Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

"A huge leap from the previous games, but still lacking something..."

Harry potter has finally came back to Hogwarts, for a third time. For every Harry Potter movie, Electronic Arts (EA) brings a wave of wizardry games for various platforms. The PC version has undergone several changes, even though they run on the Unreal Engine.

Graphics 9
Certainly a huge improvement from the previous games. At least for now, characters are far more detailed and layered and their faces looks much better and they have expressions. Spell effects are much more elaborated. Finally, one of the best improvements is the camera angle of the game. The camera is very flexible, ensuring ease of viewing when "spinning". Characters do not "spin", but instead their legs do move. Harry finally has hair that looked similar to the movie, unlike previous games, and Ron does look untidy with his shirt tucking out under the sweater. Very sweet graphics. The only downside is perhaps, everyone with older graphic cards will have to run at lower resolutions to experience the graphic upgrade.

Sounds/Music 8
Again, quite an improvement. As the game utilised a "free" camera angle, the game "aspect" changes into cutscenes very smoothly, which means there are more cutscenes, which points to more speech. Very true, this game has FAR MORE speech than the previous games. The Card Folio (Folio Universitas) has narration on every single card in the game. Very good work on this. The music is still alright, blending some tracks from the previous games as well as introducing original tracks. Quite a good mix for the magical atmosphere in the game.

Gameplay 5
The game really lacks down on here. Despite all the spiffy graphics and sounds, gameplay is very limited here. The game is very linear and you are forced to do everything before the ending could be seen. However, one good thing is that there is choice for doing sidequests. Another change from previous games is the way to learn spells. The entire "spell-tracing" or "spell-sync-arrow" games are gone and replacing them are spell challenges. The new spells, Carpe Retractum, Lapifors, Draconifors and Glacius open up more fun than just ordinary spells. There are also spells called Companion spells. All three characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione, must cast at the exact same time to unlock secrets. Another thing to note is that the common spell in the previous games, Flipendo, has been replaced by Depluso.

Hence, i conclude my review. I'd recommend those who have played any of the previous games to borrow/rent this game. For those who have enjoyed any of the previous games should then purchase this game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/04