Game: Lego Harry Potter (years 5-7)
Genre: Platformer
System: Xbox 360
Developer: TT Games
Story:
This follows along the story of Harry Potter from the Order of the Phoenix, the Half-Blood Prince and the Deathly Hallows 1 and 2. Since Harry is only at the school for the first 2 years there are some more areas to explore as they travel around to find the Horcruxes. If you're read the books or seen the movies than you're familiar with the challenges that Harry, Ron and Hermione face as they grow closer to facing Lord Vordemort. There are some scenes that feel a little weird because they might be very small, or non-existent, in the books/movies but have some decent game play involved.
Story Score:
Characters:
The characters are the same as the books/movies with a small new ones thrown in. There seems to be a lot more muggle characters to find than in the first game which is frustrating because muggles can't do any helpful magic spells. One draw back that became very frustrating was that there was only one "key" character. That meant that you couldn't access any of the key spots until you've found the character and unlocked it. Since you don't get the opportunity to find that character token until about half-way through the story there's a lot of key boxes that you have to come back to. The other thing I found while playing was that there was only about 5 characters that I actually played with. There wasn't any reason to play with a lot of the characters that you unlocked. And when you finally get to play in the Free Play the game seemed to pick the same characters every time . . . and quite a lot of them. There seemed to be a lot of characters to choose from while playing in Free Play. Too many in fact that is was annoying trying to pick the one character that you wanted.
Character Score:
Game Mechanics:
The spell wheel is the same as the first Lego Harry Potter but there's a new spell this time. Aquamente allows you to shoot water at things and make them grow or fill-up a container. The downside to this spell is that you can't see the places that you need to use it on unless you have that spell as your active spell. If you do then water drop icons show up where you need to use it. If you have another spell active you can't see those water drops. It got annoying switching between spells and suddenly have to fight someone but have the water spell active (which doesn't help in a fight) so I just pick one character to have always have that spell active and then I would just switch characters instead of moving around the spell wheel for another spell I needed at the moment. I found having to remember to check for water drops annoying and there were several places that I missed around Hogwarts that I had to go back for because of that.
There were waystations to move between Hogwarts, the streets of London and the campsites. Sometimes it was confusing which waystation you needed to get to where you wanted to go. I also had problems with the waystation to go to Hogwarts that is in the tent. Sometimes it didn't want to work for me so I would have to go back to London and then take the train to Hogwarts which was a lot of running around just to get to someplace.
Game Mechanics:
Art Design:
There seemed to be a lot more details on the screen and things to look at while exploring around. The art style was still the blocky Lego look. I think there are way too many versions of the main characters. Do we really need 11 versions of Harry (or some amount like that)? While there was a lot to look at on each level the play area in each level sort of felt smaller than the previous game. There just didn't seem to be a lot of areas to explore and look for things.
Art Design Score:
Overall Impression:
While I enjoyed playing this game I found it a little bit more annoying than the first one. The thing with the Aquamente spell and the small number of characters that I ended up using because they would do almost everything in the level made it not feel as engaging as the previous game. While it was nice to look at there also seemed to be more scenes included in the game that were not a big part (or any part at all) in the books or movies. I know it's hard to get everything in either the books/movies into the game but this game felt a little more disconnected from the source material than the previous game.
Overall Impression:
