LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4

I love the LEGO games. LOVE them. I currently own across multiple platforms all of the Star Wars titles, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, LOTR, Marvel, all the Batman games, Indiana Jones and I'm likely to buy Jurassic World and Avengers. One of the great things about these games is how rock solid stable they have been. Minor bugs sometimes occur, but nothing really game breaking or in any way frustrating... except Harry Potter. This game is astoundingly unstable. Between fairly regular crashes, "unclean" exits (the executable stays resident and running, despite quitting) and entire areas of the game that black out when I walk into them, this is the first time I have ever regretting buying one of these games. While I did manage to complete the story, after resorting to manual config edits to get around some of the crashing bugs, it was so frustrating that there is no way I will bother going back to do the rest of collecting and puzzle solving. I'm a strict completionist to the point of obsession, and this is the first LEGO game that I have abandoned. That's how bad it is.

First off, for anyone looking to play this game, you need to essentially patch it before playing. Otherwise it will be a buggy and crashing mess. To prevent most bugs/crashes, do the following: - Go to your speaker properties (sound -> speakers ->properties -> Advanced) and change the default format to 16 bit 48000 HZ. This game does not work well with high quality sound. - Open 'run' (just type in run in the search bar) and type in appdata. From there go to Roaming -> WB Games -> Lego harry potter -> Pcconfig. In the pcconfig change the value of 'desireddynamiclightquality' from '2' to '0'. - Turn off FSAA ingame and turn Vsync on. Other settings shouldn't matter that much. My game crashed a total of 3 times while getting 100% in this game. 1 crash was before patching and two after. Crashes only seemed to happen in the Hub world (Hogwarts) when an action is spammed or a high pitch noise is created by something in the game. Multiplayer apparently also causes bugs, but i don't have any experience with that because i played solo. That being said, i still enjoyed the game. Pros + Graphics are alright for a lego game + Lots of Lego humor + Hogwarts as a hubworld makes feel the world more lively + Relive the movies to some extent (some content or story do seem to miss though) + Gameplay is pretty good + Good price for the amount of playtime you get out of it (if on sale) + Level builder (if you're into building digital blocks of lego) Cons - Bugs and crashes - Lots of characters but only a few have special abilities - Collecting all 167 character tokens can get a little grindy at times - Some puzzles actually make you question yourself (obvious solution seems too obvious for adults) - Bossfights except the one on year 2 are a letdown or too easy - Stud multipliers being able to get fairly early ruins the feeling of saving up for a certain character All things considered, it's still a pretty good lego game. Pick it up on a sale to get your money's worth.

HOW TO FIX GAME FREEZE BUG INSTUCTION: Near the beginning, after building some big flowers that fan you up to a ledge, you are required to do a spell on some statues that breathe fire, melting ice in front of a door you need to go through. What happens is that when you do a spell on them, everything freezes and the game crashes (sometimes even needing hard shutdown on the computer). Some people have had luck with two-player mode, doing the spell and then quickly switching to other player standing down near the flowers, because what seems to crash the game, is the animation of the statues breathing fire. However, I have found a solution that does work, without having to fiddle with several characters (and if you are late switching, game freezes still). Here we go though: *Go to C:\Documents and Settings\your username\Application Data\WB Games\LEGO Harry Potter\ (on XP) or C:\Users\your username\Appdata\Roaming\WB Games\Lego Harry Potter\ (on Win8) *Find a file called pcconfig.txt, back it up (I just saved a copy on the desktop, to use whenever needed), and then change DesiredDynamicLightQuality to 0 (near the bottom of the file).

I got this for my kid, who is a big Harry Potter fan. We had quite a bit of fun while playing with the HP characters. Not a game to write home about, but a solid HP experience. What drags this down is the amount of bugs. Characters get stuck, players get permanently disconnected/frozen, etc. Some random, some at the same place (run from the dragon in year 4 comes to mind). Quite frustrating when you are trying to have fun with your kid.