Casual playthrough ~20 hours Played both on a Steamdeck and with mouse and keyboard [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45534557/]@MatureContent I think the first thing everyone should know before buying this game is that this isn't as much of a total remake as e.g. the Skywalker Saga, but more like a rerelease of the classic games bundled into one launcher with achievements. So, playing this is very much the classic Lego game experience and not nearly as beautiful and polished as the Skywalker Saga and Legacy of the Dark Knight. When launching this game, you will first be greeted by a launch window where you can choose either one of the two Lego Harry Potter games. Year 1-4 and Year 5-7. These two games are not combined or merged in any way whatsoever with no save data moving over between them, so you can pretty much start with whichever game you want. I played them chronologically. Year 1-4: The first game covers the first four movies in chronological order with most of the unimportant scenes cut out, leaving only the highlights. This game is from 2010 and since it has been mostly left alone in this rerelease, it shows its age and in more than just the visuals. This game is from the mute era of Lego games, so unless you already know the story, it will be hard to follow along with what is actually happening. The things you are tasked to do are also all simple and very repetitive with most of the interactable objects and puzzle games being reused in almost every area of the game. The only levels that felt somewhat unique were the few chase sequences and every final level of each movie which was usually some kind of a boss fight. Hogwarts serves as the free roam area and is pretty much indistinguishable throughout all of the first four movies. You can spend quite a bit of time in the free roam itself if your goal is to 100% the game, but mine wasn't, so I mostly just stuck to completing the main missions and followed the guiding ghost around the map to find out where to go. You also have access to a small collection of spells in the game which are unlocked gradually as you get further into the game. The spells are mostly just for breaking, building and moving bricks around and you will need to have unlocked them all to freely traverse all of Hogwarts. Beside the old repetitive and slightly generic gameplay you get with these older titles, I quite enjoyed my time with this first game and the only thing I found slightly annoying was the mandrakes in the second movie, that while of course important to the story, played too big a role in the actual gameplay. Having to constantly find a wardrobe to get ear protection instead of just making it an ability, made the second movie a bit of a drag to get through, but thankfully they were mostly gone by the third movie. The first game took around 11 hours to complete. Year 5-7: The quality definitely improved in the later game, even with there only being around a year in between them. The last three movies look better visually and the missions offered more variance, that said, it was still very much the old Lego game experience with the mute characters and the still very simple level design. In this final game, you spend less time on Hogwarts and more time in missions and running around other locations like Hogsmeade and the Campsite. Hogwarts is still the biggest free roam area though and is pretty much the same as it was in the first game. The only difference is a few new areas and some new mini puzzles to complete to find hidden bricks and such. The missions, gameplay and storytelling has still improved though and I especially liked how you forget some of the spells you learned in the first 4 years when you arrive at Hogwarts again in the new game. The first year of the second game follows the fifth movie and this is where Dolores Umbridge takes over Hogwarts and switches out wand practice with book reading. It was just a good and natural way for the developers to take away all the spells you already knew and allow you to learn new ones throughout the story. The last two movies were also good and definitely better than any of the movies in the first game, though I had hoped for more from the Half-Blood Prince, since it is my favorite of the movies. The sixth movie just didn't do a good enough job at resembling all the movie scenes well enough, especially the flashback memory scenes with Snape and the Cave where they go looking for the Horcrux were kinda bad. The last movie while fun to play, unfortunately seemed to crash a lot. My game crashed two or three times in the 3 hours it took me to complete it and every time I lost like 20 minutes of gameplay, that kinda sucked. The second game took me around 9 hours to complete. Other issues: While I didn't find that many other issues, there were still some that I feel like addressing. This game is listed as supporting Steam cloud, but my save did not carry over to my SteamDeck from my PC when I tried, so I don't know if Steam cloud actually works with this game or if it's just mine that is broken. Another issue I had was that the game would sometimes continuously get stuck in split screen mode. I had this issue in multiple different play sessions where I would constantly go into the menu to "drop out", but 10 seconds later, it would go back into co-op play again and then it would do this weird thing where I would control two different characters at the same time. Achievement Hunting: This is apparently a horrible game for achievement hunting, as it is buggy and has a chance at locking you out of completing certain achievements. This is something that is quite common in older Lego games, so if you get this game with the intention to 100% it, be aware that it might not be possible. Conclusion: I got this game on sale on the Steam store for 5,99 euro and at that price I can definitely recommend it, even if they are older games. I however, would never recommend paying the full asking price, as they have done the bare minimum with this rerelease. ————————————————————————————— [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45534557/]Help me out by following my Curator, I’d really appreciate it!!