Harry Potter Fans Unite! And then go forth and destroy EA Games. Why? I give unto you the DS Version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Prepare to eat walls of text as your gamer soul feels the slow burn of Avada Kedavra DS style. If you loved the books and the movie then plan to disappointed as you experience a loss of memory, as all the horcuxes, curses, memory flashbacks, and battles are never seen. Instead you get some random plot and flat cuts scenes of your cell shaded hero, while experiencing the mini game madness, made longer by having to literally walk all over Hogwart’s to find said mini games. Hold onto your brooms, because this is going to be a bumpy ride. . . straight down.
Your a Wizard Harry, but it won’t save you from this game.
Let the mini games and scavenger hunt begin! Welcome to the mini-game collection of the Half-Blood Prince. In order to get through the have baked plot that doesn’t even flow into the books, Harry must run around doing jobs for all the lazy students at Hogwarts. But the mini-games should be fun right? Right?! Ok lets play some quidditch. It’s an overhead view where the players are dots, yes dots. It is the quidditch equivalent of X and O football. Trace that stylus and tap to attack and shoot. Gobstones a marbles game, and Exploding Snap a card matching game make their return from previous DS games. The new mini is Wizard Skittles, a cross between pinball and curling!
You’d have to have lost your marbles to WANT to play this.
Dueling is available if help you vent your anger at the lazy students. You duel against classmates until you face your arch nemesis Draco Malfoy. The actions take place up at the top screen, while you tap out actions below to defend or attack, with your stylus. Scribble on the right to use levicorpus and then slaughter your opponent with attacks.
Scarred for life. Harry is given a copy of this game.
Forcing you to mix potions to advance the plot is another way they lengthen the playtime of this game. It’s wizard cooking momma. You have to be quick an precise but you have only your stylus so anyone watching you will think you have the shakes, while making potions.
Cooking Momma, Snape Style
Graphically the cell shaded graphics work ok for DS. They deliver on acceptable visuals for each the Harry Potter characters as long as you don’t look too closely at them. The setting for the mini game graphics aren’t too clunky. Also the maps of Hogwarts are fun for the die hard fan, but will get kind of dull after your sixth lap around the building trying to find the correct potions class or random item for some student. The “cutscenes” fall short of the term cut scene as they are even lower rez sprites , frozen in front of some flat background expounding their wall of text. With the video available for the DS at the making of this game, and the amount of memory they utilize for this cart, they could have upped the graphics a bit or used video compression, instead of sinking it in the databases of text you’ll be reading in order to see any of these visual.
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Visually, it doesn’t get better than this.
I will have to admit sound effect and musically this cart actually works well. The DS-ized soundtrack doesn’t have the amazing orchestrations of the movie’s soundtrack, but it doesn’t sound like cheap 10$ midi keyboard either. The sound effects for the actions and mini games actually correspond well with what you’re seeing visually. The drawback is, what your seeing visually is poorly done.
I can’t really recommend this game to anyone other than the die hard Harry Potter fan that has to have every single item put out related to the books. For the casual gamer this could be a somewhat ok way to kill time if it wasn’t for the relentless searching. For the regular gamer, the mini games will become repetitive and bore them quickly. So enjoy the movie and book, but don’t point your wands at this game. They may break.
