I had an excellent and relaxing weekend at home, and got to play a ton of video games with/without my kids, so I actually finished up 2 new games! This helps me to stay in striking distance of my goal of fifty new completions for the year, as I'm now up to 45, with another likely completion by the end of the week. This means I can take a leisurely stroll through the remaining 4 games in the last two months, so I may undertake another long RPG in that time. It seems all that's left in my queue is long RPGs, so it's about time I get clearing out some of them.
One of the games I cleared out was Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4, another Lego game from Traveller's Tales. I finished up the sequel first, as my son wanted to play that one, but I finally got around to clearing out this one over the weekend. As usual, I immediately began collecting tons of trinkets following the completion of the game, however, so I'd imagine I'll still be playing this one for another week or two after this to get my platinum trophy. This review is for the PS4 version, released as part of a compilation for PS4 in 2016.
The gameplay you're familiar with is all here, and just as excellent as ever. It definitely has a more early Lego game feel to it, which I love. There's a lot more focus on simple combat and puzzle solving, and a lot less on absurdly huge setpieces, boss battles, and cinematic backgrounds, which I really appreciate. There are a few irritating retro touches to this one that are silly, especially given that the release of Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 doesn't have them! The primary one is the unwieldliness of the build spell, which needs to be switched to to build anything. In the sequel, again, in the same collection, you just need to press "o" at any time to build, but here you'll need to cycle through your spells again, and again, and again to pop back and forth between a spell and the build command. This gets irritating really quickly.
The game is, in typical Lego game fashion, incredibly buggy. There are so many times when you'll get stuck somewhere, something won't build or destroy correctly, or numerous other problems. I really wish they'd play test these more extensively, or release patches, or something, but they release these seemingly twice a year now, so something has to give. Anyway, I've come to expect this, but I do wish at least one game would come out that wasn't plagued by an unusually buggy experience relative to other modern games.
The experience of exploring Hogwarts is, again, unbelievably fun. Like in the middle Lego Titles (characterized by this game up until Lego Marvel Super Heroes or so in my mental calculus), exploring the hub world will give you incredible amounts of value while also keeping the simple missions structure of the older Lego games. Hogwarts winds endlessly in a manner that is completely in keeping with the book's description of the castle, and figuring out where you are in the castle and how to get to where you want to go is half of the fun.
The music is taken primarily from John Williams' scores from the first two movies, and is, as is typical of his work, phenomenal. This is the single biggest edge for this game over the sequel, as the sequel has the middling music from the 5-8th movies. Seven and eight have excellent soundtracks, but it felt like they primarily picked tracks from 5 and 6, which is a big mistake.
The humor here is just fantastic, and is the biggest thing missing from the newest games. Introducing voice acting was, in my opinion, a big mistake, as it destroyed one of the characteristic charms of the series, and reduced the difficulty of making jokes. Tying your hand behind your back and still being funny was one of the best things about the older Lego games, and I really wish that they would bring back the mumbling Legos. It would also reduce production costs!
I really love this game, although I'd probably give a small edge to the sequel in terms of quality. They needed to iron out a few of the kinks here, but this was a wonderful first run at capturing the Harry Potter experience in the typical Lego format. It needed bug fixes and a few quality of life improvements, and it's not the type of immersive and precise game that makes for a critics' darling. But it's fun to play with family, and fun for fans of Harry Potter, so I'd definitely recommend it. I'll give it an 8.7/10.
I've already teased the next game to be feature here, so stay tuned!
-TRO
No comments:
Post a Comment