LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 Review

Review by IGN 8.5/10 Great

The cards were stacked against LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4. This is the fourth franchise to get the LEGO treatment and something like the seventh LEGO game if you include the double-dip on the Star Wars adventures. People know the formula of stud collecting, character unlocking and drop-in/drop-out co-op pretty well by now. When I — a seasoned LEGO vet — sat down to play Harry Potter, even my eyes began to roll a bit at the thought of the “blast everything” quest I was about to set out on.

Then, LEGO Harry Potter won me over with gorgeous environments, clever use of the famed spells, legitimate humor and adorable references that show how dialed in Traveller’s Tales is to this franchise. After a few hit or miss LEGO outings, this is the game fans have been waiting for.

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Review by Eurogamer 9/10

LEGO Harry Potter is enormous, which is no mean feat given that the title character is two centimetres tall. And plastic.

By the time I finished the sizeable story mode, encompassing the first four years of Harry’s life at Hogwarts, I’d put more hours on the game clock than most “adult” action games demand, yet I was still at just over 45 per cent completion. I’d not completed any of the Hogwarts crests hidden in each of the levels. I’d unlocked a fraction of the game’s 160-plus characters. I’d found only six of the secret red power bricks, rescued a mere 20 of the 50 imperilled students and earned less than half of the golden bricks which add up to unlock more bonus levels.

So, for a game built from tiny pieces, LEGO Harry Potter builds into a seriously epic undertaking. This has been true of all the LEGO games, of course, but this is by far the most impressive and most rewarding iteration of the beloved formula to date.

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Review by Games Radar 9/10 Awesome

You get a rough time of it as a Harry Potter fan, not least if you’re a Harry Potter fan over the age of 12. For most people this involves hiding your literary shame by buying the ‘adult’ versions of the books (no, we’re reading Dostoyevsky’s Konstantin Potter and the Goblet of Dense Russian Prose) or obscuring your replica lightning-bolt scar under a shaggy haircut and a porkpie hat. For those of us who quite fancy running around Hogwarts and blasting Dementors in the face, we’ve had to endure worse: a series of lame, lazy or frustratingly not-quite-there games, all of which failed to make the most of Potter’s wizarding world.

LEGO Harry Potter gets it. It gets that even though students aren’t allowed to zap Snape in his smirky face, we’d rather enjoy doing this in the game. It gets that we want to play as Dobby or Griphook or Hermione’s cat even if they weren’t in that part of the book. It gets that although it might be hard to program the many locations Harry visits, we want to go to Hogsmeade and hurl snowballs at Malfoy.

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