I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 41 was Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix. This is a magical 3rd person adventure game. The plot of this game is exactly the same as the plot of the book with the addition of extra dialogue with characters and non-canon side quests.

This is the best I will be able to do without a bunch of series spoilers. Hogwarts is under extra scrutiny from the Ministry of Magic (the magic government) because of events from the end of book 4. There is a big propaganda campaign that is out to make Harry and Dumbledore look like liars and a Ministry official named Professor Umbridge is instated as the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. She is awful and does not want to actually teach any of the students about protecting themselves. Harry and his friends are frustrated about this and set up a self-study group so that their skills don’t fall behind the standard needed to survive.

The story is fine and I always thought this book was in the middle of the road Harry Potter books. It's not the best nor the worst that Harry and Hogwarts have to offer.

The entire first half of this game is just running around Hogwarts and recruiting members for your self study group. This is miserable! There are 26 characters to recruit and all of them require you to do some stupid side quest to get them to come to the group. These side quests are almost always terrible… actually I can’t think of any that was good.

You have some of the worst, slowest, most boring platforming that you could ever imagine. Harry is forced to climb pipes and shuffle across ledges because every game of the era did that. He is unbelievably slow and you will just want to get back to the rest of the invigorating gameplay: running across Hogwarts.

About 90% of your playtime is going to be walking from place to place in Hogwarts. There isn’t really a lot to elaborate about here. Is walking around enough for you to have fun? Well it wasn’t for me.

Combat in this game forces you to move the right thumb stick in specific directions to execute spells. This feels really stupid and you will find yourself wondering how 6 spells (the total amount you can access at once) couldn’t be mapped to the many buttons on this controller. Thankfully, it does recognize your movements pretty well and it was almost always my fault that an attack didn’t register. Sadly, there are only about 5-7 combat sequences in the entire game. You do not get to do nearly enough combat to have a good time here.

Don’t go out and play Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix. Only someone who is an extreme Harry Potter fan will have fun with this. I guess there could be fun roaming around Hogwarts… but you can do that in all the games and most of them will be better than this. I am a Harry Potter fan… but I can’t look at this game with anything other than disdain. Don’t pick it up. (2/10)

I spent 7 hours, 21 minutes, and 7 seconds playing Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix.

I have spent a total of 416 hours and 6 minutes on the Road to 360 challenge so far.

Next game: Just Dance 3