First, the good news: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is easily one of the best Harry Potter videogames ever made. The bad news…is that it still isn’t anything special, and for a series as mega powerful as Harry Potter, it’s disappointing that no videogame has captured any of its magic, even though this one at least tries to take it into a new direction.

Granted, EA obviously threw more money at this latest version; you can tell in the scope of the design to the voice acting (much of which was done by cast members, although you can clearly tell who wasn’t hired on) to the grandiose setting of the game, that of Hogwarts itself. But upping the visual ante, hiring original cast members and, crafting Hogwarts to look like the real thing isn’t a replacement for quality gameplay, and that’s really where Order of the Phoenix falls down, and unless you’re a young gamer who loves everything about Harry (and there are a lot of those) you’re not going to get your (or your parents’) $60 worth. There is a legion of adult Harry Potter fans as well, and for those people who also moonlight as gamers, the ease of which you can complete the game and the repetitive nature of the quests and puzzles are enough to cause you to bail out about halfway through the main storyline.

The game loosely follows the plot of the movie, which loosely follows the plot of the book. In the game you spend more than half your time wandering around Hogwarts doing quests for schoolmates. When you complete a task, they agree to join Dumbledore’s Army in the Room of Requirement on the 7th floor of Hogwarts. (It should also be noted, that if for some unknown reason you haven’t read the book or seen the film – don’t play the game first. It contains huge spoilers.)

You have to wrangle up 28 kids this way. The tasks include things like retrieving Colin’s camera, which is stuck on a rampart high above the courtyard or helping Cho chase an owl inside the Owlery so it can deliver a message. Exciting stuff. Even worse, there are quests (like the Colin quest) that don’t make a lot of sense. In order to get the camera you have to go through the process of casting spells on pipes to repair them in order to climb up and retrieve the camera. Why can’t Harry just get on his broom…or cast “Accio” as he did in the fourth book? Why is Harry scaling Hogwarts like Spider-man?

Most of the quests are like this – basic “I need this” or “go find that” type of thing. There are a few fight scenes in the game, which could be fun – casting spells from Protego to Stupefy is done via moving the right analog stick in certain way— but the duels are anti-climatic because you don’t need to win most of them in order for the story to advance. It is one thing to make fight sequences so hard that you can’t get past them, but for the outcome to not matter at all just seems…odd.

There are several mini games which you can do during the game from playing Wizard Chess to Gobstones; the mini games are actually pretty fun – even Exploding Snap Patience which is a basic memory game where the tiles explode after a few minutes. You find these games by just tooling around Hogwarts, which is really what the game is all about.

Without a doubt the best part of the game is Hogwarts itself. If you ever wanted to walk inside the school and really get a feel as to how big it is and where everything fits from Snape’s Potions class to the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom – this is your meal ticket. Hogwarts is recreated in splendid fashion and you could easily get lost traveling from place to place if not for the Marauder’s Map. It’s easy to get around because you simply tell the map where you want to go and it then leads you to the location by spotting the ground as you walk with the little black footprints from the film. Couple that with several password protected portraits which house secret passageways, which in turn make getting around a lot faster, and strolling through the school is a snap.

While Hogwarts looks great, some of the other graphics in the game aren’t all that exciting – the faces of the characters, which admittedly do look like the actual people from the movie, are of PS2 quality and in no way look next-gen. After all, this is a high priced Xbox 360 game, right? The models should look as such.