If you like Harry Potter and lego sillyness, you're gonna love it

This feels like the definition of laziness in game development. No borderless window mode which means you have to play in full screen and any attempt to alt tab out of it crashes the game. The game play is boring and uninspired. The puzzles are both simple but unintuitive and time consuming because all they require is running around checking everything to see what you can actually interact with. Glad I got this in a humble bundle I'll see if the newer lego games made improvements.

It's fun, but at the same time a lot of the puzzles and boss battles are kind of infuriating in that there's little to no instruction on what's expected since it doesn't follow the games precisely in terms of events and while it's great there are new boss battles, most of the "battles" after the first year are ones that could take a while to do if you don't have a walk through because not all of them are obvious about what the game wants you to do right after you've just been thrust into a "boss" battle that you weren't expecting. Too much use of the "stacking blocks" mechanics is used in the game. The first time it was like "okay, it's a lego game, there had to be SOME actual legos in it besides just the design of the characters... but when the blocks are too easily pushed around and don't actually lock like REAL LEGOS DO... it makes solving what should be a relatively easy puzzle very difficult to actually pull off. Also, I managed to soft lock myself out of a puzzle, twice and I am only in year 3! There's a specific puzzle where you put 3 objects that are supposed to lock into place in front of 3 "faces" (I use this lightly because they're literally just jutting blocks and can't really be called even a proper image let alone a face) and not once, but twice did I soft lock myself out of this puzzle when one of the objects got wedged between the podiums I needed to put the objects on while I was moving another object around. The lack of confirmation if I even had the right item on the right podium did not help either. There was no helpful 'chime' or 'click' and it took me several tries (after having to reset the game twice) to actually get the puzzle solved because there was NO indication I was doing anything right and the "sounds" I heard I realized were just George and Fred who were getting impatient about me solving the dang puzzle and liked to make various noises (not helpful ones) every time I placed an item on a podium and the sound they made depended on which podium I was working with... so 3 different sounds... but that was it. I had a lot of fun with the Star Wars Lego Saga on Gamecube, but this series? I'm very disappointed that it's so dang hard to play as an adult! How much more difficult would this be for the target audience if a full grown adult is struggling to use the game's mechanics as intended?

There's also a puzzle (a friend told me) in year 4 where you have to build a bridge with lego blocks that took them forever to do because - again - the lego brick's DO NOT LOCK INTO PLACE! I'm not really looking forward to that bit though I'm determined to at least beat the story mode. This is one of the very last games I'd recommend for a repeat just to 100% it.

Puzzles aside, I've also noticed that spell casting has about a 3 second delay from when I push the button on my controller. None of the other games I use this controller with have any sort of delay, making me think this was not designed to be as polished as it should have been upon release and due to its age, the likelihood of any updates / bug fixes is slim to none.