Review by: Brandon "Stupified" Cackowski-Schnell

Rather than spend 1000 words getting to the final point of this review, I'm going to save us both some time and just cut to the chase. Simply put, you shouldn't buy this game, or rent this game or spend any time playing this game. This is a terrible game that fails to serve every audience it set out to appease. It fails as a third person shooter, it fails as a means of telling the story it is based on and it fails as a Harry Potter experience.

Where to begin? It's a licensed property based on an immensely popular book that has been made into an immensely popular movie. You would think that with multiple levels of storytelling to pull from, that the game would tell roughly the same story as either of these two properties. You would be wrong. I have read the book the game is based on and I had no earthly idea what was going on. Characters would talk and then you'd shoot Death Eaters and Snatchers and then you'd get to a loading screen and then be somewhere completely different. It was like someone with Attention Deficit Disorder wrote the game's screenplay. Look Death Eaters! Look London! Look a Dragon!

This scatterbrained approach to storytelling even rears its ugly head when it comes to the mission structure. Early in the game, Harry, Ron and Hermione realize that they must infiltrate the Ministry of Magic to obtain a locket, one of Voldemort's horcruxes. Hermione says that you'll have to do some reconnaissance on the Ministry. Right, I thought, time to get my sneak on. Next thing I know, I'm presented with a selection of missions I have to do, but don't worry, I can do them in any order I want.

For the first mission I was transported to some garbage strewn section of the English countryside, sent to run around shooting evil wizards and rescuing good wizards. Not sure what that had to do with the Ministry, but OK. Second, I was sent to a slightly cleaner section of the same countryside, this time to prevent the capture of some more good wizards. Again, what does this have to do with the Ministry? Third, I was stuck in a dragon's cave. You read that right, a dragon's cave, and I had to escape. What in the name of Godric Gryffindor did that have to do with anything I had been tasked with up until those stupid side missions? Nothing! Not a thing. Once they were done I was right back in London where the story left off. Best of all, you have to take on these stupid side missions three more times over the course of the game. Being a wizard is awesome!

When you're not randomly running through meadows stupefying enemy wizards in the face you'll be randomly running through buildings stupefying enemy wizards in the face. Harry obtains access to a bunch of spells over the course of the game, and you can tell that the developers wanted you to pick certain spells for certain uses, what with the loading screens telling you to just that, but with few exceptions, every spell resulted in the same thing: the enemy falls down and disapparates out of there.

Sometimes the bolts were blue, sometimes red, sometimes you held down the trigger, sometimes you didn't but in the end, wizard fall down and go boom and on to the next. There's a cover system that works to keep Harry safe from harm, however it also works to keep the enemies safe from harm as well as when you popped up out of cover, half of your bolts would hit the cover and ricochet away rather than find their target. Enemy wizards drop potions, however they have magical names so you have no idea what they do and if you don't use them right away they disappear. As a result, I drank everything with little regard to what it was doing to my person.