Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I Review

This Harry Potter game will make you wish you could magically transform it into something better.

The Harry Potter games have been pretty hit and miss, and there's no excuse for the misses. Any game based on a movie should be good, since it already has a decent plot set up. All that it needs is some good gameplay, and it shouldn't be that hard to pull off with a Harry Potter game. Even the DS games should at least be okay. However, the majority of games put out these days that are based on movies are terrible. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I is the worst example of a game based on a movie based on a book. It is painfully obvious that this game was thrown together and shoved onto the shelves as fast as possible in order to make the maximum profit off of naïve parents of screaming little Harry Potter fans.

The gameplay is simplistic and boring. Harry runs down endless corridors and shoots Stupefy spells out of his wand when you tap on the screen. Hitting a shoulder button activates a protection spell. Those are really the only two spells you need for combat. You might occasionally need a third area of effect spell when Stupefy fails to hit anything for no reason at all. You also need a special spell to fight Dementors, which are ridiculously easy to defeat considering how tough they are in the books/movies. But for the majority of the game, you shoot at evil wizards with Stupefy, and if they happen to cast a protection spell you should probably do that as well. Collecting the juice you need to cast special (non-Stupefy) spells is never a problem. There are a few other things to collect if you bother to wander off the beaten path a little, but it's never worth it. The game offers no real challenge at all except for the times when the game doesn't work, at which point the only thing being offered is frustration.

There was one boss that took me a couple times to beat, but only because that when I would tap on the blurry blocks of material that were chucked at me, half the time it would jump half an inch to the right instead of blowing up. I don't know if this was a glitch or just the developer's way of communicating their undying hatred for all gamers everywhere.

Harry's not hard to control, although using his special spells is a little bit awkward. You have to have the spell equipped and then push up or down on the d-pad, then tap or draw or whatever to use it. It's not what you would call intuitive, and the spells aren't worth the trouble. It's not like they look cool or anything. Either Ron or Hermione is always following you, and they're pretty useless. The also fire Stupefy balls at enemies, but at a much slower rate, and for some reason when they get hit, your health goes down. This is especially annoying when they get stuck somewhere and are getting beaten up by stray baddies like the moronic twits they are.

It's disappointing that the game doesn't make use of the DS's built in microphone. An example of how it could have been used would be to cast spells, simply say the name of the spell into the microphone and it's cast in game.