Product Reviews

The latest game in the Harry Potter series lets you play as Harry, Ron and Hermione in their fourth year at Hogwarts. It's an exciting-looking game, the characters look just like their onscreen counterparts and the actors do the voice work, too. It's as close to entering Harry's world as you're likely to get.

The gameplay is easy to pick up. There is context-sensitive spell casting: point at a boulder and you'll pick it up, point at the fire and you'll spray water from your wand to extinguish it. This makes most of the problem-solving

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quite simplistic, though, as pointing your wand in the right direction and hitting the right spell key usually does the trick. Still, there's plenty of fun to be had and enough to keep kids entertained. A range of nasty creatures attack you in the game, and if you don't want to defeat them by cursing them with your wand, you can be more inventive and drop rocks on them or throw them off ledges.

In previous games, you had to swap between characters and their various abilities to complete a level. But in The Goblet of Fire, Harry, Hermione and Ron all have the same abilities. You still get to choose which one you want to control, and the other two are taken over by the computer. You can have up to three players working together on the same PC, but you'll need two game pads if you do.

The graphics are lush, particularly the backgrounds. Play the level where you roam the roof of Hogwarts, and you'll be amazed by the school's size and complexity as it fills the screen. Camera angles can be confusing, though, and you'll often be attacked by off-screen creatures. Still, this is a fun game that kids will love to play.