looks great! but plays... So-So
The Good
First off, the environment assests in this game are EXTRORDINARY. You'll see nearly all of the sets from the Sorcers Stone (SS) movie, Chamber of Secrets (CS), POA, and GOF right here in one game. It's unbelieveabale how faithful there were to the movies. Everything is in this game. Wow.. simply wow!
You can pull out our wand and preform various magic spells on certain objects. Usually, these objects have a pulsing in-glow that make them fairly easy to spot, although sometimes you'll have to find some of the secretive items by point your wand at random things and trying different spells. Hogwarts is teaming with literally hundreds of objects that can be effected by your character, and doing so increases your magical skill and unlocks achievements. The physics system works like a breeze and doing magical tasks is always fun within itself. It feels very realistic and is satisfying to do.
Hogwarts is full of random NPC students walking around the halls. As you walk by them, you can hear pieces of their conversation, and you can also talk to EVERY single student you pass by. Most of them don't have anything unique to the storyline to say to you, but the more prominent characters who drive the story-line can easily by found by bringing up the maruders map and simply selecting them from a list of other quest-advancing students.
The Bad
The unfortnate thing about Harry Potter OOTP is that there isn't much "action" or suspensful moments. Most of the time, you'll be asked to find a book in the library, only that the book is high above a shelf. Once you use some magic to get it down, you return the book to so-and-so, and that's it. You talk to the next person on your list, and they typically have a request to be fullfilled (find this item in this room, move this object here, etc...). They're not very challenging and can get montontous to do after a while.
Once you "unhinge Umbridge," the game is about 95% over. I was hoping that the next section of the game, getting into the Department of Mysteries and fighting all those death eaters, was going to be another quest. But, no! As soon as Umbridge was "defeated,'' there were a series of (badly animated) cut-scenes, with you controlling Sirius Black for one fight enounter against Bellatrix Lestrange (which you have no choice but to lose, anyway), another cut-scene, and then take control of Dumbledore and fight Voldemort. That's it. That's all there was to that part of the game, and it went by in just 5 or 10 minutes.
The Ugly
The automated lip-sync system isn't working correctly. Characters will move their mouths in an unrealistic, robotic like way when talking, or not even move their mouths at all. The cutscene animation needs a lot of polish and looks horribly stiff.
A lot of the scenes that further the story are done in these scripted-like "cutscenes" that aren't really cutscenes. Just characters talking while in some sort of standard stand-still pose. It's not very "animated." Sometimes, you'll just see a door, with people behind the door talking, but you won't see any animation of any sort. Such a cop-out.. I felt ripped-off by this cheap way of telling the story. When the game switches to "game mode" and "cutscene" mode (like when talking to another character), the characters themselves will often "snap" to a certain location on screen that looks awkard. The demon-cam that is scripted during talking scenes can be horribly off, sometimes not even showing the talking person on screen at all! The final word: Overall, the game isn't THAT bad. It's actually quite fun at times, but repairing broken vases and hanging pictures gets old pretty fast, especially when it's the CORE of the gameplay. EA spent a good amount of time on the environments and effects, but nothing else.