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The Black Dahlia Murder - Warborn

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Yes, for my first review, I'm review a game aimed at children. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is an attempted DS adaptation from the movie adaptation of the book. You play as the infamous Harry Potter. It's your job to lead him through his fifth year at Hogwarts and help stop the evil prowess of Lord Voldemort.

The graphics aren't too bad gameplay wise. It has the look of your basic 3D game on a handheld system. All of the gameplay takes place on the bottom screen. The top screen is used for dialogue, objectives to complete, and instructions to accommodate mini games on the bottom screen. When there's a dialogue sequence, the character you're talking to will appear. Their faces look like their movie counterparts. Actually, they look like their stunt doubles counterparts, along with being fatter and stoned. When dialogue takes place on the top screen, no one seems to know what emotion is. They could be talking about matters of life or death but it seems like they're carrying on a casual conversation as if they would at a dinnertime. On the bottom screen, the characters have no faces so you have to memorize people by hair and by clothing (according to gender, meaning the males have pants and the females have skirts).

The sound design is really not too bad either. It's very high quality for its system limitations. It fits the very mood of the environment of the Harry Potter universe. One tiff I have with the sound design is that there is no voice acting. Not in the very least. I know the DS can handle voice acting. I've seen it done before on other games. I'd say it'd benefit from it because everyone deserves a good laugh. Its unintelligent dialogue needs to be voiced over for our amusement. But then again, it'll still maintain whatever dignity is left in the portraying actors for not including voice acting.

So you want to stop Lord Voldemort, eh? Stopping him may be a lot harder than it seems. Why is that you ask? Because no one is preparing you for the dangers of certain death. And this is where the fun stops. Apparently it's more important that they ask you, the almighty Harry Potter, to do incredibly tedious tasks and annoying fetch quests. I never thought I'd see the use of the spell "Reparo" more than thirty times. Also, it seems like everybody but you tends be to a tad, excuse me, ungodly lazy and wants you get things for them. This weird pointer finger at the corner of the bottom screen has no idea where it's pointing to and the terrible camera angles make it a mission to walk through a single corridor. The shotty controls don't seem to help the camera either. You'll Harry to go one way; he'll end up going the other way and running into a wall. Of course, he doesn't seem to mind. He's a happy drone, a mindless slave to your will (as well as the other members of the Harry Potter cast). This combination of the terrible controls and just as equally bad camera angles are bad enough to make the original Resident Evil blush. The only thing the game seems to get right is making potions. Making potions is not my idea of fun and engaging gameplay. It'd make a decent Internet flash game but nothing more. The rest is just half-assed level design with something the programmers happen to just make in the course of ten minute. If you had any part in creating this game, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is another sad excuse of milking a licensed cash cow of a very popular franchise. This is a game you play if you want to get yourself angry. If you're old and you have kids, you're not doing your kids a favor by buying this game. If you happened to receive this game from your parents or relatives as a gift, they don't love you anymore. And you wonder why your kids don't play the games you buy for them anymore. Don't encourage the growth of terrible games based on excellent franchises. Don't buy this game if you love your kids, value your money, or want to keep your stress level stable.

Grades
Graphics: C
Sound: B
Controls: D
Gameplay: F
Overall: F