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even a love of harry potter may not redeem this game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: August 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I'd like to say first that I am a HUGE fan of the Harry Potter books...so this review is not coming from the point of view of a "neutral" player. Despite this, sadly, I still can only give this game a 2-star overall rating.

This game is essentially like most other game-from-a-movie games, i.e. very low quality. They know it will sell tons of copies, because come on, it's Harry Potter, and why waste time and money making it good (or even DECENT) when you can sell just as many copies for much less effort?

It is true that the graphics are quite good for
Wii games we've seen to date, and the sheer size of the Hogwarts castle and grounds which you can explore is probably the game's main highlight.

When I bought this game I expected being able to use the Wiimote like a wand to be another big highlight, but I was sorely let down. The controls for this game are AWFUL. Everything feels heavy and imprecise. Rather than a z-targeting system, they seem to have been attempting to simulate wand use more "realistically" by having various targets become highlighted when you point at them, which sounds fine in theory; in actuality you just end up frustrated as it's often impossible to lock on to the object you want while the game keeps trying to direct you to something else, and casting spells over and over in a general direction while fighting with the camera to give you a decent angle the whole time. It's even worse in the duels with other students as then your targets are moving...

I would point out that Harry himself also moves rather clumsily and sometimes it can become difficult (especially with the terrible camera) to explore that wonderful environment mentioned earlier.

Also, the pacing of the game itself is extremely sporadic and there are a lot of strange 2-second long "cut scenes" that lurch on and off your screen and the story in general would be very difficult to follow, i imagine, for people who have not read the book.

On the positive side, in addition to the huge, completely realized castle and grounds, the game does have the license to "Hedwig's Theme" for the soundtrack and the music is quite good and contributes to the overall ambience. Most of the characters are voiced by the actors from the movie, contributing further to the immersive aspects. Also, as Harry levels up you unlock special interviews with various movie cast members which, as an avid HP fan, was an actual reward for me and was one of the few things I enjoyed about this game.

Overall it's difficult to say who this game is best for. Potter lovers who don't play many games should be able to overlook the control and gameplay problems and just enjoy immersing themselves in the world, exploring, absorbing the atmosphere and completing the same easy puzzles over and over to access the rewards.

On the other hand, the constant frustration thanks to the awful gameplay may ruin any potential suspension of disbelief and break the spell for other fans. Personally, I would say just go read the book again if you are still thirsty for more Harry Potter.

Crapfest 07

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: July 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am a huge harry potter fan, yet this game is the worst game I have ever played in my entire life.
Graphics: Of course because it's on the wii the graphics are worse than the other systems and made me wish that I had bought the 360 version.
Gameplay: Horrible, absolutely horrible, you don't have control after you cast the spells, targeting the item you want to cast a spell on is impossible because the targeting system auto-locks on the first thing it sees and wont let you choose something else unless if you turn away and look somewhere completely different than where your target is.
Camera: The camera was made by a druggie with no programming experience. It is unmovable, and only goes at the angle it's supposed to be about 20% of the time. Moving on stairs is hard, casting spells is hard, and some times during conversations all you see is the gray from instead of the person you are talking to's head.
Overall: This game will make you hate Harry Potter.

Hogwarts accurately recreated in video game form... but terrible game play

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: August 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The only interesting thing about this game is that it you can explore Hogwarts and the grounds. It seemed very realistic to me and the graphics are pretty cool.

But as far as game play goes - it's absolutely the worst game I have ever played. 90% of the game is performing menial tasks. The rest is just swinging the wii remote around. It felt like it was telling the story while finding random things you could do to try to tie you into the story. For example - how can you put occlumency into a video game? It just doesn't work... yet they decide to do it. Also they randomly switch you to a different character for a few "scenes"... like you get to be Dumbledore in the big Voldemort/Dumbledore battle where you just wiggle the wii remote randomly and wait boredly for it to end.

Also I thought it would be really cool to be able to use the wii remote as a wand but I found it frustrating to get the wii remote to respond correctly to the spells I was trying ot do. This may be a limit of the wii system itself more than this particular game.

Wii cannot save this game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 16 / 19
Date: December 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Ok, I am an older gamer. Played Zork 1 when it came out (the original), anyway. My wife and I love the Harry Potter series. I bought this for her for Christmas to play on our Wii. The controls were difficult often impossible. Some areas the camera blocked the view of where you were supposed to go. Sometimes there are places you just stand with no indication of what you have to do (other than the marauder map giving you clues). The bridge scene was the final straw. Tack it up to me being old if you will, the bridge scene where the kids were beating up Nevil took me 45 minutes to find out that we had to do a spell at the torches 50 feet above us.

The animation is ok, the graphics are pretty bad. Whenever a character talks they open their mouths. The teeth are just 1 pixel thick and look like white cardboard in their mouths. You can often see through the back of a persons head as you are moving around. Overall this game was rushed to line up with the movie release and therefore it is pretty bad.

Waste of time

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: January 02, 2008
Author: Amazon User

In addition to all the other comments already posted, I'd like to add a few of my own:

1. Frame rate issues everywhere. The poor little Wii doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the game engine's insane level of detail, leading to really choppy scenes and movement. Thing is, the Wii SHOULD be able to handle this - I think it was just poorly ported.

2. Random weird sound effects. There are some rooms where you enter, and it sounds like you're under a herd of stampeding cattle for no reason. It's annoying and after a few minutes in the room, it just makes you want to return the game for a refund.

