Harry potter and the order of the phoenix

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX FULL
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PS3

Perhaps the symbiotic good versus evil riff of Potter and Voldemort has wound the sentient castle up into a fit of emulative mischief, but more likely the game's biggest fault is a necessary evil: with such a brilliantly huge and detailed castle to explore, you spend most of the game simply running between people and locations. Sadly it's harder to look past the faults in a lot of what you do around Hogwarts. Most of the portraits you encounter have things to say or little quests to offer. Potter fans will adore all the incidental detail. And hey, some of the people you encounter are dead. Graphically they all give the impression of slightly crap enchanted waxworks thanks to mouths and eyes that move sunk into faces that don't, but you can look past it.

Not staggering, exactly, but good enough, and while there's an initial stiffness to certain exchanges there's quite a lot to applaud too, with difficult bits like the blossoming relationship between Potter and Cho handled delicately enough by Dan Radcliffe and Katie Leung. In one of the unlockable 'making of' vids (guarded by Moaning Myrtle in the Room of Records, incidentally), fanciable Tonks actress Natalia Tena explains that they recorded each bit of disposable dialogue thrice to avoid repetition.

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX FULL

The characters themselves have been brought to life through a mixture of full head-scans and extensive voice sessions. Elsewhere the Invisibility Cloak enables stealth, as you, Hermione and Ron crowd under it and show up to the player as a prismic distortion a sort of magical Vaseline smear running around the castle evading prefects and Slytherin. It's a GTA-style plot arrow by any other description, but it slots neatly into the Potter world. The Marauder's Map always sounded a bit like a videogame map anyway, with its ability to track the movements of your friends and foes, and so it proves here, but EA goes further by running a trail of footsteps ahead of your own so you can work out where you're going without constantly hitting the map button. Many elements of the book and film have been moulded into action-adventure mechanics. Or would do if you didn't have to round up all 58 members by running up and down stairs all day.

Challengeverythingo! Dumbledore's Army gets together quite quickly. This time the entire castle's at your disposal, and EA's own brand of technical magic means you'll never encounter a load-screen as you trot past the Fat Lady and out of the Griffyndor common room, descend the stairs to the dungeons, pop down to Hagrid's cabin, head over to the boat-house and take in the gorgeous countryside, or even pop up to the owl-house for a snog with Cho. The same is also true of Hogwarts itself - quite possibly Potter 5's greatest asset. There are only a couple more to remember, but spellcasting is context-sensitive, so the scale of your options actually expands to fit duelling as well as housekeeping. A simple range of motions takes care of all the important stuff: rotate left for reducto (smash things up), right for reparo (repair them) jab twice forward for depulso (push) and twice back for accio (pull).

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PS3

The Wii and PS3 versions use motion-sensors, but where it's available the right-analogue-stick option is more precise, acting as a fairly natural interface between your thumb and the swirls and jabs of the on-screen cast. Where better to start with the answer to that question than in spellcasting itself - and the Order of the Phoenix initially seems an order of magnitude better off than before. Can EA's latest capture the magic of the magic? As Potter fans around the world prepare for the Deathly Hallows' release next month, what better time to, er, play the game of the one before last? The point here, of course, is to keep step with the films, not the books - and so with Order of the Phoenix set to apparate down to the multiplex on 13th July, the timing is actually quite right.

Harry potter and the order of the phoenix