After having played a few of the other Harry Potter games on the PS1 and PS2, I was really looking forward to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and anticipated that it would be a thrilling and spooky game that would keep me on the edge of my seat and wanting to play more... how wrong I was.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince takes us through Harry’s sixth year at Hogwarts; Voldemort is back to full power and posing a great threat to the wizarding world and Harry has to help Dumbledore find a way to defeat the Dark Lord by finding and destroying the Horcruxes whilst also keeping an eye on his nemesis Draco Malfoy who seems to be up to no good. Of course, he still has his school work and teenage relationships to keep astride of on top of all this. This story would give the game the opportunity to provide lots of exciting challenges but, it fails to follow through on this.
The majority of the important aspects of the game are all portrayed in narrative and involve little or no interaction. In fact, you don’t really do a great deal throughout the game and it all becomes very repetitive: you duel with Malfoy and his gang, learn a new potion in potions club and play Quidditch (which has to involve an annoying warm up before each match); these aspects are broken up with narrative, talking to Ron and Hermione and following Nearly Headless Nick around the castle before the repetition starts all over again.
In previous games, you have had to explore the castle to collect Witches and Wizards Cards, Beans and other objects however, in this game, all you collect are shields which you can pick up on your travels but, collecting these very quickly becomes boring.
Despite my first impressions that this would be a hard game to complete, I soon discovered that it was ridiculously easy, meaning I had finished with it all too quickly and was left feeling disappointed and slightly ripped off!
It may be that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince would be engaging on other gaming platforms but, sadly for the PS2 it’s really not worth the time of day.
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