8.2

Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix continues the brilliant series further forward.

The Harry Potter series of books has captured millions of the children and adults in their minds and souls. The latest game launched on PS2, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix makes the trend to continue. There is faithful recreation of the Hogwarts campus to find and to explore more.

Order of the Phoenix follows the story of the book and the movie. After avoiding the expulsion for using magic a little in front of a muggle, Harry finds that Hogwart’s new defence techniques against the dark arts teachers is likely to have it out for him. Harry fears that the school will be unable to defend itself as Voldemort threatens to rear his ugly mug again and again making the situation more badly.

Though the gamebox informs that you will get to play as Dumbledore and Sirius Black, you do that for not more than five minutes, so you need to spend almost entire game in controlling Harry. Yes, Hermione and Ron will always be at your side giving you hints and pathways. The game also starts with basic tutorial for the sake of easy understanding.

The game does a decent job of showing you where the people are and where the places are; till you meet anyone and once you meet with someone, you are quite often on your own when it is the time to figure out how to help the person whom you have met.

When you are out of the role of the messenger boy, you spend most of the time cleaning up the Hogwarts by putting paintings and statues. You can also go for searching the area behind the curtains for giant chess pieces, move blocks to go for hidden plaques, sweep floors or light torches.

Visually, the Order of the Phoenix is best. Many places in Hogwarts like grand staircase or a great hall, look spectacular and is explained in very detail though many of the huge halls look the same and are largely empty. When you cast them, combat spells really look attractive but one has to keep in mind that there are few duels, which you rarely get to enjoy seeing the spells in an action.

Other than low quality in-game cut scenes and some nasty aliasing, the Wii version and PS2 versions still stand perfect by all the means. No doubt that sometimes PS2’s frame rate is quite iffy at times. For PS 2, you cast spells by pressing a button to locate your wand and to move the right analog stick in a specific pattern.

It is quite difficult to understand the game wholly if you have not gone through the book and this makes player scratching head many times while playing the game. The graphics and the quality of sound are undoubtedly good. The game goes long way towards putting you in the magical world and makes you feel like a theatre as it has actors from the films voice their characters in it. The familiar musical score rocks and suites perfectly to the game with great support form PS2.