LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7

Its great, but years 1 - 4 are better. Why? Well, allow me to explain: The hub worlds are extremely large and often have levels built into them that take a really long time to complete and aren't very satisfying (for year 4 - the beginning of the game - this is especially true) . The levels themselves are, oddly, quite short but very enjoyable. Where as years 1-4 paced its levels and spell lessons quite nicely, this one is like Poundland steak, chew-y and tough to progress with. The game struggles with great stretches of travel and no levels which makes it frustrating. Also, take note there is a game breaking bug! Others have mentioned it, but I want to add it here so you can find a way around it: When you come to get the orange spell towards the end of year 5 (Forgive me, I forget its name) focus on getting the spell and NOTHING ELSE in the classroom. If you interrupt the 'spell learnt' bit you won't get it and won't be able to get it again. Your save will be ruined and you'll have to start ALL over again (This happened to me and I had a full strop) If I had a suggestion, before you get too far in Year 5, quit, access the save file (Under AppData) and copy it somewhere as a backup At the end of the day its a great multiplayer game that my girlfriend and I get to play together and for the smile it puts on her face it is worth every penny. (That and I get to steal the purple studs and that annoys her)

First off, I'll admit my bias. I know the story of Harry Potter pretty well. The only other story found in Lego games that I know is Star Wars. So if I didn't enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean or DC Super Villains as much as this, that might be why. But that said, this one is by far my favourite of all the Lego games. Why? Firstly, the way in which abilities work here is different to a lot of the other Lego games, where only one particular (class of) character can destroy silver objects, where you need another to use telekinetic powers, or another to open locks. For this, most characters can do most things (provided that you've done enough of the main quest to get them). And I like that. Some things are gated (for instance, dark magic, goblin keys, Parseltongue, Weasley boxes, broken object repair), but most aren't. Especially nice given that one of the abilities (strength) is also available from an unlockable red brick. So you can take your favourite character and stick with them. And then there's the music. That's more due to the source material than the game itself, but I like the soundtrack a lot more than years 1-4. Sorry, John Williams. But I like the later films' music a lot more than what you did for the first four. It seems more fitting. The characters still talk in "hmm" and "ahh", which I actually prefer to the fully voiced games seen later on. Finally? Luna. She's not in the first Lego HP game. She is in this one. And she even /skips/ when she walks. I rest my case. As for the game's performance and stability? I haven't had any issues. I'm running it under Linux (using Wine, it's not native) and it's been flawless. No crashes, no glitches and solid performance. The strange corrupt lighting that I got when using Lumos in LHP 1-4 doesn't happen any more and the graphics are just prettier in general.

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 is a great adaptation of the movies. I really enjoyed my time with the game, and since I finished the previous game not too long ago, I can see the improvements from that title. For example, it is a lot easier to deliver the red boxes to the owls. In the previous title it would sometimes not work properly, but that is fixed here. The movement magic that you have to use sometimes is also a lot better than last game. You don’t have to move it erratically around until you hit the right spot since it has a small guidance system to help you place it correctly. I like a lot of the new spells. The water spell is very useful, but is a bit annoying to use since you can’t use it while moving, while the focus spell is almost never used at all and feels a bit lackluster. The way that you are forced to remove the spells from the previous game is really interesting and fits pretty well with the story, but it still feels bad to lose them and some of the spells were fun to use in the previous game. How you had to learn new spells and skills in the previous game is kept in this one, and I still really like this method to learn. It feels like the animations and expressions have improved, but I don’t know if it is just me imagining it. I think that if you have any experience with other LEGO games and enjoyed them, I think you will like this one as well. Since it is one of the older LEGO games it doesn’t have any voice acting. It has noises instead.

Poorly optimized, my fps go from 300 to 10 in matter of seconds, and that happens quite often. And there's simply no solution for that, you can have good or bad PC and you will still encounter FPS drops. The devs didn't bother to fix it. I regret that I bought this game...