When you review games, you tend to love to see diversity in gameplay. This is especially true when it comes to story modes and main portions of the game that you go through. Harry Potter games run the gambit from awesome to downright dreadfully bad! There are tons of these games and they also run the gambit from very affordable to costing a fortune! Goblet of Fire, somehow, has the best of both worlds. For the Playstation 2, it is extremely cheap and the game itself is quite awesome. The best part? Two player mode is equal parts teamwork and self gratification when you take down a whole bunch of lizards and pick up whole bunches of Bertie Bott's Beans! That's right, not Galleons, we're going for Jellybeans!
The monsters are also quite different. Some of them have never been in Harry Potter lore, some of them are there, but they're completely different. None of that actually matters, but it does give you quite a bit of interesting new gameplay. The lizards are reused as regular gecko-like things and as fire gecko-like things and those are the ones that take the water along with the stunning spells. The greatest feeling of teamwork comes when one of you sprays them with water while the other just keeps casting "Stupefy" (it is called something else, for some reason, but it's Stupefy).
The graphics are the gem of the mid 2000's and the controls leave a tiny bit to be desired, but the feeling and atmosphere are spot on! It didn't age like wine but it certainly stayed functional in every way. Call it a time capsule by look and feel. The controls and the guide through the physics can be somewhat confusing. It doesn't always have a great runthrough of the tutorial but it's still easy enough to figure out over time. Sometimes, the objective isn't said by any of the characters until you've been at it for a few minutes. It doesn't hurt if you explore the area around you, because if you get close, it can trigger the instructions to be spoken. Just play with the controls for a bit, it'll be fine.
The story is kind of stupid, but you really don't need to pay attention. The fact that you need to do all of these things for Mad-Eye Moody is keeping with the book, but at the same time, if you know the book and/or movie, you probably don't want to. It's all in the guise of having a different take on Defence Against the Dark Arts classes, and eventually we might get to Voldemort. To be honest, these cut scnes were mostly skipped. My player 2 wasn't too taken with any of it and its lower quality got slightly annoying rather than crudely charming.
For fans of the Harry Potter series with a player 2, this is a must have. You don't get a lot in the ways of lore or the books. It barely does anything from the movie, but you get plenty of Harry Potter in general. The greatest parts of the game are where you get plenty for everyone to do and there is usually a good group of mobs as such. If there is only one, you can ensnare it while smashing it together! Even with the nonsensical spells with complicated names not from the books, it has the equivalent. It has your favorites from the Golden Trio and you can be any two while you play. Not everyone can be Harry Potter. It's not like there have been multiple Harrys before or anything. Virtua Moving On!
