[As with previous Harry Potter games, I have donated the amount I’ve paid for this game to a British charity supporting trans people, as some kind of offset to this post prolonging the reach, by however little, of a series by a leading campaigner against trans people’s human rights.]
Over the course of five different Harry Potter games which topped the UK charts, I have talked about a lack of consistent direction and covered a whole host of different reasons they don’t work as games, or even as Harry Potter games. Games obsessed with endless collectibles, games as imitations of existing games, games breaking up exploration with a host of forced busywork, games trying to cover the story of the series through a series of awkwardly cobbled-together vignettes. The thing about Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 is that it does every single one of those things, and yet is comfortably better than any of those other games.
That is because those were only negatives in the contexts where they were used, of course. Plus the fact that by Goblet of Fire, the game it was badly imitating were Lego Star Wars. Lego Harry Potter is first and foremost a Lego game, and succeeds on those terms. It is not only the best Harry Potter game so far but also a great deal better than Lego Indiana Jones, and even better than Lego Star Wars: The One Based on the Films People Like.
It improves on many features of those previous games. If you’re playing on your own, the AI actually works for puzzles where you need help rather than turning them into frustration. The lego-building and lego-destroying action is increasingly baroque but in ways which keep figuring out what to do from being a problem. Even if it is usually just to interact with everything around.
The other thing is that Harry Potter is a better fit for the Lego video game formula than its predecessors. Before Travellers’ Tales produced that formula, in the old old days of 2001, there was a Lego Harry Potter video game of a different kind before any Star Wars ones, indeed. Harry Potter, especially post-movies, had some very recognisable iconography, a colourful setting inventive enough to lend itself to extra invention, and characters who already spend most of the time working together. Making the main three interchangeable in normal functions works out nicely, with the additional twist of Ron getting compensated for being Ron by also being the most useful as he can send his pet rat through pipes.
Most of all, a world in which magic is prevalent, flippant and not particularly well-defined is absolutely perfect for doing silly things with lego. Dig up carrots and see them rocket into the sky? Send broomsticks flying off in formation to the Star Wars theme? Make things blow up, crash into each other, whizz off, rebuild as new things all around? Why not? None of it is as ridiculous as wizards vanishing their own shit anyway. The animated portraits in Hogwarts are a natural fit as well, allowing lots of information to be conveyed in the series’s trademark exaggerated mime. The game is able to reach a new level of density of unexpected and amusing things happening as you fling spells at everything around, and does so with a new-found confidence that it is what it can do best.
It is a game with a lot of Harry Potter imagery which draws on the specific details of four Harry Potter books and films. Its affectionate take reflects a lot more of their appeal successfully than most of the previous games. Yet there is a further benefit to the Lego game approach which is that, for all that evident love, it easily skips over much of the worst of Harry Potter in a way which previous games failed to. I still didn’t find it an entirely comfortable game to play today — certainly not when almost the very first puzzle involves dressing Harry up to sneak into the girls’ toilets — but in working at a further level of remove from the books, J.K. Rowling’s worst attitudes don’t come through in the same way. Treating the setting as something to skim for toybox material for a separate formula on is around the best thing to do with it.
Top of the charts for week ending 26 June 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 3 July 2010:
