'Half-Blood Prince' doesn't add up to much

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvoate.com
• Published: Jul 9, 2009

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 In his sixth year at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry Potter has surprisingly little to do. Well, there’s the small matter of preparing for a massive showdown between the forces of good and the armies of evil, but really, who has time for that when there are potions to be made and practice Quidditch matches to be played?

The main problem with “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is that it just isn’t clear who the game’s target audience is. It’s actually much easier to list precisely who the game isn’t meant for.

It isn’t aimed at fans of the series. The story is retold in a distorted and choppy fashion and doesn’t serve in any way as a good companion to either the novel or the film. There is perhaps something to be said for the large and well-realized nature of Hogwarts Castle itself, but your interaction with the world is so limited that walking the castle grounds is more like looking at a painting than actual exploration.

Nor is the game aimed at those who are largely unfamiliar with Harry Potter and are simply looking for a fun gaming experience. With the entirety of the gameplay consisting of three minigames – Dueling, Quidditch and Potions – and none of these games having much internal variety, the game gets old quickly.

Quidditch is the worst offender. You point the Wii Remote at the screen and, as Harry flies on a preset path, you move the remote to help him dodge obstacles and hit targets. It isn’t naturally terrible. It’s actually fun, for the first 30 seconds or so. After that, it just keeps going, and it never changes.

Dueling falls prey to similar flaws, with the added bonus of some motion-control maladies. You have two options in a duel. First, you can try to make use of all the spells at your disposal, resulting in a long, repetitive struggle to make the Wii Remote understand the you are trying to cast Expelliarmus, not Protego. The second option is to immobilize your opponent, then run up and shake the Wii Remote as fast as you can, turning your wand into a virtual magic missile machine gun and completely breaking any immersion. The good thing about this technique is it makes the fights mercifully shorter.

The final activity, making potions, comes the closest to being consistently fun. Adding ingredients and heating and stirring your concoctions is actually quite enjoyable, when it works. However, the process becomes unnecessarily complex by increasing the number of necessary ingredients, and the tall yellow bottle looks a lot like the thin yellow-orange bottle and you end up having to repeat a long recipe just because the Wii doesn’t have an HD video output, and the whole process sours a bit.

That’s it.

That’s all there is to the game, besides the run-to-one-end-of-the-castle-and-back intra-mission time. There are collectible crests scattered about the place, but all they unlock are minor time or power boosts for the mini-games or for the two-player Dueling mode.

Nothing about “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is exactly bad – except for the presentation of the story – but none of the three parts is good enough to make the game compelling as a whole. If you’re an absolute Potter fanatic, it might be rent-worthy just to take a 3-D tour of Hogwarts, but it doesn’t warrant a purchase from anyone.