Seven months. That's how much extra time EA Bright Light has had to tweak and polish Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince after its November release date was pushed back to June thanks to the movie's theatrical slippage. The time could have been spent perfecting one of the most valuable game licenses. Instead it seems as though Harry and company were dumped in the vanishing cupboard since the game's completion last year and left to gather cobwebs. Draco would be proud.
Like most family games of late Half-Blood Prince suffers from catastrophic Wii syndrome. The game's clearly been designed with the waggle stick in mind. From the awkward potion mixing lessons to the wand-waving duels every action mapped to the right stick would work better with a motion controller (or, better still, a combination of Natal's body mapping and voice recognition).
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Official trailer
1:51
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Official trailer
1:51
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The problematic camera highlights the issue perfectly. In a sane world camera wobbles can be corrected with a flick of the right stick, but thanks to some thoughtless control patching this merely waves Harry's magical fleshlight about. To spin the camera you'll need to squeeze RT as well, despite the universally accepted rule of trigger-pulls initiating firing stances (in this case the magic wand stance).
But it's the giant step backwards from Order of the Phoenix which offends the most. Bastardised controls we can half accept; inferior versions of the last game's features are a little harder to swallow. Half-Blood Prince boasts none of the story progression of before - choosing instead to edit out key scenes in ways which would confuse even JK - and is so reliant on its three main mini-games there's little room for any other content.
Duelling, potions and Quidditch: at any given time you're probably involved in one of these three tasks. The first is almost a carbon copy of Order of the Phoenix's scraps (though dodging buttons replace the speedy sidestepping of 'fore), the second a cumbersome mixing game which suffers from imprecise controls and confusing depth perception, and the third a lengthy and disappointing on-rails glide to snatch the snitch. In any other title each mini-game would be little more than a side-quest.
Unfortunately in Half-Blood Prince there's no real main adventure to speak of, only brief 'run-here', 'go-there' quests to link these three activities together. Hogwarts itself is superbly recreated, in part because it was already believable in the last game. There are subtle differences but liberal use of copy and paste has helped to bash this one out quickly. As a result navigation is easy enough for anybody familiar with the series. Newcomers, however, will struggle endlessly to accept the convoluted corridors.
In lieu of the retired Marauder's Map breadcrumb footsteps you can instead call upon a (tragically voiced) Nearly Headless Nick for guidance, but to extend the time between the bland mini-games Harry can search for the Hogwarts badges. Sometimes this involves repairing broken emblems or hurling heavy objects into walls with Wingardium Leviosa; mostly it's simply a case of prodding random objects with a push spell. Glowing lamp post? Push it for pickups. Boulder? Push it. Sign? Why not... push it?
Order of the Phoenix's diversionary puzzles were a fun way to extend longevity but here the push-all tasks are lacking focus, much like the rest of the game and its pitifully pocked plotline. A real shame, especially given the promise shown in Order of the Phoenix. Fingers crossed for Deathly Hallows: Part One...
Matthew Pellett
// Overview
Verdict
Certainly faithful to the fiction but inferior to the last game in almost every single way.
I really do have to wonder, all the people involved in making a videogame, the cost of buying the licence, marketing it and all that, surely they cant be making that much money off a game that a few out of the know mums will buy for their kids and will sell to pretty much no one else??
Loads of kids will get this game though....I can say from experience that this game is pretty bland stuff, with the missions being spoonfed to you the whole time.
I worked at EA last year and tested this game on DS, PSP, Wii, 360, PSE and PC.
Very tedious "on rails" Quidditch games, and trying to five star them using a Wii-mote made a lot of us go mental in the office!
And CVG have mentioned, moving the right stick waggels Harry's little wand, when in fact you just want to move the camera around.....They also couldn't be bothered to put the testers names in the game at the end as it was "too risky" apparently!!!!!
J_H__: they're never gonna give up, and we'll always be let down. The sales numbers speak for themselves.
Currently, even before the film's launch today, the game is sitting at nr. 4 on Chart-Tracks all-format hitlist, and doing top-10 on all platforms across the board.
In a world where the audience for both the film and games are renewed on a semi-anual basis, with purchases thus ensured no matter quality, you're never going to see improvements of any kind... Cost benefit simple as that, quality and content simply has no factor in sales of this type of products.
I've only played the wii game and it wasn't a bad little game. It definately was built for the platform, its a nice change for the wii to get the definitive version for a change rather than a scaled back mockery of a game. Then again theres been a spate of this at the moment. virtua tennis and Tiger woods spring to mind.
Hopefully Arkham Asylam will pave the way for licensed games to be good now. When the films finish, I think that's when they'll start TRYING with this franchise.
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Faithful Hogwarts recreation
