Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban is a great game, but I think it falls far short of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in terms of gameplay, atmosphere, and most certainly duration. I enjoyed the chance to play as Ron and Hermione, but it's not as if you choose one for a certain situation - it's all predetermined by the game itself. I was happiest when the trio stayed together and worked as a team - a number of different actions require the skills of more than one of our young wizard characters. Nice new additions such as this to the HP gaming experience turn out, unfortunately, to be few and far between. Much more is lost than is gained here.
The graphics are quite good, for the most part, but they just don't make Hogwarts come to life. In fact, Harry is pretty much just thrown down in the middle of the place and sent to class without any adequate introduction - there's no animation clip of Harry's departure from the Dursley household, no get-together in the Great Hall, only the briefest of welcomes from Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall, and little chance to really settle in. Hogwarts itself seems to lack character, especially when viewed from outside the grounds - I never felt as if I were really "home." The experience is further diminished by the nonexistence of Quidditch matches, a House Points Championship, or extracurricular activities such as wizard dueling. Then there's the length of the thing. Just as I was settling in and planning to get start exploring the place in earnest, I found myself almost at the end of the game. This feels more like a demo than a complete game. You basically only learn three new spells here, and the spell challenges are much shorter than those of the earlier Harry Potter games. And even though Hogwarts looks bigger in this game, there is much less to do and explore than I was expecting based on my memories of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The only association you really have with your professors is in the challenges; in fact, there is hardly any interconnection with characters other than Harry, Ron, and Hermione in the entire game (even Draco Malfoy is kept out of the picture almost completely). Things come much too easily, even when Harry has to battle a horde of Dementors. As bad a player as I am, I had little trouble advancing quickly past all of the challenges - that is a clear sign that the game is much too easy.
The game does have its good points. Flying Buckbeak is loads of fun and makes for an almost serene experience. Expecto Patronum makes a fine addition to Harry's repertoire of wizarding skills, the ability to create and temporarily control small dragons makes for a bit of a fun challenge, and Carpe Retractum offers up a different and rather risky way to get around inside a challenge. The ability to create little rabbits and send them out to explore the local area is fun at first but eventually feels a little silly. I also have mixed feelings about the new Glacius spell, largely because sliding down frozen streams of water just doesn't seem to jibe with my concept of Hogwarts and Harry Potter in particular. All of this points to the most problematic issue with the game - it all too often wanders far afield from the events of the novel and movie. This renders the whole Sirius Black storyline as almost incidental and anticlimactic at best. Giving the game designers such a free hand in terms of content seems to have led to a concentration on the gaming aspects rather than the storyline, and that weakens the whole experience.
Harry is basically just going through the motions in this third installment of the HP gaming saga. When I finished the Chamber of Secrets game, I went right back in and played it a second time. Having finished The Prisoner of Azkaban, I feel no such commitment to the experience and may or may not ever return to this adventure. It's still a fun game to play, but give me HP and the Chamber of Secrets any day over this newest addition to the HP gaming series.
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