Welcome Back To Hogwarts! (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PS2))

Member Name: saturnsenshi

Product:	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PS2)
Date:	16/12/02 (808 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fun, more characters, duelling with Malfoy

Disadvantages: loading time

Based on the second book by J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets begins with the main character, Harry, staying in The Burrow with the Weasleys. There you'll be asked to help de-gnome the garden, tackle a mad washing machine and learn to use the basic controls of the game with help from Fred, George and Ron.

You'll then join (after getting lost with the Floo powder) Mrs. Weasley, Ginny and Ron for a trip to Diagon Alley, where you'll need to buy your new school supplies (Standard Book of Spells (Grade 2) and a potion vial) from different shops and do a small task for Ginny, who seems to have dropped all her supplies when she was travelling by Floo powder.

After you've bought all your things, had a chat to Professor Gilderloy Lockhart and be teased by Malfoy (personal favourite character :)), Ron will inform you that you've missed the Hogwarts Express and will have to use Ron's fathers car to fly to Hogwarts. Of course, The Whomping Willow prevents you from having a safe trip and you'll have to save Ron from it's clutches.

The real fun begins once you arrive inside the castle, where you'll get to take lessons such as Defence Against The Dark Arts, Charms, Transfiguration and revised flying lessons. You'll be marked and awarded house points for each class or lesson.

Each classes teacher will set you a challenge where you have to retrieve a spell book that will help you advance through the game. 40 house points are awarded after each challenge and the new spell will allow you to either search new corridors (severing charm etc) or open treasure chests (skurge charm etc).

You'll also get to play Quidditch! You can practice at the Quidditch Stadium to get used to the controls before the game or even fly around the school grounds. If you beat all three teams Gryffindor win the Quidditch Cup. If you lose, Slytherin win.

The same rules apply with the House Cup
. You'll have to do more than just retrieve spell books to win. Tasks will have to be completed from the Gryffindor notice board, such as finding Nevilles pet toad Trevor, flying around the roof tops on the Nimbus 2000 to find a telescope, and retrieving a witches hat from the school grounds. Each task earns Gryffindor 10 house points and you get a wizards card. Although you don't have to win either the House Cup or Quidditch Cup to complete the game, it does make it more interesting.

Most of the tasks in the game will be rewarded with a Wizards Card for Harry's collection. There are a hundred and one cards to collect that include characters from the books such as the Weird Sisters band and the four Wizards who founded Hogwarts, Slitherin, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw and a sentence or two about each wizard.

Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans will need to be collected to purchase items from George and Fred Weasleys shop (that you have to get past Percy to get to) where they sell potion vials, spells, wizard cards, stink pellets and other wizard goods to help you out during the game. Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans can easily be found in bushes, armour, statues or jars.

The most annoying part of the game was the controls. I absolutely HATE analog control. There should have been an option to use analog or joypad. It was especially hard to control during duelling practice and defeating monsters since when I moved left Harry decided to go backwards left getting himself killed about four times (this is the reason I hate X-Box and prefer Playstation 2). But it seems a lot of the new Playstation 2 games are using analog without giving the player a choice.

The controls are very simple.
Select brings up a menu of Harry's possessions, such as school books you can read through (monsters, Hogwarts: a history, spells), wizard cards, maps and spell lists you can equip to either the square, circle or triangl
e button.
Start is the menu, where you can save, quit, etc.
X opens chests, pushes boxes, and opens secret passageways etc,
And square, triangle and circle are your spell buttons you use on different objects and monsters.

I also found there was more than enough sneaking around you had to do in the game. For every time a Prefect catches you 5 points (up to 20) are taken from Gryffindor unless you've turned into Goyle. Then the points are taken from Slytherin! You tend to get annoyed with it after a while, especially if you don't have any patience like myself.

All in all this was an excellent game though. There was a good selection of characters, the story was shortened from the books lengthy description of each scene to avoid long pauses in game play, and collecting all the Wizard Cards, reading through Harry's school books and exploring the corridors was a lot of fun. You learn a lot about different monsters and how to disarm or kill them with different spells and charms.

The game is probably suitable for kids aged 10 and up since I finished it in two days, so it is pretty simple and only takes place over a 12 day period at Hogwarts. It's a definite must for all Harry Potter fans who want to experience Hogwarts.

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