Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince



You'll love

* Hogwarts is pleasantly detailed and realistic
* Typically great Potter soundtrack
* Mixing potions is fun

You'll hate

* Lots of wandering, not much doing
* Main 'activity' is pointing with the remote
* Some of the characters look a bit strange


What EA giveth, EA taketh away. For every improvement or addition to the Harry Potter series there must be a subtraction – presumably to keep the universe balanced or something. Order of the Phoenix introduced a sprawling, detailed version of Hogwarts, for example, but scraped out every shred of ‘game’ as a result. The great hope for Half-Blood Prince was that the pretty, but pretty empty, castle of Phoenix would now be filled with stuff to do. Admittedly, there are more activities, but quite a lot has been taken out as recompense.

Still, Harry should be used to sacrifice. Now in his sixth year, the grumpy magic orphan has to balance his studies with the prophecy of him offing Voldemort, all while figuring out how that blonde dick Malfoy keeps disappearing off the Marauder’s Map. It’s one of those licensed games that presumes you have an intimate knowledge of the story already, as evidenced by the fact that the delivery is consistently terrible. Major scenes are rushed and often incomprehensible, treated primarily as inconveniences that get in the way of the structure of the game.

It’s a narrative the player has almost no role in, except in the few situations where the story intersects with one of the three – yes, three – activities at the game’s core. ‘So-and-so needs this potion, go and make it will you.’ ‘It’s time for Quidditch practice.’ ‘Potter, I’m gonna duel you silly.’ There are a couple of out-there moments that offer variety and engage with the story properly, but most of the game revolves around potions, dueling and – sigh – Quidditch.

Let’s start with potions, as it’s the Big New Thing in Half-Blood Prince. It’s brilliant. You use the remote to pick up bottles and other ingredients, and then tip it sideways to pour them into your bubbling cauldron. The remote also stirs the gloopy mixture, and in tandem with the Nunchuk you can do a fist-pumping motion to heat the potion up. Not having ever made a potion we can’t judge how accurate it all is, but the gestures are spot-on and fun to perform – it’s a truly great minigame.

But it is still a minigame though, and like all the others it’s overused to the point where the thought of making another vial of magic juice makes you want to punch Jim Broadbent (the new Potions master) in the back of the head. Dueling, returning from the previous Potter game, similarly outstays its welcome even if in the short term it’s a pyrotechnic blast. New to this edition is two-player competitive dueling, which should keep you diverted for a while.



The previous Potter games have never managed to make anything good out of Quidditch, and this outing is no exception. As a sport it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but to see it reduced to a game where you fly through glowing hoops – and that’s honestly the extent of it – is disappointing. Compared to the other activities, it’s pointless, lazy and dull.

These three minigames form the bulk of the curriculum, but if you can’t get enough – and you probably will get enough – you can join clubs in each area and while away your free time challenging students to duels, mixing potions or chasing the snitch. But, seemingly in exchange, some of the previous title’s minigames have been axed. Say goodbye to Gobstones, Wizard Chess and Exploding Snap. Er, why? They were already implemented – EA could have just copied and pasted them from one game to the other. Sure, that would be lazy, but why remove them completely?

With fewer ways to interact with the other students – and seemingly fewer objects to cast spells on – the castle feels less alive. In Order of the Phoenix you were rewarded with ‘Discovery Points’ for exploring the environment, but this has been replaced with collectable crests that unlock health bonuses and other trinkets instead. It’s a slightly better system but the rewards are still essentially futile. How about giving us enchanted objects we can equip and play around with? There’s a whole world of magic to the books and movies that the games don’t even bother grappling with.

It’s short too: just five hours long, with an incoherent story you won’t want to replay and no real incentives for exploring. It’s worse than the last game in almost every way. Except potions. Making potions rocks.