3. You don't feel particularly heroic. Going around levitating things for other wizards (who apparently can't master the most basic of spells, so they ask you to do it) feels contrived, pointless, and ultimately not why we play video games. There are several places in the game where I swear I'm not playing Harry Potter any more, but instead I'm playing Box Stacker(tm). (For those of you who don't read The Onion, go Google for it. You'll get what I'm saying then.)

4. People have mentioned the lurching pace of the videos; I describe it as if someone had rented the DVD version and accidentally sat on the fast-forward button. I mean, how hard would it have been to add some sort of crossfade between scenes? Come on.

5. The "Occlumency" portion of the game is just plain laughable. I literally laughed out loud at how ridiculously simple and boring it was.

To sum up, clearly this game was rushed to market. It's frustrating to play, the game itself is a series of boring chores, and the "rewards" are nothing but self-serving videos of the actors and EA staff telling you how great the game is. It's nice having a bunch of DVD extras, but not for the price they're asking, and not for the price of 20+ hours of my time. Seriously, even if you're a huge Harry Potter fan, this just isn't worth it.

I give it two stars for the voice acting, music and environment, and hurling benches at students is at least some fun.

Not user friendly!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: May 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I bought this for my 10 year old grandson who plays a lot on the WII and is a Harry Potter fan.....He was easily distracted and changed to something else rather quickly. This may be OK for an older player but I tried it and didn't like it either!

Amazing castle, but overall terrible game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: July 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the Wii is, in my opinion, a very bad game. The bad parts of this game are that the view is annoying and random, it skips over major parts of the story, teleports you at random points (for example I was in Occlumency class and then less than a second later without any explanation in the Order of the Phoenix headquarters at Christmas), has hardly any action, no puzzles, and is made up mostly of running around Hogwarts collecting students for this or that. The students who you are supposed to collect can never come with you until you do some stupid task for them. The good parts are that the Wii motions usually work and when they do work it feels a lot like you are actually holding a wand, the graphics are amazing for the Wii, and Hogwarts is gigantic and thoroughly detailed. All of those pros have a bad side to them though. When the Wii motions don't work it is really annoying, the graphics are only good from far away (when you look at close-ups things look really weird), and because Hogwarts is so big it makes the tasks insanely hard because you often need to go across the whole entire building looking for things or just getting something across the building. There's good music, but for some reason it usually isn't playing. Every word is voice-acted, which is a good thing, but there's so much unneeded and random talking in the game that the voices get really annoying. There are a bunch of unlockables, but no real reason to get them. You get videos and stuff when you find enough hidden stuff, but they're sort of boring.

Overall the only really good thing in this game is the amazing recreation of Hogwarts. If the price goes down somewhere around 5$ this game might be worth thinking about just so you can explore Hogwarts, but at any other price it just isn't worth it.

Gorgeous to look at, but can be very tedious

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 29 / 32
Date: August 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I'm a newcomer to the Harry Potter game franchise, so I can't compare this game to the previous entries in the series.

I'm a fan of adventure games in general, especially the classic titles from Sierra and LucasArts, so it was a great treat to have such a large and immersive environment to explore.

Hogwarts looks gorgeous, and the game designers have done a magnificent job making it look every bit like the sets from the Harry Potter films. The castle is HUGE, and you'll spend quite a bit of time discovering all sorts of hidden goodies. The voice acting is top-notch, using some of the actual actors from the film, and the character models do resemble their movie counterparts.

All that being said, the actual gameplay is tedious. Most of your time will be spent running errands. Advancing through the game consists of talking to a character only to discover that he/she needs an item in a wholly different area of the castle. Puzzles are sparse and not terribly challenging -- all you really need to do is figure out which of the spells in your repertoire need to be cast on the available items. For the most part, you'll be using Wingardium Leviosa to move objects around.

The Wii-specific wand controls are fun in their own way, and add to the feeling of "being there" but in the end the actual game isn't that deep or challenging. Replay value is limited, as there's really no deviating from the main tasks, besides hunting down every last hidden chess statue or broken masonry in need of a Reparo spell.

I can only really recommend this to hard-core fans of the Harry Potter books and films. As a game it's not that great, but it's a beautiful presentation of Hogwarts that you'll spend hours exploring.

OKY game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 12, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Harry Potter for the nintendo wii is a pretty good game except for a few things. Anyway lts just get to the game play. In this game the gameplay is oky in this game but it could be better. First of all to cast a spell in Harry Potter on the Wii you have to move your wand a certin way or else it won't work. This is annoying becase if you are in the middle of a battle it could take you a long time to hit you enemy because you can't cast a spell corectly. The good thing about this game is that it is more realistic. what I mean by that is you get to actually wave your wand instead of just sitting on you butt using a playstaion controler. Also the game is fun at the begining but after you beat it it really gets boring because there is nothing to do.
The graphics in this game are about as good as the PS3 except malfoys face looks like a peice of crap.
The sound is also really good in this game to.
Overall I give this game a three out of fiv because its an oky game but its not the best Harry potter game.

Not what I expected, but still fun!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I'm a huge Harry Potter fan so I thought the this game would be fun! When I had finally finished the instructions, which were long and detailed, I thought I'd be prepared for playing the game. I was very confused at times by which tasks to do first, and how to remember all the spell motions. It's more complicated than fun, sorry to say.

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