Overall Feeling:
The savior of the Kinect hasn’t been found since Harry Potter for Kinect is simply an okay game that will clearly please its target audience of children. Some control issues are present such as certain motions not being picked up or taking too long to register in addition to endless pantomime wand waving becoming old over time. Even with those obvious and ever apparent issues, Harry Potter Kinect manages to provide some consistent entertainment partly because the production values are surprisingly good for a licensed based game, especially a Kinect one. Longtime Harry Potter fans probably won’t be amazed by this new Kinect effort, but it is a valiant effort nonetheless.
The Pros:
+ The essence of Harry Potter is captured from top to bottom in a way that doesn’t feel forced.
+ This may be a licensed game, but the production values are surprisingly high.
+ Playing the game is easy most of the time so it’s a perfect game for younger gamers.
The Cons:
- The "best of" nature of the game presents an odd flow to things since the finer points of the film/book narrative and even certain scenarios are lost in the shuffle.
- Once again we have a Kinect game that isn’t perfect since certain movement commands don’t register properly.
- Occasional difficulty spikes are somewhat odd and annoying.
- Being able to put your face on an original character is cool, but it looks a bit creepy in a zombie/wearing a face mask sort of way.
It may seem like Warner Bros. is beating a dead horse at this point by not letting a franchise bow out gracefully. I’m of course referring to how we’re still receiving Harry Potter video games despite being almost a year removed from the final chapter of the Harry Potter film franchise. For ten long years gamers had to withstand some rather uneven Harry Potter games via Electronic Arts and now Warner Bros. is trying their hand by directly publishing the new wizard based video games.
