LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 Message Board older than one year ago

It doesn't take seven years at Hogwarts to see that Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 looks to be packed with magical charm (hopefully as much as its predecessor). And it goes without saying, Lego Dumbledore? Adorable.

Something I still haven’t done, that I was originally planning before Christmas, is to write a WIT for Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4. I know that sounds like a strange game to review long after it came out, and perhaps not quite in the target audience for RPS, but blimey, it’s a brilliant game. Certainly I’m a sucker for Traveller’s Tales’ Lego games, but not without an eye for quality. Lego Star Wars: great. Lego Indy: poop. And as it happens, I can’t stand Harry Potter. But Lego Harry Potter was a level above all the others, not only nailing the regularly repeated formula exactly, but also framing itself very differently. One day I’ll write it, and probably call it a “retro”. Indeed, I could time it with the release of the next game in the series, Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7, which Warner has just announced for the 18th November this year. Which is splendid news, even for a boy-wizard-hating git like me.

#harrypotter It's an incongruous notion: Making a video game set in a LEGO world of children wizards, dark and gritty. More »

- improved lighting engine
- dynamic shadows and lighting effects on the surrounding surfaces
- Agamenti has been added, which lets you spray the world (and even his friends) with a stream of water
- use this spell to put out fires, fertilize plants, fill translucent green pieces to weigh them down and solve puzzles, or wash off coats of mud
- Ron's owl is in the game
- Weasely Wizarding Wheeze boxes are in the game, delivering items like brick-shattering fireworks, portable swamps, and special sneakers that let players scale up surfaces
- For the sequence where Hermione reads about the tale of the three brothers, you'll play in a 2D platformer, with parallax-scrolling backgrounds
- this mode is also filtered with a drab, grainy look
- play as the three brothers as they solve puzzles and outwit death himself
- character deaths are still touched upon in the game, but with a more humorous tone

Check out more screens in our Flickr set

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7, based on the last three Potter books and final four films, will be out at the end of the year...