Harry Potter and The Prisoner Of Azkaban – Review

Ok so I’ve never been a Harry Potter fan. There, I’ve said it and I haven’t been struck by lightening yet. I don’t understand the fascination with Harry Potter. The books are well written, J.K. Rowling clearly tapped into something there but at the end of the day it just doesn’t do it for me. Perhaps I’m not the best person to be reviewing Harry Potter so I have carried out this review with a little help from a friend who is a Harry Potter fanatic. Lets see if EA can bring Harry to life once again on the gaming screen.

Harry Potter and The Prisoner Of Azkaban is one of many varied console titles to be released based on Harry and his friends adventures. On this particular outing, Harry, Hermione and Ron are all playable characters who have certain tasks they must fulfill in order to proceed through the game and become ultimate heroes once more. The title is a 3rd person adventure game where you can control each of the characters in order to exploit and make use of their own specialist skills. Harry can jump over large gaps, Ron can see hidden rooms and Hermione can crawl under small gaps and into small holes. At certain points in the game it will be of the utmost importance to utilize each different character as the game is setup in a way where you must swap back and forward between characters and all work together at certain times in order to succeed. They also develop particular skills in the form of unusual spells as the game progresses and I have to admit that watching Hermione freezing lakes of lava was indeed pretty funky.

When you first glimpse a look at Harry Potter, you’ll be pretty impressed by the likeness the characters have to the movie characters. There is no mistaking who is who in this title. Even the secondary characters like Malfoy have a very good resemblance to the actors in the film and this is likely to please most Harry Potter fans. It didn’t do much for me because to be honest it just felt like another adventure puzzle game however my very own HP fan informed me that it was ‘cool to get to play the actual characters and to see feel like part of the story’.

As you wander around the various environments in this game, you’ll notice a few things. Firstly you may well notice that they effects are all pretty good and the overall look of the game seems pretty polished, however, when you’ve been playing this game for a little while you will start to notice various problems and discrepancies in the graphics which are a real disappointment for an EA title. Your characters will float in mid air when they’re meant to be balancing on objects, they’ll open doors without ever laying a hand on the handle, they’ll talk yet their mouths will move in very different ways from what they’re saying and so on. It all just feels fairly light weight and embarrassing. It looks like small mistakes which could have been rectified and made the game feel more grown up, less patchy and a stronger contender for a good adventure game. The frame rate suffers at times and you’ll see your character almost shudder on the screen as it tries to catch up to your responses on the control pad. The controls aren’t the best either and often you’ll be jumping the same gap time and time again until Harry finally grabs the ledge in front of him. Also, when moving your characters around the screen you can at times feel like they’re doing their own thing even when you’re telling them not to. All these little issues could have been ironed out before release but it feels like maybe they thought since the game is likely to appeal to kids, maybe there’s not as much effort needed in smoothing it out. My resident HP fan isn’t stupid however and gladly pointed out to me on numerous occasions that Harry wasn’t responding how he should be.

The core of the game involves puzzle solving and some of it can be a lot of fun, some can be a total bore however. On a few occasions I had to go back over things numerous times before I worked it out and my HP fan was becoming increasingly frustrated at this and very edgy. Sure, it’s nice to have a level of difficult where everything isn’t ridiculously easy but sometimes people need a little help or they quickly tire of trying again and again. The very odd thing about this game however is with all these faults it’s hard to put down. You start to get involved in the story and you want to continue on with your adventure to see where it takes you. Even though these characters didn’t really mean much to me, the HP fan next to me was engrossed in the storyline and didn’t want to stop playing. I imagine if you are a Harry Potter fan then this title is going to be far more entertaining and interesting to you.

The sound on this game was… interesting. It’s atmospheric and it has a lot of sweeping movie soundtrack sound-bytes throughout and the background music is well suited to the style of play. The voice acting is very good and it’s very authentic so fans of HP won’t be disappointed. Small children are likely to enjoy it and be swept up in it however I have one major complaint. At a few points in the game, the mouths of the characters were moving but there was no sound at all. Surely in the play-testing of this game people would have noticed that? I missed a good few chunks of dialogue because of this, thankfully it didn’t seem to be too integral to the storyline but it does look a little unprofessional. For the deaf gamer this title has subtitles which can be switched on or off so it’s very friendly and inclusive. A definite plus point.

The female gamer is most definitely included in this title because Hermione is as good a character to play as any of the boys. You’re not at a disadvantage if you choose her but lets face it Harry is the hero and that’s just how it will always be. The good aspect of this for female gamers is that it doesn’t contain any sexist, chauvinistic comments from the male characters and that’s a nice addition.

Overall, if you’re a Harry Potter fan you’ll love this title. The game itself isn’t that bad and the puzzles and adventures you encounter are interesting enough to see you want to progress through the game. Getting to play the characters from the book is fun and again, the HP fan I borrowed really enjoyed it and didn’t want to stop playing. If you’re not a Harry Potter fan then you may pick this title up just because it’s an adventure puzzle game with cool spells in it. You’re most likely to cough up the cash for something else however but this isn’t really a bad thing. This title has definitely captured some of the excitement of the Harry Potter books and films and will deliver this to any fan. Had the small niggly graphics problems and sound problems been ironed out then this would have scored better even though it really doesn’t bring anything new to the gaming world. Not a bad attempt.

Review by Tracy

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment