The LEGO Harry Potter Collection features remastered versions of LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4 and LEGO Harry Potter Years 5-7. You begin each game in the first year of that collection, and unlock the rest of the years as you progress through the story.
If you’ve never played a LEGO game before, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the gameplay style. They are action adventure collectathons where you lead your characters around the landscape finding LEGO studs as currency and LEGO pieces in sets to assemble for more currency or vital stage components to allow you to move on. There are also tons of little things hidden around the levels to find, and usually hide them pretty well behind strategically placed items/breakable decorations, or require solving a puzzle in just the right manner to uncover.
LEGO games follow a pretty strict formula, and while most of the games all play out pretty similarity, they definitely tend to be fun experiences regardless of how familiar it may all seem to seasoned veterans. That being said, we get an introduction to the Harry Potter universe with a cutscene using LEGO versions of Dumbledore, Hagrid, and McGonagall as they drop an infant Harry on the doorstep of his Aunt Petunia Dursley, just as it starts in the book and movie. We then jump forward 11 years as Harry receives his letter from Hagrid after his Uncle Vernon tries to hide the family away from a barrage of letters. All of this plays out quite quickly and mostly in pantomime with a lot of humorous charm thrown in to keep it engaging and entertaining without employing voice actors to act it out. This is a hallmark of the LEGO cutscenes that will greet you to move the plot forward every time that you complete a level.
Once you get into the actual gameplay itself, you will find yourself with the ability to swap control of your character to any other playable character on screen at the time. While it starts off with Hagrid and Harry, you will most commonly be controlling Harry, Ron, and Hermione (or some combination thereof). Occasionally you will be given a situational character that will generally only serve a purpose in a specific level, but will be available for use in free play after you have completed a stage. Each character will have a special ability that will help you complete puzzles or gain access to a new area. The LEGO series has always shined with its drop in and out co-op nature, and that would normally be where it shines here, but also presented some of the most prominent bugs present in the game. You see, when you have two players on screen at the same time, everything is fine until they stray far enough away from each other to go into split screen mode. This often resulted in screen blurring that made it nearly impossible to play until the characters got close enough again to stop the camera split.
Unfortunately, this was just the second of many bugs that I and my daughter encountered during our time with the game, and while there weren’t too many unique instances of bugs, there was one bug, in particular, that was the most troubling. My daughter and I have each had to start the game over at least two times each because the game’s auto save feature either didn’t work properly or decided to erase itself. I once made it to the vault in Gringotts, only to have the game crash (with a loss of save data, if there was any). Another time I made it all the way through the Troll in the dungeon before putting the game on suspend, and when returning to the game I wasn’t able to enter any of the rooms from Hogwarts. After I closed the game and reopened, I again had to start over because my save file was gone. Years 5-7 mostly suffered from a lot of frame drops and music skips, and crashed no less than 5 times. We also frequently experienced the screen blur glitch here, as well. The biggest problem with these bugs? They are a known quantity. They were present in the PS4 version of the game when it was released over two years ago, and those bugs are still present in the game on PS4 to this day, so it seems unlikely that these issues will be addressed for the Nintendo Switch version any time soon.
After having played the original LEGO Harry Potter games across multiple platforms, mostly with my daughter that helped me test this version of the game, I was really disappointed to see how poorly done the port seems to have been. Prior to this, we had never experienced anything as devastating as a deleted game save, and very few bugs that weren’t easily rectified by restarting the level. The games remain just as fun as they were when they first came out, and playing through what I could of them again was great when we weren’t encountering the bugs and crashes…but those bugs and crashes came a bit too frequently for me to be happy about recommending this collection.
5/10
Tested on Nintendo Switch
