Box Art

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or with some part of crazy strict religious cult you’ll know of Harry Potter. Like Haribo, kids and grown ups love it so. J.K Rowling’s certainly been doing pretty well for herself spawning seven books making billions out of it. Of course you can’t have a large worldwide popular franchise without some merchandising and spin offs. Harry Potter is certainly guilty of this. As the series grew so did the tone. Abandoning the more childish themes of previous books, The Deathly Hallows is a darker and more adult story.

For those who need a little catch up, The Deathly Hallows is the first part of a two part adventure which involves Harry Potter flunking out of Hogwarts due to the death of Dumbledore. Voldermort is rising in strength and it’s up to Harry and his friends to destroy the Horcruxes – items which give Voldermort his immortal power.

Throughout most of the game you’ll go through a third person shooter fashion with some small stealth elements thrown in. The main problem with the style of the game is that you’ll often be blocked by objects in the environment as you try to attack the enemies. Furthermore aiming is annoying. There’s no auto aim to aid you making the imprecise and inaccurate targeting cumbersome.

The game follows a linear fashion and this is one of the problems for the game. When you’re not being frustrated by the mass amounts of enemies constantly spawning, you’ll be annoyed by the repetitive look of the environment. This can get confusing as you’ll sometimes wonder which direction you were facing originally. The quests are also amazingly bland as you’ll often find yourself A: clearing out a room, B: Going from one place to the other and C: nothing else. The inclusion of trying to find people or items does little to add variety to the already bland objectives.

Furthermore the character designs are as soul-less and drab as their surroundings. You could say the characters lack character themselves.

The camera also poses a massive problem for the game. It’ll often pop to random places on its own accord and this is particularly frustrating due to the motion sensing nature of the game. This makes it particularly horrible when it comes to the cover system. The camera fails to take this into account and your screen will be blocked by an object.

If the book series were anything like this game, it would fail miserably. The game suffers from horrible controls, horrible design and horrible cameras. When it does make an attempt to add anything interesting it fails miserably.

+ Follows the story line in some ways at least
+ Should appease hardcore fans if they ignore the negatives

- Horrible controls
- Horrible cameras
- Amazingly bland

SCORE 2 / 10