For the past few months, all Harry Potter fans have been stamping their feet with impatience. The reason ? The cinema release in a few days of the penultimate chapter of the saga, taken from the books of JK Rowling. And yes, next year, the adventures of Harry on the big screen will be over and our wizard will only have to make way for a new franchise. The end of an era... But let's see the good side of things: whoever says the end of the Harry Potter films also says the end of the video games based on them. A boon as it is true that these franchise games have never really convinced us, especially the latest, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One, which is even less convincing than the previous ones.
On the brink of death...
"The more things change, the more they stay the same" once said the most famous one-eyed hero of cinema: Snake Plisten. Like almost all games based on the adventures of the bespectacled wizard, Harry Potter 7 suffers from a rather unfortunate flaw: it is only intended for fans of the books/films who have read/seen all the previous episodes and for whom the twists and turns of the universe imagined by JK Rowling would hold no secrets. The first minutes of play are also surprising. No summary of previous episodes, no small reminders of facts and characters, we are directly immersed in the adventure without knowing precisely where we are in the story. Barely time to put a name on a face that we are already at the heart of an adventure whose ins and outs we have long since forgotten (who remembers the end of Harry Potter 6?) and of which we will certainly not know the outcomes, since we know very well that the eighth and last episode has not yet been released. The story of the game will therefore follow year after year that of the film. Except that here, the developers have obviously not found enough material in this seventh episode to draw a game with an honorable lifespan. What results is simply hilarious: between two passages inspired by scenes from the film, the player will have to complete a few "bonus" levels scattered here and there (escape from a dragon's lair, eliminate a bunch of opponents, liberate prisoner friends...) without any consistency. Suffice to say that the narration and the scenario then become so disjointed that the players will certainly be completely dropped.
We indeed find all the defects that are detrimental to this kind of title, namely frankly limited graphics [...], an obvious lack of challenge, a camera more restrictive than anything else, minimalist gameplay leading to great repetitiveness and an enemy AI that borders on nothingness."
As with each episode, the developers have once again changed the "genre" of the game to offer us this year a kind of Gears of War with Potter sauce (understand by this, an ultra-simplistic third-person action game) , in which the player will have to cross long ultra linear levels by stunning everything that moves, armed with his wand (capable of sending a dozen different spells) and a few potions acting as secondary weapons. Sometimes, some missions ask us to play it infiltration via phases in subjective view during which Harry, hidden under his invisible cape, must cross a level without getting caught. The idea is not bad in itself, except that it faces two major problems. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine children under 10 finding their happiness in this kind of ultra nag title and without any magic (a shame for a game stamped Harry Potter). On the other, we remind you that competition is fierce on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and that older players can easily find better elsewhere. It is unfortunately not by its realization if its gameplay that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One will raise the overall level. We find indeed all the defects that are detrimental to this kind of title, namely frankly limited graphics (poor textures, technical bugs, enemies that all look alike...), an obvious lack of challenge, a more restrictive camera than anything else, a minimalist gameplay leading to great repetitiveness and an enemy AI that borders on nothingness. Add to that a not fully operational aiming aid system and endless blabbering phases, and you have the old-fashioned recipe for "derived product" games that bring shame both to the works from which they are derived and to the consoles on which they are exploited. Come on, a good wave of the magic wand, and we forget all that.
