Customer Reviews

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My family rented this game for a week and My boyfriend who's 30 and myself love it. It's a perfect game for the WII since you actually get to use the remote as a wand and perform spells. You get really in to it. The only con is that there is a lot of walking around to find things and to do your tasks. There's some little bugs with the remote in doing spells, sometimes it will do a different spell than the one you want. My 9 year old LOVES it. He likes how it's interactive and how the characters are more real. He did have a little trouble with some spells but after practicing he did good. I would recomend this game for anyone who has a WII and likes Harry Potter

I'm a newcomer to the Harry Potter game franchise, so I can't compare this game to the previous entries in the series.

I'm a fan of adventure games in general, especially the classic titles from Sierra and LucasArts, so it was a great treat to have such a large and immersive environment to explore.

Hogwarts looks gorgeous, and the game designers have done a magnificent job making it look every bit like the sets from the Harry Potter films. The castle is HUGE, and you'll spend quite a bit of time discovering all sorts of hidden goodies. The voice acting is top-notch, using some of the actual actors from the film, and the character models do resemble their movie counterparts.

All that being said, the actual gameplay is tedious. Most of your time will be spent running errands. Advancing through the game consists of talking to a character only to discover that he/she needs an item in a wholly different area of the castle. Puzzles are sparse and not terribly challenging -- all you really need to do is figure out which of the spells in your repertoire need to be cast on the available items. For the most part, you'll be using Wingardium Leviosa to move objects around.

The Wii-specific wand controls are fun in their own way, and add to the feeling of "being there" but in the end the actual game isn't that deep or challenging. Replay value is limited, as there's really no deviating from the main tasks, besides hunting down every last hidden chess statue or broken masonry in need of a Reparo spell.

I can only really recommend this to hard-core fans of the Harry Potter books and films. As a game it's not that great, but it's a beautiful presentation of Hogwarts that you'll spend hours exploring.

The previous Harry Potter Games all have their highs and lows as far as gameplay meets the Potterverse goes. This time around the focus is around the storyline of Order of The Phoenix specifically the film adaptation. The castle is a fully realized vision full of all the things you would expect and a few surprises. The Marauders map figures large into gameplay as well with black padfeet leading your way from destination to destination. This is all wonderfully implemented, the real issues here are a slighty subpar graphical quality at times (jaggy) and characters that look like lifeless CG versions of themselves. The wand controls can be problematic but if you use sublte hand movements versus big grand gestures you'll find that you can get spells to fire in a reliable fashion. The game is fairly short with the first 50% being made up of the search for members of the DA.. The voice acting is above average and the spell duels are engaging but there are too few. Overall EA has brought a respectable digital version of OOTP to the table, but in the end my favorite part of this game was the minigames. Chess and Gobstones which add some much needed fun diversion to a fairly straightforward game.

I borrowed my friend's Wii for a month when he went away and I bought this game because I felt that the Wii controllers would be fantastic for all the spell making. I was not disappointed! Exploring the grounds of Hogwarts was amazing and the the graphics were extremely detailed. It totally brought the story to life. Bear in mind that most of my gaming experience has been with the old NES and SNES so perhaps the graphics would not be so impressive to gamers today. My only complaint is that sometimes the controller would get a bit confused about my movements when casting spells, but apart from that I absolutely loved it!

The game is alot of fun and follows the movie and book fairly well. Some of the wand movements are a little hard to perform. Wish it could be multi player- didn't know that before purchasing. Overall, fun and keeps you going for a long time.

I'm the mom in the family and I bought this primarily for my Harry-crazy kids, but I've played through it myself and enjoy it quite a bit. I think it will appeal to casual gamers like me who like to think through situations. For example, you level-up in power by collecting points throughout Hogwarts. My kids didn't notice that the beds in the dormitories and the hospital wings all needed to be made. Poof! 200 points right there for tidying up. All the torches throughout the castle need to be lit, and there are clever nods to the previous books (hint: you can open the Chamber of Secrets in Myrtle's bathroom). When the story line is complete, you can enter "endless day" mode and try to figure out the hidden points you haven't discovered yet. Some are quite challenging.

I recommend this, along with "Endless Ocean" to those parents out there who bought a Wii system primarily for their kids and want to enjoy it without a lot of frenzied shot-em-up action.

Of course when this game first came out I thought it would be the greatest thing in the world being able to use the wiimote to cast spells such as the famous swish and flick (wingardiumleviosa). Well, turns out your just tilt the wiimote and nunchuck upwards, :).

The basic premesis of this game is you use the nunchuck to guide Harry around Hogwarts (obnoxiously followed by Ron and Hermione EVERYWHERE) and complete little tasks assigned to you. One of the more major ones is trying to get everybody from the DA in the Room of Requierement which requires you to find everybody on your map and do things for them so that they agree to go.

You also do little things around the school like find secret passages to shorten your trips from place to place (it REALLY helps), play wizard chess and marbles, put paintings back in place, fix statues, find animal prints, etc. all to get magical points to increace the power of your spells and various other bonuses.

The spells are like I said, the simple motion of the wiimote and/or nunchuck such as a circular motion, a tilt, a shake side to side, etc. It IS pretty cool though because it's certainly more realistic than pressing the 'A' button a controller.

This game is probably better for younger kids who like Harry Potter and like the idea of magic or scavenger hunts. It's definitely not something for a hard core gamer or an obsessive Harry Potter fan, because you WILL be dissapointed.

Overall, the cons are that the spells are a bit difficult sometimes, especially wingardiumleviosa because you have to tilt the nunchukc and wiimote together so that it works on screen and it can be difficult. Also, when you want to go somewhere on the map, you have to click on that place and then little footsteps on the floor will lead you around. This can be a bit difficult to follow because they don't appear consistently and sometimes you can't tell which way they're facing. Also, you actually have to walk from one end of the castle to the other which could take up to a minute or two in the real world, which is honestly kind of annoying.

Anyways, the real reason I personally like the game, is because I get a feeling of accomplishment when I complete like a list of tasks, and that's basically what this game is. A list of people to see shows up on the Maurauder's Map and you go to them and do stuff and blah blah blah and it gets off your list.

Any person playing this game has to be familiar with the Harry Potter story, otherwise the idea of the game can be confusing..But if you do know the stories the game is great! The graphics are terrific, and the magic is great fun..

My family has the Prisoner of Azkaban for PC, Goblet of Fire for PC, and Order of the Phoenix for Wii. We like the Prisoner of Azkaban a lot, possibly more than the OotP. Goblet of Fire is TERRIBLE. Order of the Phoenix would be much better if it had a multi-player capacity. Why can't you have three friends playing as Harry, Ron and Hermione, swapping about in the action? Also, I agree with the comments about the wandering around. It does get tedious. But my 9 year old loves it, as do all her friends.

I have to agree with a previous reviewer who said that the game was tedious. I own all of the Harry Potter games and have to say that this is my least favorite. My kids got bored with it about half-way through and abandoned it for other games. Which is a first for them as they usually like to solve the game first. The game makers did a good job on the graphics and Hogwarts is gorgeous but the storyline does seem to be a little lacking.