I have been a fan of the Harry Potter books for almost five years. Naturally, this affinity extends to some of the other Harry Potter products such as Lego sets and video games. I have already been disappointed twice by mediocre Harry Potter games, but I was sure that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would be different from its predecessors.
Unfortunately, I was wrong; PoA was not just as bad as its predecessors, it was actually much worse. This is rather disappointing because there were some new elements of gameplay that could have made this game stand out from the pile of mediocre licensed games.
Ostensibly, the plot of PoA is based on the book and movie of the same name. It would be unreasonable to expect the developers of the game to be able to include most of the scenes from the book/movie; frankly, there are several scenes that would not make a smooth translation to the world of video games. That said, much of the game consists of material from the book/movie, but I found it rather problematic that the developers seemed to run out of ideas and had to resort to making up the plot. In one memorable level, Ron visits Harry in the hospital wing and tells him that Sirius Black is hiding in the dungeons. Harry eagerly follows Ron only to find out that “Ron” is really Draco Malfoy. Apparently, Malfoy just put together a Polyjuice potion and really wants to get even with Harry. This is certainly a memorable way to start another predictable problem-solving “dungeon” crawling level, but it just doesn’t make any sense; it’s as if they turned the story department over to bad fan-fiction writers.
While PoA retains the basic elements of gameplay from the previous games (the aforementioned pseudo dungeon-crawling), there is also an entirely new aspect of the game. In addition to controlling Harry Potter, players will now also control Harry’s friends Ron and Hermione. Sometimes, Ron and Hermione find themselves on solo missions; this is tolerable, for the most part, and allows the player to utilize each character’s unique abilities and spells. However, at other points, the player must switch between the three characters. While this certainly adds a new twist to gameplay, it can get rather tedious since each of the three characters is highly specialized. This means that players will constantly be switching between the three characters because they does not seem to be able to do anything by themselves. In short, it is often very clear what objectives need to be met in order to solve a puzzle, but the actual execution of the plan take three times as long because of the constant switching between characters. The puzzles themselves are not very hard, but they may be more difficult for the target audience of school-aged children. I was rather disappointed that, once again, the game included jumping elements, but failed to factor in a button to make the characters jump. Once again, one must make Harry Potter run headlong towards a cliff and hope that he jumps at the edge. This brings up an ideal of example of how ridiculously specialized the characters are: Only Harry Potter can jump. If you try to make Ron or Hermione jump, they will not be able to do it. This specialization makes gameplay downright tedious. The designers did provide a number of widgets and doodads to collect to pass the time, but these don’t do much to enhance the gameplay.
Before this game was released, I found myself wondering how the developers would tackle the hippogriff-flying portion of the game. To be frank, this had the potential to be one of the most interesting parts of the game, but it was ruined by imprecise control and stuttering graphics. Also, I was rather disappointed that the hippogriff level replaced the Quidditch portions in the game. I found the incorporation of Quidditch into the world of Harry Potter video games to be rather ingenious. The absence of these portions was very noticeable; Quidditch was sorely missed on the part of this reviewer.
To be honest, the graphics have made an improvement since the Chamber of Secrets game. This is a rather nice surprise; character models are more defined and the scenery looks nicer than it did in previous Harry Potter games. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are occasional graphical stutters and the characters will occasionally get stuck in the walls or on objects.
The aural aspects are equally uninspiring. While there is nothing wrong with them, they are simply not very impressive at all. The characters are not voiced at all by the actors who appear in the movie. While this might have been acceptable at one time, it is now almost de rigueur to expect actors to reprise their roles in video games. The musical score is rather unmemorable and the sound effects get old very quickly.
In late 2002, I ended my review of the Chamber of Secrets game with the optimistic statement that the developers had about a year and half to get the Prisoner of Azkaban game right. While my expectations were not met, I would like to remain optimistic. The next Harry Potter movie, Goblet of Fire, is not scheduled to be released until November of 2005. This gives the developers another year and a half to finally get things right. Here’s to hoping that they bring the franchise to the level at which it deserves to be.
