Anyone who was charmed by 2005's "Lego Star Wars" and gradually less impressed with the franchise's takes on Indiana Jones and Batman will likely be downright annoyed to discover that "Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4" continues the Lego games' unfortunate tradition of not evolving in ways they should.
This wouldn't be a problem if "Potter" didn't continue the series' other tradition of continually turning out surprises within the constraints of its formula. So we're faced yet again with taking the bad in order to take the good.
As the name implies, the game covers the first four years of Harry Potter's seven-year saga. As per series tradition, the game reenacts each year's biggest moments using pantomiming Lego characters and re-creating the scenes with a mix of authenticity and genuinely amusing creative license.
But "Potter" also covers a surprising number of lesser moments in each chapter, and the game allows players to take control of practically everyone -- Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Dobby, even Scabbers the rat, among more than 150 others -- in addition to Harry, Ron and Hermione. The amount of learnable spells is impressively high, and by using two cavernous hub levels (Diagon Alley/Hogsmeade and Hogwarts) instead of one, there's a ton to discover off the stories' main roads.
Passing a story level opens it up to free play, allowing players even more freedom in terms of the characters they wish to control. The result is a massive "Potter" playground that offers 20-plus hours' worth of stuff to do.
Unfortunately, those hours are also chock full of the same annoyances that have persisted since "Star Wars." For a game that features fixed camera angles and lots of running and jumping, the controls are still too squirrelly. Ditto for the targeting system, which occasionally makes casting certain spells with precision a case of trial and error if too many possible targets are clustered together.
The control imperfections are harder to understand because, for the most part and regardless of story scenario or characters used, "Potter" generally plays the same way. Some nice broom controls and the occasional vehicular objective are welcome, but neither makes enough of an impact to give the game a strong sense of variety.
Similarly, while "Potter" is loaded with cause-and-effect puzzles, most of them are too straightforward to count as puzzles so much as steps to take in order to make X happen and clear the path to get to Y.
