“We are nearly there my fellow subjects. Just three more games to go, before we have completed our look into the ‘Harry Potter’ game series. Let us not waste anymore time, and jump straight into the sixth game, ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’.
I am playing this one for the PlayStation 2, however I feel I would have been better off waiting until I had gotten a PlayStation 3, because the graphics in this game are terrible! It is completely obvious that this was made purely for the PS3, but somepony felt that they could also sell it for the PS2, which was a really stupid move. The faces in this game have really gone downhill since ‘Order of the Phoenix’, there is no texture to them, no details whatsoever, and the mouths tend to just move up and down, like the characters have been replaced by humanoid goldfish. And the voice acting for the most part is really bad, Hermione sounds, again, too stuck up for Emma Watson, and Bellatrix… oh dear. Ok, I know Bellatrix is supposed to be completely insane, but why give her that high pitched mad scientist like voice? Helena Bonham-Carter would be feeling ashamed if she saw how her character was being represented in the games. Wow, I’ve barely started and already I’ve had my first rant.
So, aside from the graphical standpoint, what else is there to this game? Well, for one thing, they’ve brought back flying and Quidditch in this game! It works in the same way as it had done in the first two games, you just fly though stars, until you get the Golden Snitch. However, I do have a problem, and if I’m not the only pony to experience this let me know, and that is the controls are quite stiff. In the other games, when you flew, it was quite steady and it flowed naturally as you turned around corners, but in this game, the character just tilts slightly to one side and the broom just glides to either side of the screen. And when you do have to go around corners, be prepared to hit a wall as you turn in.
You only get three spells this time, Reparo, Incendio and Wingardium Leviosa. Lumos is also brought back, but you can’t activate it, the game automatically casts it whenever it gets dark. You do keep the same spells for duelling as you did in ‘Order of the Phoenix’, and I suppose now it’s time to talk about the duelling. In this game, Dumbledore re-instates the Duelling Club from the second movie, each house has their own club, and you will have to become a member of every one (yes, that includes Slytherin) where you will have to fight four duelists. It’s from doing these that you also learn the other spells for when you need to fight Death Eaters later on. However, the problem with the duelling, and this is the same problem I had with ‘Order of the Phoenix’, is that it gets really repetitive and very boring as the game progresses, because it’s really easy, due to the fact that your opponents rarely dodge your spells. Take for example, the boss battles at the end; you know how in the movie we were completely robbed of our chance to see the Battle of the Tower, and instead we got Bellatrix kicking the crockery in the Great Hall? Well here though, we just get four duels with a different Death Eater one after another and that’s really it, and of course it is really repetitive.
In fact, the whole thing is repetitive as most of your time is either taken up by Quidditch, Duelling or brewing potions. Yeah, potions becomes a big thing in this game. You have to become a member of the Potions Club where you will need to, you guessed it, brew potions. First time, it’s really fun, but when you need to constantly go back from Potions class or to Potions Club, you start to get bored of it. And there is the game’s biggest problem: it gets really boring, because you are not doing anything else in the game aside from the three tasks that I’ve just mentioned.
Well, now we move on to the games faults. First of all, the missions are really minimal. What made ‘Order of the Phoenix’ stand out, was that you could choose what mission you could do, and it would still help in progressing the story. Here though, you only have one mission at a time. This isn’t a huge problem, but after playing ‘Order of the Phoenix’, it makes it feel like we have gone backwards a little.
Another problem is the exploration, in that you aren’t allowed to, or at least not straight away. For some reason, the Aurors have locked up different areas of Hogwarts, which when you think about, doesn’t work for the school in general. I mean, the Astronomy Tower is the last place that gets unlocked in the game, and that happens after Christmas, (the human version of Hearths Warming Eve), so where did they have to have the Astronomy lessons if they couldn’t get up to the tower? So, this results in you pretty much going back and forth to the same places over and over again. The portraits are also not as fun as in ‘Order in the Phoenix’. Remember in the last game, when you would have to do tasks for the portraits in order to get the passwords, and when you finally got them, you get the sense that you had truly earned it? Here though, they just give it to you and not in a ‘you ask them and they give it to you’ way, no, you just have to walk past them and they say, ‘oh I’ve got a shortcut, just say this and I’ll open’. Was it too much effort to give us something else to do in this game? And there aren’t even that many portraits here, so it seems pointless to even have them here in the first place.
And that’s really it for this game. You walk somewhere, talk to someone, have a duel, brew a potion, play Quidditch, and that’s it. And all this comes down to the game’s biggest problem; it’s the shortest game so far! I am not kidding when I say that I beat this game in under 4 hours. That is unacceptable! Yes, I know that there are crests that you can collect for multiplayer purposes, and there are larger varieties for the three main tasks, but they are not enough, for me at least, to warrant replay value. They could have extended the game more, by having the small tasks for the portraits in this, at least that would want to make me explore and get a sense of achievement by the end of it like with the other games, but here I just felt really empty by the end of it, like I hadn’t accomplished anything in the long run, and for a game like the ‘Harry Potter’ series, that is the biggest crime you could commit.
Seriously EA, you started out great with the series, but now they’re just becoming gimmicky and boring now. It is not difficult to make a good ‘Harry Potter’ game, but you have got two more chances to redeem yourself, just two! So come back when we look at ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1’ for the next generation consoles.”