At first we owned this on GameCube, but later on my older brother got a PS2 before they stopped being sold and we got the game again, so that’s when I actually beat it.
So I actually have a lot of thoughts on this one. I think there’s a lot of great elements here but the overall execution is really sloppy. I love that you can map spells to different buttons, I think that’s something very Harry Potter game should do. I appreciate that the game is open world, but that’s where I start to have problems. It’s not as noticeable before you get to Hogwarts, but once you get there you realize there’s not much to explore. The game has all this open space with the Hogwarts campus but it’s all barren. Inside the castle most of the rooms are empty or locked. There is sometimes a collectible to find, but there’s not enough of them to motivate exploration. It’s like it was originally going to be this big cool Hogwarts simulator at first but then they changed it to be as linear as possible. Eventually you unlock the broomstick and you can fly around the castle whenever you’re outside, but again there’s very little to do except fly aimlessly. It basically means that unless you’re doing a story level, it’s very boring.
When the game begins, it combines elements from both the book and the film adaptation to create its own original interpretation. There’s even little touches like how the inventory menu is a Remembrall, and some of the early cutscenes feature narrations from the book, so it seems like the developers wanted to put thought and care into the details for the fans. But by the time you get to the end of the game, it feels like any other low effort movie tie in game.
The worst part is that even if you never get caught by the prefects and you don’t lose any points, Slytherin still wins the house cup! Why is that? I know because I beat the game multiple times and it happened each time.
I guess it’s meant to just entertain kids who aren’t going to try to master the game thoroughly, but since there are so many adult Potter fans who would enjoy this I think it was a huge oversight not to make the game more polished. That’s EA I guess.
So I actually have a lot of thoughts on this one. I think there’s a lot of great elements here but the overall execution is really sloppy. I love that you can map spells to different buttons, I think that’s something very Harry Potter game should do. I appreciate that the game is open world, but that’s where I start to have problems. It’s not as noticeable before you get to Hogwarts, but once you get there you realize there’s not much to explore. The game has all this open space with the Hogwarts campus but it’s all barren. Inside the castle most of the rooms are empty or locked. There is sometimes a collectible to find, but there’s not enough of them to motivate exploration. It’s like it was originally going to be this big cool Hogwarts simulator at first but then they changed it to be as linear as possible. Eventually you unlock the broomstick and you can fly around the castle whenever you’re outside, but again there’s very little to do except fly aimlessly. It basically means that unless you’re doing a story level, it’s very boring.
When the game begins, it combines elements from both the book and the film adaptation to create its own original interpretation. There’s even little touches like how the inventory menu is a Remembrall, and some of the early cutscenes feature narrations from the book, so it seems like the developers wanted to put thought and care into the details for the fans. But by the time you get to the end of the game, it feels like any other low effort movie tie in game.
The worst part is that even if you never get caught by the prefects and you don’t lose any points, Slytherin still wins the house cup! Why is that? I know because I beat the game multiple times and it happened each time.
I guess it’s meant to just entertain kids who aren’t going to try to master the game thoroughly, but since there are so many adult Potter fans who would enjoy this I think it was a huge oversight not to make the game more polished. That’s EA I guess.