Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I’ve never really invested in the Harry Potter series, however when I found out that games were released, I thought, ‘Hello, surely this will be an easy quick 1,000 points?’ I was sort of right, it was easy but it was nowhere near as quick as I thought.

The storyline follows The Order of the Phoenix story only you have to complete various tasks to get students to come to your little party which is the main part of the game. I found it unexplainably annoying that they all refer to Dumbledore’s Army as the DA. I couldn’t help but think of District Attorney every time it was a mentioned and it’s such a common reference that I don’t think it should be used in this way. It’s not confusing. Just stupid.

Visually I thought the game very poor, even by the standards in 2007. It feels like the game was, again, another quick release to market the movie. This is especially apparent with the amount of direct-from-movie cut scenes and the fact that all of the unlockable bonuses are behind the scenes footage from the movie. There may have been more varied bonuses but I have an interest in games, not in the actors behind the Harry Potter franchise, so I didn’t look at anymore after the first two.

Sound effects are normally the best part about movie franchise games and Harry Potter is no exception. The music is very in keeping with the movie which is always good – even if the music is totally fucking annoying, contrived, overdone, etc, etc.

The gameplay... now I’m not sure what I really did throughout the game but it all felt very wishy-washy. Go here, Harry and pick up this thing for me. Now go to class and battle with the horrendous wand controls to mix potions and perform spells. Now fight Malfoy and his followers using your various spells without knowing if they having any effect until you fall down or they do.

Basically the game play is a sack of shit. Most of the game is spent following footsteps to the next location where you have to do something uninteresting that doesn’t mean anything.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 41 Achievements

The game wins point straight away for having no missable achievements. This is good as the whole game is a free roaming environment. There are eight for playing through the game and another for completing it on hard mode.

I was very confused by the concept of hard mode, even more so as a lot of people seemed to think that two playthoughs were required and a lot of people complained that the hard mode achievement didn’t unlock for them. I found a really easy way around this – play the game on hard from the start. Only a masochist would want to play this game through twice a you don’t have to play it through on normal to unlock hard. As the game mostly consists of puzzle solving with set solutions, it isn’t actually that much harder than normal mode anyway.

The other achievements are all collectibles and tasks – basically getting 100% in the game nets you the remaining achievements. A lot of these, such as beating all Gobstones Champions and getting top marks in each of the lessons, are largely luck based due to the intensely poor control system. I came very close to rage controller destruction when trying to get the ‘O’ rating in the charms class. This involves you having to cast the various spells that Harry can learn in quick succession. The problem with this is that it involves having to flick the analogue stick in various ways and the game will not pick up the actions you want to do in a timely manner which was totally fucking annoying especially when you have to do everything really quickly.

In addition to this, you actually have to be really good at chess to beat the chess champions. Fortunately there are a lot of chess simulation programmes on the internet to make this easy.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I did not enjoy Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at all. It was touch and go as to whether I would even finish it. My own stubbornness and a late night won through in the end though and I was able to add this to the 100% pile. I’m not sure I’ll play the next one. I have a lot of other games to work through before descending even deeper into masochism.