Avada Kedavra!
It is important for me to note beforehand that for some bizarre reason GiantBomb continues to reset my score to a three star rating. My intended rating is a single star and a half! Sorry for the confusion.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is… over. Or at least, it might as well be.
You see, you get to experience most everything the game has to offer within its initial thirty minutes; by the time you're settled in at Hogwarts and have begun the endless sea of fetch-quests. Past that, it's just the same rubbish over and over for an additional five hours.
Curse not Harry Potter yet, however! There must be some gold in this mine of dirt!
Harry Potter may be a wizard, but for one pushing on into his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he certainly has many skills that need brushing up. Poor Harry has such a petty allotment of spells; he can push things, pull them, and have them levitate. He can stun opponents, disarm them, or petrify them. He can make objects put themselves together again, or destroy themselves, exploding from the inside out.
Even this limited selection sounds cool in thought, but poor Harry has but the most mundane of instances to use these spells. Picture this: pushing all the furniture in a room to the opposite wall. Dusting trophies in the Trophy Room. Correcting the posture of the Knights which litter Hogwarts' walls. And to think, these exciting chores are but the beginning of Harry's adventures!
We do have a neat way of performing the spells; using the right joystick in various motions casts the appropriate spell, and this works quite well as a means of performing wizardry – there were no mix-ups in casting that were the game's fault – however, it sacrifices an even more important element of the gameplay, that being the camera.
The wretched camera. This incompetent contraption is of a mind of its own, generally following Harry from behind but also occasionally getting in the way in the front, and sadly its movement is beyond your control, as the typically used right joystick is occupied with other functions! Even though alternative means of camera control could have been introduced – even the holding of a button to prevent spell casting and to allow looking with the joystick – we're stuck with an entirely uncontrollable, immensely annoying excuse for a camera.
Not all is lost, however; luckily we at least have a nice playground to doddle in. Hogwarts is recreated in stunning fashion, a labyrinth of staircases and hallways and rooms sure to emit more than a little drool from a Potter fan. And the lot of it is presented in a powerful display of grandiosity; you feel like an ant traversing the corridors of the school, and one can't help but marvel at the scope of this fantastical building. Light sears through crystallized windows, floors shine with polish and colours flourish without the need of in-game blurring to maintain a realistic vision. This is a totally focused display of graphical prowess…
… of the capabilities of an Xbox. We've seen this level of handiwork all before, and Order's mish-mash of boxy and rubbery characters, two dimensional layers of walling and repetitive textures leave the gamer only briefly enchanted, if even enchanted at all. It is the compromise for the grand building itself, one can only assume.
How unfortunate is it that not only are the bulk of the game's goals (being fetch-quests) boring to execute, but as are what could have been a saving grace; the battles? You get an interesting supply of offensive and defensive spells – the three most important are the aforementioned offensive conjurations – but with the dumb-as-dirt AI and with the simplicity of the combat itself – it pretty much comes down to stunning your opponent then disarming them – we get nothing but another blockade of boredom.
Painful then that even the story is mostly lost in this adaptation. The biggest problem is that for the most part, the game chooses to adapt the film's variation of the Potter story, and this is flawed on principal as the film leaves out much of Potter's world that would work poorly on film, but great in-game, especially given that the bulk of what we do have is nothing but fetching items. Where is the Quidditch during the first half of our caper? Why can't we take classes? Totally abolished in this rendition are the creative dungeon-esque classes of past games such as The Chamber of Secrets, replaced with teachers requiring you to… fetch things to help you with your exams.
There can only be one more strand of hope. One more shine that could possibly lift this from the bowels of incompetence. Clasp hands and pray that boss battles – boss battles! Moments of patterns and power and struggle and intensity! – have been saved from the wrath of horrid game design. Pray that we have, at the very least, and interesting battle or two to partake in! Surely the final boss is an amazing climax of vigilant combat! Surely!
… surely!
… surely…
… hopefully…
…
Well, we do get a boss fight. We do get some cool effects, and some combat which requires defense. We do get this step above from crap into mediocrity, and we get it for all of three minutes.
And that would sum up our incredibly short adventure with Harry.