Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 Review

Harry returns to Hogwarts in a Lego adventure that's both charming and fun to play.

The Lego brand video games have always been a guilty pleasure for most gamers, myself included. Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 keeps the charm of the previous Lego games and in addition makes small improvements to the formula.  This also means, though, that the bugs and glitches that plagued the previous Lego titles are still present.

If you're unfamiliar with the Lego brand of games it’s essentially a retelling of events from a popular film series only with Lego versions of the cast. Legos can’t speak so a lot of the charm comes from the comical actions you see and perform in the game, which are both a retelling and parody.

The game is split into two main modes: Story and Free Play. Story mode allows you and, if you desire, a friend play through the events of the movies in order. Free Play is where most of the exploration happens as you can go anywhere and play as over a hundred different characters in the levels from Story Mode. Different characters offer different abilities that are essential to discovering secrets. For example, Ron can use his rat "Scabbers" to solve puzzles or a Hufflepuff student can gain access to Hufflepuff only areas.

Each film is accessible from different locations on the Hogwarts grounds and acts as the hub world that you use in order to progress the story forward. Just as you would expect the actual Hogwarts to be, the Lego version has various secret locations and plenty of mayhem throughout the hallways. These locations include common rooms in hourses, class rooms, and outdoor grounds.

As with the others before it, Lego Harry Potter offers plenty of collectible items such as golden bricks, red bricks (cheats), Lego studs (the game’s currency) and more.  Completionists will have tons of things to do after completing the main story mode including the activities above and collecting all of the characters.  In addition, Lego Harry Potter adds the collection of spells, costumes and comical ‘Student in Peril’ moments where you need to free a trapped student.

Fitting well into the Lego game formula is the ability to learn new spells that you can use anywhere once they are acquired. The amount of spells that you learn will add to the exploration as some areas require specific spells to allow passage. The jinxes are particularly fun because you can perform on various hi-jinx on unsuspecting students like shrinking heads, transforming students, and my favorite, break-dancing.