If I ever take an Unbreakable Vow and have to kill somebody, I'll give them a handheld version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. If they don't die of boredom they'll Avada Kedavra themselves.

The DS one went for a cel-shaded look to the character models, while the PSP one fully rendered theirs. Neither looks particularly great, but the school is pretty well done. Some random things like none of the staircases moving make it feel kind of static and non magical, though.

90 percent of this game seems to take place in the unspoken sections of the book. Nearly every major plot point happens via a cutscene. Unfortunately by cutscene I mean shot of every character standing still like a mannequin while you get to read word bubbles. I understand that the only people playing this game are likely to be fans of the book and movie. That said, the plot is incomprehensible. The game comes out weeks before the film, so it's likely people will be playing it before they go see the movie. And this story is good too. Horcuxes, curses, memory flashbacks, insight into Voldemort's past, some cool battles. All of that is lost.

Sorry to geek out on you Muggles, but this is Harry flipping Potter, here! The Dark Lord returns and is trying to kill him, the prophesied savior of the magic realm, and the video game version of his story is a string of meaningless fetch quests? The developers could have at least given me an option not to accept these inane quests. Maybe right under the "Swap Items" button there could have been one that said, "I'm the Boy who Lived you tool, I don't have time for this!"

I tried to think of the positive parts of the Half-Blood Prince, so I could write a balanced review, and all I could come up with was the fact that I like Harry Potter (not like that, shut up). When the only positive part of your game is that it has a trademark attached to it, then you've made a bad game. It's not that Harry Potter is broken, it's that EA has managed to take a world brimming with magic and turn it into the most tedious, mundane game possible.

See, rather than have you play through the events of the movie, Half-Blood Prince just kind of uses them as touchstones. Sure, you'll participate in the big battles and see videogame cutscenes depicting key moments, but these events won't really be properly explained nor will they carry the appropriate impact. You're not here to play the movie; you're here to live in the movie's universe.

While the school looks good, you're going to be taken aback by some of the facial animations in this game. When the camera's close up on a talking Ron or Hermione, faces have a tendency to look like creepy robots. On top of that, none of the sound-alikes sound all that good, although the musical score is outstanding and you're going to hear that more than the lame voices.

Sure, the quests aren’t as story-related as the find-every-person-in-the-DA-all-over-the-freakin’-castle missions in Order of the Phoenix, but they’re actually entertaining and nicely paced. The kids look odder now than they did in Order of the Phoenix (Seriously, what the heck is up with Ron’s face?) and Dumbledore is apparently a ventriloquist as his lips never move, but a lot of the annoying bits have been adequately scourgified. On the plus side, Hermione and Ron are no longer perpetually present and nagging, AND Moaning Myrtle isn’t around, leaving you to enjoy Hogwarts in peace when you aren’t on a specific quest that requires their presence. Gone are the useless footprint trails that disappear too quickly, and running around the castle is not nearly as tiresome as it was in Order of the Phoenix thanks to an abundance of labeled(!) portrait portals.