Hey, kids?! Remember all of the excitement and drama that goes on throughout Harry Potter's later series? Remember how some of it was alright while the rest of it was meh? Yeah, well, you really couldn't have picked a worse subject for a fast-paced video game. If any of you have read the sixth book, you'll know that it doesn't exactly lend itself to a game like this in any capacity. The ending scene had some excitement, but beyond that, it was Harry being stupid about Malfoy, some shallow plot around horcruxes with Professor Slughorn and Dumbledore having a sore hand before going for a tumble. It's understandable that this would be rough to make a game out of, but even under those limitations, it seems like someone could have thought of something better.
So, unlike The Order of the Phoenix, I went ahead played the Wii version of this one. While it did do better with the motion controls, it did not make this game anymore interesting or longer. That's right, this game lasts around three, maybe four hours. The mechanics are as simple as they could make them and not in a good way. All you do in this game is duel with wands, mix potions and fly on a broom through rings. That's right, someone didn't think that flying through rings on Superman 64 was lame enough, they needed to give it to Harry Potter for broom practice and Quidditch because, why not?
This game is also very boring. Half-Blood Prince wasn't known for its exciting scenes and even the fighting is nonsensical within the book and the movie. The motion controls add a little bit of novelty to this game, but certainly not enough to make me want to play it anymore. Some people love potion simulators and honestly, I can see the charm in it. If this were called Harry Potter's Potion Class, with both timed and regular rounds, it could have been a cool little minigame for your phone or something. In a full release game, though, this just feels like a cheap knockoff to an actual title.
If this were part of a larger game, it could have been thought of as a good bit of filler. As it stands, though, there just really isn't that much to talk about. The graphics are what you'd expect from the time: Slightly uncanny valley movie characters who look like puppets of the actors. The Wii era really knew how to make humans look wishy washy either way. The voice work isn't bad... but it isn't very good either. They sound like the actors who forgot how to talk properly and come off as stilted and lifeless.
The worst parts came in the form of the Quidditch controls. You need to point the wand at the screen and move it around in the direction you want them to fly on their broom. This is a little harder than it sounds, especially with such small targets to fly through. As a novelty, this can come as a cool mini-game, much like the potions class, but the controls for it can get very frustrating as the broom sometimes decides not to do as you instruct.
The game is improved if you decide to play its intended format. This may improve the 5th game's score if it wasn't played on the PS2, but that's really not saying much in terms of an actual game. This is still comparable to a series of Mario Party mini-games that does not lend itself well at all to a full retail Wii game. The Wii is rather infamous for these types of titles, and there are worse examples. It's really just a shame that they went with the trendy, easier titles to make after such a peak as the Goblet of Fire game. For some reason, they went less mature in the later series for their subject material. With such a shallow game, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people were disappointed in this game. It wasn't within their power to create a Hogwarts Legacy type game yet, so we can't give them too much grief on that, but they could have come up with something better than this. It doesn't really bode well for the Deathly Hallows games, but we'll see how that goes. Virtua Flobberworms.
