Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince Review

Written by Sith Lord Jim Monday, 06 July 2009 12:31

My faith in movie to game translations had been somewhat restored of late. So much so that I found myself hoping, praying, and dreaming that Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince would be the Harry Potter game I’ve always wanted. The formula makes so much sense for a video game; a great story, lots of action, magic, evil villains, and the opportunity for a fantastic sandbox environment. But of course, this game fails to deliver. Instead it falls into the usual traps of games based on movies, and pretty much just sucks a whole lot of ass.

The latest Harry Potter game finds Harry and his comrades in their sixth year of Hogwarts. Obviously if your interested in this game, I’d assume you’ve read the books or at least seen the movies, so you have some idea of what is going on. If not then don’t play this game, because it really tells you nothing of the story. Rather than tell the story it jumps around and just touches on key moments without providing any background or explaining anything of the moments. With such a rich story I think it’s fairly inexcusable to not tell the story.

Not so shockingly you spend the vast majority of the game playing as Harry, and the moments where you don’t seemed massively pointless. As Harry will explore Hogwarts as you run back and forth between the three activities the game offers, making potions, flying, and dueling. Sounds tedious? Well it is.

Making potions is probably the most interesting of the three. It’s a mini-game that starts of simple, but grows more complex as you progress. There is a cauldron and you have to follow the prompts on the screen to pour, heat, mix, and place ingredients in it till it goes the color shown by the prompt. A timer gains time as you successfully follow prompts and goes down faster when you miss the cauldron, or screw up in any way. The biggest problem I had with this one was its often hard to judge where the ingredient is in relation to the cauldron when your holding it. This means I found myself constantly missing the cauldron and dropping stuff on the table instead.

Flying is done during qudditch matches and during practices, and warm ups, but really its all the same. You fly through stars, and into practice dummies while following the snitch around. If you miss the stars your time goes down which is indicated by the stars changing colors. Rather than forcing you to hunt down the snitch the screen and Harry automatically zoom after it, and you just control whether you go up, down, left or right. There is no way to really go faster or make sure you catch the snitch quicker you just have to zoom around the track the game sets till you reach the end and Harry catches the snitch. It might have been alright if these things were short, but many of them go for quite a long time, and doing it as a warm-up, then again as the actual qudditch match is just plain stupid.

Dueling gives you one spell at first and as you progress unlocks more spells to use in combat. Using the triggers you can dodge attacks, and you use the thumb-sticks to launch spells. Unfortunately it seems to be wildly inaccurate and often refuses to recognize you attempting to do a spell.

All of these activities also score your performance and you can unlock badges for doing well in them. There is simply too much of each of these activities. Not only are you forced to do them to progress the story, there are also “clubs” you have to join, where you can choose to complete more of the same activities.

There are crests and mini-crests scattered throughout Hogwarts for you to collect. Collect enough mini-crests and they become a normal crest. The crests unlock things such as mini-games or more health in dueling. The crests help add a reason to keep playing, and to explore Hogwarts.

Exploring Hogwarts is without a doubt the best thing about this title. It’s hugely detailed and feels like its straight out of the movies, and is something all fans will get a kick out of exploring. Graphically it’s nothing special. As it is quite a massive castle, if you get lost you can get Nearly headless Nick to guide you to your next objective at the push of a button.

The game’s music is just right for a Harry Potter game, with all the typical music. Unfortunately the voice acting is not as good. The sound-alikes are very obviously, simply sound-alikes rather than the actual actors, and a lot don’t really sound very alike at all.

For the current RRP of $89 this game really isn’t worth it. It’s a tedious, boring, and largely un-enjoyable experience. If you’re a massive Harry Potter fan you may get a kick out of exploring Harry’s stomping grounds, but still likely not enough of a kick to justify purchasing this title.