Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for Xbox 360 Reviews by Gamers

The previous Harry Potter games haven't looked very good to me. They look like they were made only for little kids. This newest installment of the series finally looks like some effort went into making it enjoyable for the over 12 crowd. That's not to say it isn't still held back in school just a bit for the kids to be able to get into it. But it is a nice middle ground. The graphics are certainly much better than any previous game and the fun of wandering around Hogwarts is great - at first. The one thing I don't like about this game so far is that it takes a long time to travel around to different areas of the castle grounds. The Marauders Map helps considerably, but it still becomes tedious. But sometimes I haven't felt like accomplishing the next goal in the game anyway, and I just wander around exploring. You can talk to students and interact with the paintings in Hogwarts. You have a storyline that mirrors the book pretty exactly that you can follow mostly by attending classes or meeting with certain people that you are prompted to locate on the grounds.

Spellcasting is fun, although there are moves to memorize for each spell. To cast a spell, you move your right stick in a certain pattern after targeting your intended victim or object. There are spells to levitate objects, set them on fire, or to repair them.

The voice acting is good, with some of the voices done by the actors from the movies. You can always tell when it isn't the actual actor, but it is a fair enough representation for those characters that I have no complaints.

With the evolution of the games in this series progressing forward, I look forward to seeing what they will come up with for the next two games in the series.

I'm a big Harry potter nerd, so this game was pretty darn fun for me. Lots to do and does a great job of making you feel like you are exploring Hogwarts. If you don't like Potter, it's gonna be harder to forgive some repetitive puzzles, wonky camera and sometimes unresponsive controls. But I played it nonstop for 12 hours, although in fairness I got stuck for a long time trying to win a chess minigame.

Well worth the rental. Not so much the $60.