LEGO Creator: Harry Potter is atypical of children's programs, which usually run players through a fixed set of activities or educational challenges. Instead, game designers have made a serious effort to leave things wide open and flexible, sticking close to the reason why kids enjoy LEGO in the first place. Players can place LEGO units--animals, characters, blocks, doors, chests--around the landscape of Hogwarts. But this is no mere simulation of a real-life play experience--this LEGO world is animated! With a single mouse click, players bring their creations to life. Place a LEGO snake onscreen in this game, and it will promptly slither for cover. Likewise, the Harry Potter characters--who are incredibly charming when rendered as standard LEGO people--will move around the environment created for them, even interacting when they come together!

While the complexity of this package makes it tougher to master than many games, a series of tutorials disguised as challenges can smooth out the learning curve. Users explore the school, build LEGO trains, and find lost animals, and as they do, they learn the lay of the land. The challenges have another motivator built in: without them, you can't cast all the magical spells otherwise available to Harry and the others.

LEGO Creator: Harry Potter frees you to build a stage and place upon it the well-known characters from J.K. Rowling's novels. What happens next is limited only by your imagination. --Alyx Dellamonica

In addition to the range of classic LEGO bricks, kids can play with all-new features taken right from LEGO's Harry Potter line of toys. Design and build train tracks for Hogwarts Express to follow, or build furniture from LEGO bricks for the various rooms of a virtual Hogwarts Castle. LEGO Creator: Harry Potter also features a new 3-D character designer that allows kids to build their own mini-figure pupils. Then, click on the virtual Sorting Hat to place them in the appropriate houses of Hogwarts. How Hogwarts' pupils interact with each other will depend on what house they are from. For example, a virtual Slytherin mini-figure may react differently to a Gryffindor pupil than they do to a Ravenclaw student.

There are 12 optional challenges that add to the interactive play, including the option to download new LEGO bricks and virtual models from LEGO.com. The game also gives players the ability to create building instructions, so that they can build their own virtual models using real LEGO bricks.

In fact, this is a game released on schedule, but before being finished. Its controls are contra-intuitive, clumsy, and v-e-r-y s-l-o-w. It locks up and freezes, some times coming back and executing your mouse click up to a minute after you've thought it didn't take, and have moved on. When it's running, it's sensitve and twitchy. Those who have said the controls are bad or frustrating are being quite kind. It takes hours to get the simplest things set up.

Then, when you're finished, you can't actually DO much with your creations.

Lego has a variety of software titles and should include good products; perhaps the second title, "LEGO Creator: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" will be usable and fun.

Difinitley NOT worth the time or money. A shameful addition to any Lego or Harry Potter Collection!!!!!!