Harry Potter is a decent licence and, as such, should lend itself to a great videogame. Let’s look at the potential: you have a school of witchcraft and wizardry. It has hidden tunnels, mysterious rooms and magical creatures in the same environment, and the students have the ability to transform things, lift items or summon objects towards them. The school has a forest that contains legendary creatures, and a great cast of characters inhabit the halls of the school. It’s a perfect premise for an RPG, or an adventure game.

How is it, then, that EA has managed to sap all of the life out of this potential brilliance? Well, there are many answers to that question. This adaptation of the fifth film, based on the fifth book, takes the Hogwarts setting and converts it into a limp castle venture that feels about as magical as Rolf Harris. It has moving staircases, sure, but they feel like a deceptive distraction from the boring bits of the castle.

The boring bits of the castle are, of course, everything. If you thought this was going to be GTA Potter, then think again. A large portion of the game enables you to explore the school, Bully-style, taking on lessons and missions and even chatting to the residents of the castle. Unlike Bully, however, the setting and the gameplay blow chunks, and it never feels like it’s going anywhere or doing anything interesting. The castle is just plain boring, and all of the residents are too posh.

The “magical” sections of Harry Potter, you see, are so slight that you could mistake the setting for Eton College instead. Sure, you can go around chatting to paintings, but when all the kids sound like they’d be kicked in at a regular school, all posh and proper, you get the urge to stab. Posh voices are one thing, but boathouses and dormitories? Get out. When you are allowed to engage in magical activity (and it’s pretty rare), most of it is as neutral as burning plants, and the so-called “duels” encompass flicking the stick twice and waiting for a 15-year-old fatty to fall over. Stunning.

The graphics aren’t brilliant either. There’s some nice lighting and some of the character models resemble their acting counterparts (the others look like vandalised wax figurines), but this essentially looks like a PS2 game – which is an appropriate step up from the PSone-like PS2 Potter games. Still, this entire circle of PlayStation-wasting has to stop if the series is ever going to come good. Our opinions of Harry Potter in general are divided, certainly, but we all agree on the potential of the book as a videogame. Instead, a good 50% of the game is wasted on recruiting Dumbledore’s Army, an incompetent group of posh children who have no idea why they’re there, or indeed why they’re even alive. It’s unfortunate, and to recruit every member you have to travel across Hogwarts and take part in history’s most banal mini-games. These include camera finding, trophy room repairing, book fetching and our least favourite, owl catching for Cho Chang.

That last one will stay with us forever. The only activity here is walking up a tower, chasing her moronic owl until it stops flying away. To do that, you have to do a pointless range of tasks, including shimmying over open spaces (which makes no sense) and repairing building posts. Does that sound like a game you want to play? We bloody hope not, because this is our least favourite PS3 release so far.

Hogwarts is pointless and weird, and a worrying degree of children have ginger hair. On top of this, almost nothing is interactive. Why can’t you cause loads of carnage, like in Bully? Harry ended up doing all kinds of crap in the books, but all he gets in this game is hatred from the generic students. The midget teacher, Professor Flitwick, asks you to search for a book in the library. That isn’t fun, is it? Finding a book in a real library is bad enough, but in this instance you paid £50 for that experience. You want to kick the midget, sure, but are you allowed to? No. You just have to find the book, and take it like a wizard. And when you find the book, your reward is the opportunity to take part in his lessons. That’s right, folks, you just worked your arse off to unlock a class, which is definitely the most tedious activity ever. Didn’t classes feel like punishment when you were a kid? Well, they do here as well. You just spent half an hour earning a class, on a £50 PS3 game. These are the events that cause depression in later life.

Thus, the Harry Potter legacy takes another kick in the face. The books are quality, sure, but utter trash like this will only savage your memories of them. You could waste loads of empty hours on the lifeless corridors of Hogwarts and not a single one of them would be fun. We feel for the kids who land a Potter game this summer, because Order Of The Phoenix is one of gaming’s most soulless experiences.

Samuel Roberts