Techtite Game Reviews ---

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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How disappointing is "disappointing"...? Let me lay it out for you. For three games running, the Harry Potter games have been an engaging departure from all the rubber-stamp "shoot everything moving" video game clichés available on the PC. The series reached nearly flawless heights with Prizoner of Azkaban, which had Harry defeating dementors, Ron jumping across perilous heights in mid-air, and Hermione controlling enchanted rabbits. What a cool children's game that was! Is it wrong to buy that game again...especially when the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire game is, well...not very good?

Let's begin by heralding the prior games' best asset; no level select screen! All levels were reached by freely walking through Harry's school, Hogwarts. To progress the story, simply go to Harry's next class...but why hurry? In between classes, you could complete side quests, use Bernie Bott Beans to buy secret items, search for secret rooms, and so on. This is the sort of quality befitting games that aren’t simple “movie tie-ins” rushed to store shelves. Tell that to the designers of this game, which replaces Hogwarts with a simplistic level select screen. Gone is any sense of story as you go to an incongruous menu and click, click, click. This is admittedly a minor grudge, but we're only getting started.

The fact is, all assets of the prior games have been either downgraded, or totally removed. This includes the "new" camera controls ---there aren't any!--- with the camera fixed in an annoying far-off angle. This particularly downplays this game's best asset: all three lead characters are striking likenesses of the film actors. Yet how much of an asset is this when you cannot actually see the characters' faces while playing? Sure, you can see them in the main menu screen, but...big whopping deal.

The game proper has been reduced to a simple bug hunt. The prior games had amusing platform style puzzles, where you'd have to seek out "hot spots" to use various spells in various ways, to get various items. It was a simple game, but it was fun. That fun has been replaced with a very trigger-happy barrage of enemies that attack in swarms, over and over again. While the game tries to make this seem less redundant with two spell keys instead of one, this only makes combat tedious. Press the charm spell button and maybe an enemy will be zapped, or maybe you'll simply hold them in place, while an ally defeats them with a "Jinx." Use the Jinx spell yourself, and maybe you'll defeat the enemy, though more likely, you'll just "stun" them. This isn't improving the original one-button magic option as much as making it all the more cumbersome.

Level maps are too linear. Sure, there are alternate paths to alternate "shields," which are collected to unlock later levels. Yet these shields are as easy to collect as 1) defeating the barrage of bad guys, and 2) having the right spell learned, to "unlock" or "open" whatever is blocking access to the shield. This style of gaming is as old as the original "shoot everything moving" shooter games of old, but at least those games had two things these levels lack. For one thing they had interesting enemies. For another; you had no life limit, so why worry? This game has your butt kicked by such inane adversaries as giant moths and, quite literally, leapin' lizards! (hey; I call them as I see 'em). The worst part, though: you have limited lives, so if you eventually get killed, you must restart the whole level. It wasn't until this game forced me to start a level over, after being killed by a bunch of giant fat moths, that I really started to lose my patience with Goblet of Fire.

Each level completes with a very long, very pointless, and very redundant "progress report." I don't mean to drive home how boring this game is, but seriously; how evident is it, thanks to this "progress report," that you have officially reached...nowhere? Do we really need all action in the game to grind to a halt, just to be told that we used the Hebivicus spell 7 times? You can imagine the game design team talking amongst themselves, trying in vain to make these reports not drag on, only to make each line pop on screen for 0.05ths of a second. So on the one hand you have a report whose information is displayed so quickly you can barely read it. On the other hand there is so much information given the report still grinds the game to a halt after every level.

Yet the most unforgivable aspect of this game is how even the story is nonexistent. Where's Dumbledore, Hagrid, or Professor Snape? An agnostic gamer would think the original story was as simple as "Harry completes three challenges to win a goblet." It doesn't help when Harry, Hermione and Ron barely speak to one another in the game. How insulting for fans, to have their favorite characters' dialog reduced to "Look! Beans! Collect the Beans!"

Yes, for what it's worth, this game has a multiplayer option, for anyone with two controllers. Unfortunately, in order to make this omelet, the game design team had to crack a few eggs. It was apparently too confusing to give camera control to each player, so nobody has camera control. It was apparently too "unfair" to give unique powers to each character (as it was in Prisoner of Azkaban), so all three characters have the exact same dull, boring, unremarkable spells. Younger kids will enjoy playing as any of the three characters, on all available levels. Older kids will yearn for any of the earlier, better games in the series.

If I wasn't so disenchanted at this point, I might've been moved to check who was responsible for this "sequel." Could this game actually be made by the same people behind Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? If that is true, what went so wrong here? This is like making one step forward (multiplayer), and three steps backward. Here's hoping that the inevitable Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix brings back some of the old...and very little of the new.

	Rating : Near Miss. What happened here? This series was only getting better and better until this mistake ridden "sequel's" release!
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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