Harry Potter for Kinect (Xbox 360)
The Harry Potter universe is certainly one of the more popular franchises for fans to imagine themselves in. Seven school years worth of magic to learn, four houses within that school to ally yourself with, and a story that already has the structure of an ordinary character suddenly being thrust into the wizarding world have made it a common subject for fan fiction, video games, and even a theme park attraction. While systems like the Wii could have you wave something similar to a wand, the Kinect’s full body control method could seem like one of the closest means of experiencing J.K. Rowling’s world of magic. However, people familiar with Kinect gaming would likely know that this wasn’t to be, as Harry Potter for Kinect fumbles with many of the issues other games that use the camera sensor suffer from.
After choosing whether you want to play your seven years at Hogwarts as a character who awkwardly wears a scanned image of your face or Harry Potter himself, the player will start to play a series of minigames that line up with both the kinds of magic activities you’d expect of a witch or wizard enrolled in the school as well as moments from the overarching plot of the movie series specifically. While you can have your character end up in your preferred house and relive some of the film’s moments, at other points the game will just swap in the likes of Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione for play, making the game a much clearer adaptation of the multi-film battle to defeat the evil lord Voldemort rather than an immersive personal take on life at the school. The minigame structure made this sort of inevitable in a way, but if more of them were focused on actually attending classes instead of reliving plot points it is possible it could have provided the personal experience and then included the film events as a second structured experience for those more interested in that angle.
The quality of the minigames on offer is certainly all over the place though. Similar to the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Wii game, the potions class probably come out the best of the bunch. Only one potion is made during the plot, the player needing to move their hands to add ingredients and stir, the timing and amount added successfully evoking the feel of working with a dangerous magical mixture as you can find it smoking immensely or bubbling over if you get sloppy. It’s simple but enjoyable enough, and its one of the minigame types that has additional modes to play outside of the story line, the other one being the more unfortunately designed wizard dueling. Wizard duels involve the player standing on one side and firing spells at an opposing caster, the goal simple enough in that you want to wear down their health before you go down yourself. You can dodge by moving around your real life body, and while the game doesn’t teach you how to do many spells in the context of the main adventure, you can swap to options beyond simple damage such as making them hover in the air or knocking them down to the ground. However, one spell makes the dueling quite a slog, Protego being a shield you can raise quite easily, hold with quite a degree of impunity, and if your opponent uses it, it can reflect spells back at you. It can be broken through at times or worked around, but mostly it’s a crutch you can rely on to avoid damage and enemies stick it up constantly to the point you’ll spend a lot of time waiting if you didn’t have your counter spell ready. Needing to strike a certain pose or hope the game hears you announcing your spell switch makes reacting to Protego spam on the fly difficult as well, and ultimately it feels like Wizard Dueling would be much better if defense was either solely dodge-focused or leaned on the disabling spells rather than an outright shield.
The Wizard Duel formula is applied to many minigames you encounter across the seven years, most battles with villains relying on the same spell slinging mechanics and being quite annoying for it. Some fights at least have something like a beam battle where you need to keep your wand aligned with the incoming magic, which, while simple, at least isn’t peppered with moments of dead air as people wait for someone to drop Protego. Combat is at least a reasonable aspect of the Harry Potter series to adapt and one people would like to experience, but some of the minigames picked for this Kinect title are rather bland. Near the climax of the game, one of the minigames ends up being running across a falling bridge, an unexceptional event in the film compared to other moments that were completely skipped over. The Triwizard Tournament from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had four events to it, but the broom-flying battle with a dragon was completely ignored here, meaning only three of its events were adapted despite running through a hedge maze being a far less exciting prospect than a dragon battle. The broom flying that would have potentially been used already exists in the game and they show no problem with reusing mechanics elsewhere, but it seems Harry Potter for Kinect would rather adapt easier gameplay ideas like smacking Cornish Pixies around with your text book or having Ron float in front of a Quidditch goal as your spread your limbs about wildly to play goalie against an onslaught of incoming balls.
