Video Games Review

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows

December 15th, 2010 - No Comments

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Wizards, as we know, conjure spells at the snap of their fingers, create giant fireballs and call down lightning with a sweep of their arms.

Imagine playing a wizard in a game using the Kinect, which can detect how you move your hands and lets you dish out spells at the twitch of your finger.

Sounds like fun?

Alas, the latest Harry Potter game for Kinect is nothing like that.

There are actually two games here. The one that follows the events of the movie is the main game that uses the classic controller, while the Kinect segment is a series of challenges for one or two players.

In each segment, Harry uses spells like a machine gun to take out his enemies. Players have to swing their arm one way to cast the attack spell Stupefy, raise both hands to call up the protection shield Protego and perform other movements to cast other spells.

But that is all there is because the flow of the game is a little like Time Crisis, where the sequence is guided. Players move to a scene, attempt to kill everyone and the game moves to another scene where the action repeats itself.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Never mind that the Kinect can track a player’s body – the game is all about hand movements. You can see a spell coming at you but you do not avoid it by ducking, only by casting Protego to fend it off. As ducking and moving do not come into play, the fun and gameplay are limited.

The gameplay comes across as more like a Wii game, where players have no other movement options but to swing their arms.

Another puzzling limitation is that while players can learn new movements to cast new spells for each level, they can use only two spells per level.

That this game failed to extract more from Kinect’s motion-sensing capabilities suggests that the game’s publisher and developer Electronic Arts (EA) may have been rushing it for release and could not make a better game in time.

Or perhaps in EA’s eagerness to be part of the crop of launch titles, it decided to simply slap on basic Kinect features to the game.

Either way, it means gamers end up with half-baked games, which is never good for a new platform, especially if other developers follow suit.

Play Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows now!