Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Xbox 360)

The game is split into two halves really, before Christmas break where you'll be running around doing about 30 or so tasks and recruiting Dumbledore's army and after when you're making Professor Umbridge's life a complete hell and awaiting the return of Mr. V, yeah, some people tell me he's known as: He Who Shall Not Be Named, but there was no way I was going to type that out, ah, rats.

So with this entire sandbox exploring, side-questing and superb Marauder's Mappage the game is perfect right? No, it's not. When you're casting spells for instance the control on the 360 suffers when you have to tilt the stick up and down. It seems fine when you rotate it and spin it for certain magic, but for the basic up/down, Harry sometimes gets confused bless him.

The combat is as flat as a pancake (no surprises there) and you'll be battling Slytherin henchmen and bad guys. You'll even go wand-to-wand with old V himself of course. There's an assortment of protection and defensive spells but they don't really do the magic from the movies justice. Combine this with a fiddly casting system and you begin to see where the game falls down. If I wanted to waggle my joystick there are far better games to do it in.

I remember the days of breaking Kempston Joysticks on sports games like Daley's.

The game is also let down by less than spectacular graphics in the cut-scenes and close-up dialogues. The graphics in game are fine when they're whizzing about and you don't focus on things for too long. Once they get close and you start looking at the details, they look more like the kind of people you find in an Urban City come Saturday afternoon who might be listening to Goth or something.

It's either that or the cast for a new Dead Rising game. Whichever way you colour it, the stunning background of Hogwarts is let down by the fact that the developers didn't bother to really tidy up their models or bother to switch between hi-res and hi-poly for cut-scenes and low-res low-poly for gameplay.

There are graphical glitches, some misplaced textures and a few jaggies here and there. For the Potter fan you'll look past these and love the game no doubt, but for the rest of us we can only look at the flaws and wonder why EA continue to miss things like this. Harry also has problems opening some doors; this seems to be an intermittent and annoying glitch that has a macabre sense of digital humour most of the time, happening to inconvenience you when you really need a quick exit.

The sound and so forth, dialogues and various spot effects are decent enough since they have a whole library of sounds by now and actors are getting more and more involved in the processes of games. The music is great, though it does tend to drown out the game sound from time to time.

All flaws aside this outing for Harry is the best yet and I recommend it to Potter fans as well as anyone wanting to explore Hogwarts. It will be interesting to see how the next game shapes up since this one raised the bar a little.

Only time will tell.