While some are bland on a conceptual level or feel like odd replacements for more exciting moments from the series, some minigames suffer more from their controls than their ideas. Having the player dodge the animate tree known as the Whomping Willow is a smart choice for a game, but its attacks are a plain loop of big wind up strikes you walk to the side of, overhead swings that you easily duck, and low roots that you have to dodge with the unreliable jump. The Kinect seems oddly picky in what it considers a jump that will basically make you float in the air for a bit or one where you’ll hit the ground pretty quickly after getting airborne, and it makes timing the jumps for the encroaching obstacles or attacks unreliable and pointlessly harder than necessary. The face-off with Professor Quirrell that caps off the adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’s year ends up with you practically massaging his face instead of really fighting him, and the Devil’s Snare plant attack and Wizard Chess are left out in favor of the least interesting challenge before that fight, the section where you need to grab the right flying key.
There are certainly some minigames present that feel more like middle of the road activities, and depending on your difficulty, they can sometimes put up a fight. Tending to the infant-like Mandrake plants can be tight on Advanced, and repelling the aquatic creatures known as Grindylows while swimming underwater is a serviceable bit of unique action. There isn’t really anything truly exceptional on offer though, the best minigames mostly just tolerable because of their simple demands of the player or not asking too much of the Kinect sensor. A few too many times during play it seemed like the game would think my resting position was me signalling to skip a cutscene, but if I tried to skip it with the indicated pose, it rarely worked. Sometimes aiming my wand at an opponent in a wizard duel would start to register as me trying to swap spells due to how my other arm was at rest, and for similar reasons it was having difficulty in the battles where you can use your free hand to signal for assistance but it can just as easily trigger spell changes again. Considering how short the game is, it’s a shame more time wasn’t spent finding more distinct poses for controls or constructing more interesting minigames than the frequent retooling of the same mechanics regardless of whether the minigame built from them would be interesting or not.
THE VERDICT: An odd mixture of minigames based on whatever moments from the Harry Potter films worked best within the boundaries of recycled play mechanics, Harry Potter for Kinect fails to capture the magic of the movies it is based on. Memorable moments are turned into tedious struggles with Kinect controls, bland ideas like running across a tumbling bridge are included instead of a high-flying fight with a dragon, and the half-baked implementation of a custom characters fails to offer any real sense of immersion for people hoping to have their own wizarding journey. Some ideas like the potion-mixing come out alright, but the far more present combat is broken and slow and the best minigames of the bunch are usually just decent because they actually work properly instead of providing exciting gameplay.
And so, I give Harry Potter for Kinect for Xbox 360…
A BAD rating. Despite Protego spells, inconsistency with the jumping, and unexciting minigame designs at parts, you can still make it through Harry Potter for Kinect’s adventure without being completely aggravated. The unreliability of Kinect detection is accounted for in many minigames and some of the decent ones won’t bother you much to retry if necessary, but the extra content like going for scores or doing extra Wizard Duels really won’t seem appealing after slogging through the bland story mode. Potion making is fine but not nearly enough to justify buying a game that is more focused on awkward spell casting and adapting strange action moments by way of recycled mechanics. If you want this to be the personal journey of a student who is a stand-in for you or just a chance to play through Harry Potter’s exceptional life, you’ll end up disappointed either way as it can’t commit to adequately adapting either concept, but since the game is meant for kids it at least avoids the degree of difficulty that would make it a true slog to get through.
Even ignoring the potential expectation that Harry Potter for Kinect could have been the most immersive way to experience the wizarding world found in the Harry Potter films, it still fails even as a collection of magic-themed Kinect minigames. The bland and the basic are common enough that you won’t be overwhelmed by the flaws in some of its cornerstone designs like the magical duels, but the whole package feels like far too little budget went into it, meaning it can’t be as adventurous or varied as a game of this style should be.