Harry Potter 7 Part 1
With the final Harry Potter book being split into a two parts can EA prove that they aren’t just selling us half a game at full price?
For those that aren’t exactly sure what the story is here’s a quick rundown of what you’ll be hearing quite a bit over and over. You and your friends are out to destroy a dark evil wizard by finding pieces of his soul hidden around the world, and of course dark evil wizard doesn’t like you so he sends out his minions to find you so he can do you in himself. Yeah it sounds a lot more interesting in the books but trust me what the game makes you listen to seems even weaker than what I just wrote. Also to accompany a feeble attempt to a good story is a failed attempt at almost all spoken dialogue. It always feels off, or it just does as little as possible to show the feeling of the character and what’s happening around them. They did bring in some of the original voices for this title but even still it doesn’t do much to help.
For reasons unknown to me they decided to change the entire game play style compared to all of the other ones. It now acts like a Gears of War with magic and that might sound cool to some but it once again fails to hit the mark. In past games everything was about finesse, and ability, when you learned a spell you knew that it would be useful in puzzles and certain enemies but now you pretty much just mash on the shoot button and enemies will take quite a few hits, then with the amount of enemies that you will have to face you will be hitting the attack button so much that your finger will probably start to hurt you’d wish that you could hold it down, and even though you do learn new spells along the way you only ever need to use one, which ever you choose to use, the entire time. What doesn’t help is that this game is also very linear, other than the odd go left for 20 seconds the whole game is pretty much a straight path and it doesn’t help the player when ever few minutes the game tells you to active the spell that shows you exactly where you need to go, as if they thought the game confusing on where you need to go, and it is, it is confusing because the games controls don’t seems to move quite correctly, the movement seems off and when you actually want to use their guidance spell it doesn’t want to work.
Like almost all movie-tie in games it’s a short experience. It will take you about 6 hours to finish it. They try to lengthen it by throwing the same “missions” at you that don’t do anything for the game but waste your time for it has nothing to do with the story or keeping things interesting. There are times where you will have to use stealth to move around without being spotted to gather Intel and get away from your enemies and while this may work at times when you are supposed to use stealth it feels clunky and at times useless.
I am a fan of the books and some of the older Harry Potter games and adding a Gears of War style of fighting seemed like a decent idea to help relay the war and the feeling dread that is in the final book but by the time you get close to the end of the game you’ll most likely be running past everything just so you can get the game over with.
I give it a 3.5/10