problematic — because the game splits the screen only when the controlled characters go far from each other.
—Garcius—
What I liked:
Potter’s world in LEGO
lots of creative ideas
minute and careful development
quality family game
What I didn’t like:
tiresome bugs
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