Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the PS2

Straight out of the opening cut scene you'll notice how forced the gameplay is. While the games have always followed closely with the movies, this one throws random cut scenes at you that involve a lot of terrible voice acting and are about as exciting as watching paint dry. Ignoring the cut scenes and moving on to the actual game, it does a lot of the work for you. Characters follow you around and don't bother to hide the fact that they're giving you hints. Instead they frequently pop up and explain "Go this way Harry!" or the game simply whisks you there during a cut scene so it won't have to waste its time waiting for you to run there yourself.

While the Harry Potter series has never been at the top of the list for the most ground-breaking games of the year, the new one lacks any depth at all. Simple tasks and challenges have always been a part of the series, but they had a decent story that went at a good pace. They were also a nice way to pass the time while waiting for the release of the newest Harry Potter movie, and could even be a nice challenge to solve the puzzles in. This game rewards you with a rushed storyline that feels thrown together, even to those who have read the books, and has no thought put into the mediocre tasks you're assigned.

With the new PS3 and the Xbox 360 on the market, no one can expect the PS2 to have the best graphics around, but the older Harry Potter games used what resources they had much better than Harry Potter 6 does. While the past games had some minor bugs with cameras zooming into walls and people's heads suddenly turning inside out, that's nothing compared to the latest mess. Even by PS2 standards the graphics for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, quite simply, are horrendous.

The characters are like choppy, colored boxes. Their faces move in odd positions while they're talking that make them appear to be chewing large wads of gum, and the voice acting is so low and poorly done for most characters that they're impossible to understand without subtitles. Even the cut scenes don't bother to step up the graphics any.

What's worse than the graphics is how sluggish they make the controls. A more in-depth look at the controls for Harry Potter is discussed on the next page, but the graphics seem to mess those controls up as well. Objects are hard to see, and often the boundaries around an object seem to stick out much farther than they should, causing you to bounce off objects while flying that you never even saw.

The only improvement to the graphics is the castle, which looks a bit more detailed than earlier games and doesn't create as many glitches while running around or trying to climb stairs. But this comes at the sacrifice of a smaller world and fewer rooms to explore.