Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Review

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is set during Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts. Things are not going well in the fight against Voldemort: Muggles are beginning to notice magical accidents, important mystical people are disappearing and Severus Snape has made an unbreakable vow to Narcissa Malfoy to protect her son Draco.

At Hogwarts, Harry learns how to Apparate, gets a new Potions master in the form of Horace Slughorn (but at the expense of having Snape as his Defense Against the Dark Art teacher) and begins to have all new romantic feelings towards Ron's sister, Ginny. Along the way, Harry receives help in Potions class from a mysterious penman named the Half-Blood Prince, uncovers some history behind Lord Voldemort, Dumbledore and Snape, and prepares for his biggest battle yet against the dark forces of magic.

Needless to say, a lot of stuff happens in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but you'll be hard-pressed to discover any of that information in the actual game. The bulk of Half-Blood Prince merely skirts over most of the important events in the novel and film in favor of forcing you to play repetitious mini games over and over again. While the game explains some of the basic plot (with some mediocre to downright terrible cut scenes), I doubt anyone who hasn't read the books or viewed the upcoming film would have any clue as to what was happening or why.

The bulk of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince's gameplay is spent in four different categories: Quidditch, brewing potions, wizard dueling, and running your wizard butt to-and-fro across the castle. The game utilizes the Wii Remote for all your Quidditch, Potions and dueling needs and while it's fairly well incorporated, it can be pretty touch and go with certain tasks. In Quidditch, you'll find that Harry is already set on a directed flight path through the stadium, leaving you to simply point the Wii mote left, right, up and down to make him fly through some star shapes which propel him to catch the snitch. While the animation and sound design is pretty good, the gameplay is dull, repetitive and not particularly hard, which left me feeling pretty bummed, as Quidditch seems like such a fertile ground for some intense sports gameplay.

Potions are a mess all together. I can see why Harry Potter has always hated potions class, because if it's anything like this Wii incarnation, it's like trying to make soup while incredibly drunk. You're tasked with trying to beat a countdown whilst mixing various ingredients, and while the mini-game isn't very hard, the controls and design are very awkward, leaving a decent amount of frustration when your polyjuice potion blows up in your face. Dueling is probably the highlight of this game. The controls work pretty well; a flick of the wrist down will send a "stupefy" attack, a flick of both controls down will subdue opponents with "expelliarmus". While it is innately fun to knock some Slytherin students off of their feet with a "levicorpus" spell, the dueling gets pretty repetitive and the controls can get confused at times. Once you've dueled one person, you've dueled them all, which can lead to some disappointing fights with some of the stories main villains.

the best part of the game was the design of Hogwarts castle. It is fully realized, detailed, and loading screen free -- which is pretty remarkable considering the size of it. However, like the rest of the game, I found that outside of its looks there isn't much invested in the environment of the Potter-verse. You're only real opportunity to interact with the world comes in the form of collecting shields and mini shields, which is a tedious task that doesn't reap many rewards worth pursuing.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is kind of fun and features some decent gameplay. Still, for a game that looks like it has all the makings for a sandbox-style Harry Potter game, there isn't much to do once you've completed the story and the three main game categories. The game plays in a very linear style, jumping from task to task with no real options to do anything other than task at hand.