(continued from previous page) ...of the first half of the game, you will have a number of tasks to finish as you assemble members of Dumbledore's Army. After the break, you'll have a dozen or so to finish up as you try to challenge Professor Umbridge and prepare your squadron for “He Who Shall Not Be Named”.

Throughout a long story, you'll need to battle many kids, some from Slytherin, and the dark lord himself with six combat spells you've learned thanks to Hermione. Stupefy is used to stun your opponents, Expelliarmus will disarm them and Petrificus Totalus will paralyze them for a moment and allow for more attacks. The only way you'll know if you're hurt or hurting your opponent is by watching them, since there is no HUD. If Harry's hurt, he'll usually fall down to the ground.

With these battles, comes the use of Sixaxis controls. Some games, such as Lair, make Sixaxis feel natural. But Harry Potter: OOTP doesn’t. The Sixaxis never matches the accuracy and feeling of casting spells with the right analogue stick. When played with motion, all the player does is move his hands around like a bimbo. There is no general direction to these Sixaxis controls.

A nice touch is that cut scenes are built on the game engine, so everything looks and plays the same. The good things about this is that at many points, players will not realize that the cut scene has ended and are further immersed into the game. The bad side is that the characters always look pasty and just not very full of life. Their faces don’t move much when they talk and the animation with their faces is pretty much just their jaw moving up and down.

The sound effects are very well done and are pretty realistic, and the music is great too. The voice acting is impressive, but a lot of the actors in the movies didn't do the voices for the characters and that was pretty obvious at some parts. Something to be noted right away was that at many times you couldn’t hear what a person was saying because the music just drowned out their voice. This definitely drew away from the experience.

The animations are pretty fluent throughout the game, but they are overdone at some points, like when Harry has his wand it looks like he is swinging a bat.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a great game and is fun to play for fans of the books and movies alike. The game immerses players in a cinematic experience because there is no HUD and the characters react in a way that is believable. Unfortunately, the game has quite a few flaws like the dull cut scene animations and a couple of graphics problems like horizontal tearing. There are a lot of things to do like side missions and bonus features to unlock, so they should keep you going a bit after the 20 hour plot. If you’re Harry Potter fan, prepare to enjoy yourself at Hogwarts for the fifth time.