I took a look at Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince a while back at an Electronic Arts press event. If you played the last game, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how this one plays. Order of the Phoenix created a solid Harry Potter formula, with an open Hogwarts environment for players to explore, and Electronic Arts is sticking with that formula.
The wand-based nature of the series also makes Harry a good fit for the Wii. EA’s PR guy said as of Half-Blood Prince, the Wii is considered the primary Harry Potter console. I’m not sure what that means; perhaps that they design the games with the Wii in mind and then figure out how to make something similar for the other consoles. We’ll consider it a good thing for Wii owners.
Some new gameplay has been added for Half-Blood Prince, including a potion-making system that borrows from cooking games like Order Up! They also have added quidditch to the game, which in spite of its importance in the books hasn’t been a part of most of the video games. In the game, quidditch simply involves chasing the snitch, which in actuality involves riding a broom through a lot of rings floating in the sky, something most gamers will have done often before.
Dueling seems to have been somewhat refined from the previous game, and there are some fun spells, like the ability to turn your opponent upside down (an activity I previously enjoyed in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed).
Half-Blood Prince was originally scheduled to be released last year, alongside the movie, but when the latter was pushed back to July, the developers suddenly found themselves with eight more months to work on the game, time which has been spent on tweaking the graphics. Hogwarts looks significantly better than it did in the last game; the difference is striking enough that I didn’t need the PR guy to point it out for me. The character design was iffier; some people like Harry looked okay, whereas others, like Ron, looked disturbingly pop-eyed and bloated. Hopefully everyone will look good by the time the game comes out.
The question I can’t answer is: will they tweak the gameplay? Order of the Phoenix had many bugs and gameplay that, to quote myself, felt “as though the game’s designers stuck in a placeholder for game play, planning to flesh it out later, only to run out of time.” Having been given the gift of time; did they use it to make a better game, or just a better-looking game? We’ll find out when Half-Blood Prince arrives this June 30.
