LEGO: Harry Potter Years 5-7

I went into Years 5-7 expecting a straight retread and came out genuinely surprised by how well Traveller's Tales handles the tonal shift. The back half of the Potter saga - Order of the Phoenix through Deathly Hallows - is bleak material for a LEGO game to chew on, but the studio leans into that tension rather than papering over it. Death scenes get slapstick eulogies. Snape's fate gets rewritten around stolen muffins. The pantomime storytelling, all gibberish voices and expressive plastic faces, turns grief into a running gag without ever feeling disrespectful to the source. It is a neat trick and they pull it off consistently. On the mechanical side, this is a refinement of the first game rather than a reinvention. The spell wheel now holds eight spells you cycle through on the fly, and the clunky lock-on targeting from Years 1-4 has been scrapped in favour of a free-aim system that actually works. Duels get a dedicated mechanic - match your opponent's spell choice a set number of times - which is simple but makes boss fights feel distinct from standard exploration. Weasley Boxes introduce family-specific puzzle gates that give a reason to care which character you drag around the hub. Diagon Alley returns as the central hub, and the explorable world is noticeably wider this time: Hogsmeade, the forest from Deathly Hallows, stretches of London, and the full Hogwarts interior all sit alongside the story levels. With over 200 gold bricks and around 150 characters to unlock, the completionist loop is genuinely deep. The co-op remains the best way to play. The split-screen implementation is smooth, the drop-in system is frictionless, and puzzle-solving with a second person adds a cooperative dimension that single-player can't replicate. The puzzle design itself leans hard toward exploration and environmental interaction rather than combat, which suits the licence - Harry Potter was never really about punching things, and the game knows it. That said, a few real problems are worth naming before you buy the PC version specifically. There is a well-documented frame rate issue on modern hardware where the game drops sharply and unpredictably, regardless of GPU. It has not been patched. Keyboard controls use an unusual default layout. These are not dealbreakers if you attach a controller and keep expectations calibrated for a 2012 port, but buyers on high-refresh-rate monitors should do a bit of research before committing. The remastered collection released for newer platforms in later years sidesteps most of these issues, so if that version is accessible to you, it may be the smarter pick. The PC original still runs fine for many players, but the variance is real. For the right audience - fans of the books who want to spend time in that world, parents looking for couch co-op that isn't punishing, or anyone who loved Years 1-4 - this delivers exactly what it promises: a charming, content-heavy adventure that trusts the property it adapts. It is not trying to evolve the LEGO formula, and critics who went in hoping for that found it familiar to a fault. Accept it on its own terms and there are easily fifteen-plus hours of content here before completionism kicks in. Alex, Scout Team