Playthrough was done in co-op mode in the story with my girlfriend, so how the game accomodates to two-player gameplay is practically how I experienced it this time. But did all the Free Play and Hogwarts stuff myself since she hated the experience that bad.

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is a game that I was very wary about. I remember not liking it very much when I was little and playing it on my Xbox 360, and hell, I love LEGO games so to find one that was a complete turn off was and is still very worrying to think about, and after FOUR whole better-than-average-but-not-for-much fully featured wizard movies (my reaction to those in my Letterboxd page, by the way.) I was starting to feel real dread, these movies are repetitive to no end and have a minuscule amount of an actual World and a pretty small selection of notable characters to use in a series of games which prides itself of letting you play as whoever you want, anywhere you want, but fine. I am a whole ass adult by now, it can't be that bad to fathom now, can it?

So, in my previous LEGO game review about Indy 2 (which I might or might not have been way too harsh on), I was keen on how those levels were pretty small, had no real significance and a big chunk of the game feels like filler because Traveller's Tales was just that bored and sort of remade the first one, now apply that logic to fully-fledged levels spanning 4 boring ass movies, and now you have a game that makes LEGO Indiana Jones 2 look like a timeless masterpiece in comparison.
And it's truly a shame, really, this game could've had so much more potential as the next big stepping stone for LEGO games, but the fact that they opted for a series with a world so hollow and so fundamentally flawed is probably what brought this game so down and made it so tedious to go through at all, and if it wasn't good for someone who had gone and watched all the movies beforehand, I really couldn't imagine for someone that isn't even familiar with the Wizarding World in the first place.

There's so much repetitiveness attributed to the gameplay loop making you go to the same places inside Hogwarts, using the same characters, and casting the same spells you use over and over and over again, wand-based skills really make it so dull compared to everything else before.
Characters aren't unlocked as you play the game so after you're done with the story levels you have to painstakingly go out of your way to save up, collect and buy for characters that will be useful for the 100% completion marks, oftentimes out of order so you can prioritize getting at least one dark magic user before you do anything else, having to scourge Hogwarts for some red bricks/Extras that'll aid you into getting all the pieces of the House Crest or finding the more hidden Character Tokens, and this part of the game is what I'd even dare to say is kinda fun and carries a lot of the experience, this is the very first LEGO game to feature a fully-playable expansive hub world that isn't just a gateway to enter levels, and I gotta admit that after getting all your spells and some characters necessary to do certain things, going around Hogwarts and getting everything that has been a tease all throughout the playthrough is satisfying, until it's not, and you have to resort to checking out places one by one if you're missing a Student in Peril or a Golden Brick anywhere, some sort of minimap or any notice that you've done everything you could in a room would be fine but by that point you're pretty much done with the game, so I'll let it slide.

A whopping 167 characters, (most of which are filler because the saga never really moves to other characters besides Harry Potter and the sometimes secondary lead or antagonist idk) and I only really used Tom Riddle because a lot of the characters are either virtually the same or just worse, making Free Play kinda sucky for the best part since it was actually just replaying most of the level with only this one character, oftentimes also missing something so I would have to go back in and do it all again.

The splitscreen being kinda messy and controls suddenly glitching out and not working, the constant back and forth between having to check a minimap I found on the internet made for the castle and playing the game because that damn layout doesn't make a lick of sense, the constant disappointment in self for having to bear the fact that you are playing A Harry Potter Game, Harry Potter Himself made by one of the evilest of evil in the planet (I wanna clarify that I bought my copy of both 1-4 and 5-7 through Humble Bundle and chose to give my money to charity instead of Warner Bros.) and it all makes it a pretty miserable experience and probably my least favorite LEGO game to date, every other one that's also considered bad is somehow more fun than this pile of nothingness.