- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Developer: EA Bright Light
- ESRB Rating: “T" for Teen
- Genre: Third-Person-Shooter
- Pros: Kinect mode is fun for a while; decent visuals
- Cons: Poorly told story; cover system is broken; stealth sections suck; awful combat
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows follows the story of Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they leave the safety of Hogwarts to seek out and destroy Horcruxes created by Voldemort. What is a Horcrux? It is an item that has a piece of a person's soul inside of it, and the only way to ultimately kill Voldemort is to destroy all of his Horcruxes. One problem, though, is that they don't really know where to even start looking.
In the book, this uncertainty led to a lot of bickering between the three while hiding in a ratty old tent. In the game, they miraculously come up with ideas on the spot and you are whisked away to new missions and locations without any real reasoning. Major plot points and important things are either skipped over entirely or told through awkwardly directed cutscenes that don't really make sense. This game utterly fails at telling a pretty important story. I suppose it could be argued that anyone playing the game already knows the story, which is probably true, but it is still hard to follow because it is very poorly paced and there is a lot of extra pointless stuff thrown in that doesn't move the story along and only serves to confuse you. Like I said above, this is a Harry Potter experience in name only.
Gameplay
EA
But none of it is all that fun. You tend to have to cast spells so rapid fire that it just gets repetitive and boring very early on. There is also far, far too much combat overall. The cover system is pretty much broken as well, as your own spells hit the cover more often than not, and enemy spells can still hit you even if you think you're hidden.
The only other part of the gameplay is the occasional level where you have to use the Invisibility Cloak to sneak around in a first-person perspective. For some reason, the cloak runs out of juice every 20 steps or so, so you have to stand still and wait for it to recharge. These sections are rarely difficult as long as you take your time, and even if you do get spotted you can run around a corner and put the cloak back on and everyone forgets you were there.
Kinect
The game also has a Kinect mode available as well, which while not particularly good, is better than the standard game with a normal controller. The Kinect mode (and be warned, when you first select the Kinect mode in the menu your Xbox 360 seems like it hard freezes, just be patient and it will load eventually) plays like an on-rails shooter where Harry moves on his own and you just have to wave your hand to cast spells at the dozens of Death Eaters that pop up all over. You cast different spells with different hand motions - stupefy just has you sort of pointing forward repeatedly, confundo has you raise your left hand above your shoulder, then point with your right, and expelliarmus has you raise your right hand to charge it up before pointing forward to cast it, etc. - and the spells actually work fairly well. You don't even have to aim, just cast spells. Once you get the proper moves for each spell down, they are easy to cast consistently. It is actually pretty fun, but it does get repetitive very quickly. And your arm will get very tired from casting dozens and dozens of spells. Fun for a while, but not worth buying the game for.
EA
Visually, the game can be decent at times. The environments generally look okay, and the character models for Harry, Ron, and Hermione look fairly good. Models for Death Eaters and other enemeis aren't so good, though, and look kind of undetailed and ugly and the same handful of designs repeat a lot. Spells generally look great, and some set pieces are quite stunning.
Sound
The sound is a similar mishmash of good and bad. The music is good. The voice acting is generally okay. At least, outside of combat. During combat all you hear are the same spell names called out over, and over, and over. And over.
Bottom Line
In the end, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 is an utter disappointment. After how much we enjoyed the last two Harry Potter games on Xbox 360 (along with LEGO Harry Potter), this is a real letdown. We understand that it needed to be different because it is outside of Hogwarts, the story is darker, and the characters are supposed to be more mature, but "mature" and "dark" shouldn't automatically turn it into a combat heavy shooting game! Particularly when those mechanics (cover, shooting, stealth) don't even work very well. This just isn't a good game. Don't buy it, but you might rent it if you have Kinect and want to try something new for an hour or so.
