Kids' games don't need to suck.
There's always seemed to be an unfortunate mentality on the part of the creators of games for younger children that the game doesn't need to be especially good, because parents are just looking for the license on the box and kids will play anything. The really unfortunate part about this is that they're right, so what's the motivation to do any better when there's no need to?
With all the cards in the deck stacked against the development of high-quality kids' games, it's good to see things like Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4, coming in May for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and PC. I got to see a hands-off demo of the game running on the 360, and it's what you'd expect from the group that turned Star Wars and Indiana Jones into goofy plastic brick parodies: a polished, funny game, but one that's much more for kids rather than adult fans of the franchises.
I played Lego Star Wars II back in 2006 and mostly panned it; although I appreciated what it did right (funny cut scenes), there was just no getting around the fact that for grown-ups, the gameplay boiled down to hours of tedious button-mashing with very infrequent payoffs. (Ignore the rating on that review; that wasn't the number in the story I filed.)
From what I've learned about Lego Harry, I doubt I'll have a significantly different experience. But on a different level – looking at the game as kids' entertainment – I came away impressed.
First of all, it looks really nice. Developer Traveller's Tales mastered the look of virtual Lego bricks long ago, but the Potter world around them is also elegantly illustrated with tons of cute little details (the Lego paintings in the Hogwarts castle corridors, for example).
The silliness of the Lego action games is also a perfect fit for this franchise. Building things out of Lego bricks in Indiana Jones doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In the magic-fueled chaos of the Potterverse, in which things are broken and magically put back together on a regular basis, the mechanic fits.
Attending lessons at Hogwarts, you'll able to add all kinds of magic spells to your inventory, using them as you travel through the game. Unlike the earlier games, there's no life meter – while there are a couple times in the game where you can die, in general you're not in danger of much anything bad happening to you.
In short, kids will love it; they'll love smashing and bashing their way through Hogwarts and all the assorted levels and they'll think it's all a laugh riot. And the drop-in, drop-out cooperative gameplay means parents and siblings can help, too.
What of adult fans? As a major Harry Potter fan, I thought Traveller's Tales' signature cinematic moments – key bits of the original movies, acted out wordlessly by Lego men with lots of comedic alterations – were hilarious. But I felt the same way about Star Wars and they weren't enough to carry me through the game without becoming quite bored.
Then again, nobody's even gotten to play Lego Harry Potter yet. I'll probably mess around with it once it's available and let you know how the final version came out. But the developer's track record and the fact that it isn't straying too far from the formula means this will probably be a slam dunk for its intended audience.
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