‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, GameCube

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Price: $39.99

Stars: 2.5 out of 5

The book and movie versions of J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ may have received much acclaim, but EA’s video game translation of the fourth story in the Harry Potter series falls short of reaching the lofty standards set by Rowling’s work.

EA tried to mix things up in the series, changing the format of the game from the Hogwart’s wandering style of the first three games to a level selection this time around. It was a good idea to try and spice it up, but the execution wasn’t as good as it could have been.

The result is a choppy game that makes each level seem like a separate entity instead of part of a novel-based game. It defeats the whole purpose of having a game based on a movie or book. In the movie, Harry didn’t walk up to the Pensieve, a memory storing device that serves as the games level selection menu, and choose ‘The Forbidden Forest.’ The game doesn’t tell the story, even though it tries to with short clips after you select a level for the first time.

One nice feature is the ability to choose between Harry Potter and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and you can have up to three human players at one time. The game never fully utilizes this system to its advantage, though, as the other two wizards tag along with the player for most of the game in the single-player version and there really isn’t much difference between one wizard and another.

Another problem deals more with the intended audience rather than an actual flaw with the game. There’s practically no freedom in this game. You have to cast a spell on a specific plant or rock or open a certain door to move on. It’s a very straightforward approach probably meant to cater Harry Potter fans studying long division and onomatopoeias, not the variety studying biochemistry and econometrics.

Don’t get me wrong, this game is fun and provides plenty of puzzles to figure out along the way. In the end, though, it boils down to a lot of incoherent button mashing. Like the movie, a lot of the story is missing and what’s worse is, in the game, the story is pretty much lost.

The power of Rowling’s writing is her ability to pull a reader along through a story with such captivity you can blow an entire day reading and not feel like you’ve wasted your time. That’s not really the case for this game, and it may be because the gamer never really becomes too involved in the story.

Published on December 4, 2005 at 12:00 pm