Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Review (PSP)

PSP must be punished

If you put the words Harry and Potter onto anything, it is going to sell and sell in shed loads! So this review could be a bit pointless, but bear with it!

Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix SHOULD be amazing on the PSP

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix sees our favourite bespectacled wizard in his 5th outing. Voldermort and his Death Eaters are growing stronger by the day and all that stands between him and world domination is Harry and his group of friends. Following the plot of the book, Harry, Hermione and Ron must put together a secret organisation called Dumbledors Army to prepare the students for the forthcoming fight. Along the way Harry must clear his name after Cederics death in the previous book,Goblet of Fire and also deal with the psychotic new defence against the dark arts teacher, Dalorus Umbridge.

With such a fantastic cast and story you would think this would be a breeze to get right. Wrong. There is so much wrong with this game it is hard to know where to start.

But first, lets deal with what it gets right. The majority of your time is spent roaming the corridors of a beautifully realised model of Hogwarts. The grand staircase is there, the great hall and more, all in fine detail! The characters all look good and are, for the most part, recognisable. Even the voices are done by the original cast, a rare thing these days! As well as the main playable characters there are loads of people in the game to interact with. This adds to a feeling of life in Hogwarts, which helps the game progress. The music is also superb and give a real big screen feel to the game.

Spell casting has been greatly improved. Simple combinations of the face buttons will have you casting Wingardium Leviosa and Incendio spells in no time.

Then it all start going a bit wrong. The game structure is very limited. It is mostly repetitive task based. Go here, find this, bring it back. Given the size of the available map, this is a shame. Mind you with the waypoint navigation that in it self may be a blessing, but more on that in a second.

At your disposal is the marauders map. Here you can set waypoint to help you find your way around. Once a waypoint is set and you have returned to the game, you will see foot prints walking in the direction you must take. Only they seem to wander about randomly, at times even disappearing into walls several feet from the door you must walk through!

All of this pales into insignificance at my next bug bear with Harry Potter. The camera. To give it that extra cinematic feel, EA have opted for a roaming camera. As you move, the camera will set its self to some angle that looks good. Which is great until you try to walking in a straight line down a corridor. You move in relation to the camera. So if it is behind you, you push up to walk forward, if it is in front of you, you push down to move towards it. So as you walking in your straight line, the camera can move off to the side, which means that rather than walking forward, you are now walking to the left or right of the camera, ending with you walking into a wall.

The worst instance I can think of is in the Library (ignoring the appalling angles chosen for the particular “catch the book” mission. At one stage you are walking left to right, the camera switches and you are now walking right to left, but you are still pressing left. So you actually end up walking back the way you came! Unforgivable in a game of this calibre and nearly had me biting a chunk out of my PSP in frustration!

Right with that out of the way on with a conclusion.

Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix should be amazing on the PSP. It looks great, sounds great and for the most part the game concepts are pretty good. Admittedly there is a large chunk of boredom to deal with at the start, but it picks up. The problem is all of this is ruined by the camera. It makes simple things, like walking, very frustrating.

If you are a Potter fan and have to have the PSP version, then off you go, you won’t listen to me anyway. If you can get the PS2 version, go for that instead!