Absolutely bricking it!
So, after just one whole week I’ve just completed the latest addition to the Lego game family, ‘Lego Harry Potter years 5-7′. Arguably in terms of gameplay a week really isn’t very long at all, not when compared to games such as ‘Skyrim’ that stretch on for as long as you will allow them or ‘Viva Pinata’ with my personal favourite achievement ever, 50 total hours of gameplay. Easy, I doubled that in 'Skyrim'. But I’m more than happy to sweep this minor disappointment straight under the carpet since I spent the last week having what can only be described as too much fun. ‘Lego Harry Potter’, as with all other Lego games is nothing if not a game that requires absolute thoroughness at all times. Scratching the surface simply will not do here. If you want collectibles and the achievements that collectibles often do lead to you need to dig and build, then smash and rebuild and so on and so forth.
The story progresses slightly differently this time around when compared to ‘Harry Potter years 1-4′. You often find yourself going off on side missions that when you begin you believe yourself to be in a level until you realise that your ‘true wizard’ bar is absent. Also these missions are noticably shorter than the actual levels, however, I do believe that they prove to be very effective when it comes to retelling the tale of ‘Harry Potter’.
The whole game looks a lot nicer this time too. Obviously picking up on the improvements that were very apparent when playing ’Lego Pirates of the Caribbean’ and translating them to the word of ‘Harry Potter’. There are more characters to be found within the game world too. However, my one other negative regarding this game lies within these character tokens. My question is next time will you please, please give me more than one page when it comes to buying characters. Because they swap and change so fast that I’m dizzy by the time I finally find the character I want. It would have been so much easier to swap from page to page than to wait and wait then….oops I missed it.
The one element of the game that I was particularly impressed with was the introduction of ‘dueling’, an idea that had been briefly mentioned before but never featured to the same extent as it does now and if I’m honest this way is so much more fun than just aiming at another character and pressing ‘x’.
I thoroughly enjoyed every second of this game right down to those irritating last few minutes where you have one character token left and you can’t find it anywhere or that stupidly annoying green crest piece in ‘might is magic’ that I must have missed on at least seven separate occasions. I am sad that ‘Lego Harry Potter’ is over and done with though and I hope that the next Lego offering will build on the strengths of both this game and ‘Lego Pirates’ while continuing to be equally enjoyable.
