I'm actually genuinely surprised at the high ratings this has. This game is quite bad, and somehow aged worse than the other two games before it. I have no clue what happened between Chamber of Secrets and this one but it's such a step down in quality and quantity.

For one thing, the visual fidelity is an absolute mess. In the two years between games, they somehow managed to double the texture size, but leave the model's poly count the same. This means you still have trees that are two planes but now they're higher texture quality ~ooooooo~. You get a lowpoly rabbit and a lowpoly dragon, but now their textures are high rez without any shading and it looks horrible. It's like they expected the game engine to fill in the blanks with shading, but forgot to actually add any normal maps or something. The outside of the castle took the biggest hit here, it looks like a brutalist sculpture with a mushy brick texture that hasn't aged well at all. It's a massive downgrade from the second game.

The character models and animations are so strange. Everyone moves and talks like a robot, but occasionally Hermione will just whip out a sick fully-realized talking animation that gives me whiplash every time it happens. It reeks of crunch and rushed deadlines.

But ignoring the visual problems, the game just doesn't work as a collect-a-thon anymore.

They give you almost no free time to explore the castle during the story of the game. No joke, they introduce you to Fred and Georges shop in hour 1 of the game, and you are basically unable to go back to it until you've completed the whole rest of the fucking game, it's ridiculous. The Buckbeak minigame is especially hilarious for the same reason, since cannonically he shouldn't even be around after the main story is over. But sure enough, that's the only time I could go back and finish it!

There are things to 'collect' for sure, but it's really just a chore most of the time. I was halfway through the game and I had 2k beans just jangling in my pocket and nothing to spend it on because I couldn't go back to Fred and Georges shop. The Wizard Cards make a much needed return, but sadly they made the stupid mistake of making some of them limited-time-only so if you accidentally completed a level without checking every corner for secrets you may be unable to actually get to the credits screen!

The new spells are kind of interesting, but don't actually add anything to the game. Carpe Retractum is just Spongify except more limiting. Lapiforse and Draconicorse (I don't care to look up the actual spelling of those) are cool on paper, but the controls of both the dragon and the rabbit are horrible and I'm shocked that it made it through the design phase unchanged. Glacius feels completely niche too, only really being used on the ice-slide set pieces that are sprinkled here and there. It's really jarring to be exploring a place and then 'oh cool here's 100 yards of ice slide, i guess it's that time again'.

None of these spells ever makes an appearance outside of the class trials and the story events, meaning unlocking these spells doesn't let you explore any new areas of the castle (not that it matters since the game doesn't let you do that in the first place).

The secrets take a massive downgrade in this one too. Apparently 'secret' went from finding a hidden door to a secret room, to, finding a skull on a shelf somewhere and hitting it. (Side note: Wtf is with the skeletons in this game? It's Harry Potter, not fucking Dungeons and Dragons, what were you thinking?) It gets even worse because most of the secrets in the castle have been replaced by special portraits that require you to purchase a passcode to access. Nothing screams 'secret' like extremely-noticable-mural-of-some-dude on the wall. And again, you won't get access to it until the game lets you go buy the passcode from Fred and George, so... yeah.

Combat's a joke too: They really want you to take it seriously but like the last two games there isn't anything hard about clicking on an enemy. They keep putting chocolate frogs here and there as a reward to replenish health but I would literally have to stand up and walk out of the room before anything in this game ever killed me. In Hermiones case, I literally did that during her class challenge and the green flumper-head-lookin-thing failed to do anything but spin around like a disco ball. The only thing that is at risk of dealing 2% of your health bar on occasion are the imps that throw wizard-crackers at you, and that mechanic deserved to stay in the first game for a reason.

It's also laughably short. Shorter than the first game, and though it hits all the storybeats it feels more like a themed ride than a game. Two and a half hours in, and I was already at the tail end of the story of the game, like wtf even happened?

And then there are the mini-games. There are three of them in here, and two of them (the Monsterous Book of Monsters and the Pixie Infestation) are click-on-the-enemy-simulators. They are copy-and-pasted encounters, with the models swapped out, and a minor behavior tweak. They didn't even bother to re-color the projectiles that the enemies shoot, it's fucking shameless. The last one is the Buckbeak minigame, where you get to fly through rings, with the same horrible controls that the dragon spell has. It's unnecessarily hard, and really just a pain in the ass but I had to do it to get all of the wizard cards.

What really gets me is that the rings you fly through on Buckbeak are comprised of a particle effect that is inexplicably made out of bats. Fucking..... BATS?! Sir, this isn't Batman this is actually a Harry Potter game I mean -- OWLS ARE RIGHT THERE!!! Yeah, so, that's a bit of a nitpick but, after seeing them do almost everything else in this game wrong I have to bring it up.

Exploration has taken a back seat to spectacle and combat. But the spectacle is boring, and the combat is horrible. So what do you have left? A game that's only gotten worse with age. Yikes.

This game goes so hard for no reason. The first game was just alright, a serviceable tie-in game that loosely followed the plot of the first game while being a decent 3D Collect-a-thon.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, the sequel is basically the first, but better and longer. There are more spells, more dungeons, more enemies, more hidden secrets to find, and it's all wrapped up in this thick layer of Potter-atmosphere that still holds up to this day.

There are still some models and environments that are pretty fugly, but I think they do a better job of hiding it in this one than in the first.

The biggest disappointment however was the final boss of the game. After fighting Aragog (who, no joke, is the reason I have arachnophobia), the Basilisk really fails to live up to the hype in size or sense of scale. And the Arena isn't doing him any favors either, the statue is like 3 feet tall, come-on.

Outside of that though, the game holds up pretty damn well. They only hold your hand so much as to show where you can go, but rarely actually force you into anything. This means you can take your time and fuck-abouts the castle at your own pace to find all of its secrets.

The dungeons and the puzzles aren't too difficult but they make up for it in those hidden secrets I keep raving about. You'll be combing every inch of the place trying to cast alohomora on every surface, and each class will teach you a spell that unlocks more stuff for you to find. It's incredibly well paced for a movie tie-in game.

I think they do a decent mix of combat and exploration here, with emphasis more in the exploration pool. You'll be jumping around climbing over boxes and tables like a horse climbing a mountain in skyrim. Most of the enemies in the game are beaten by a single spell and you have so much health that mistakes are rarely actually punishing. But you can't exactly ignore them either, and you're actively rewarded with secrets or beans for defeating enemies.

The two minigames, Quidditch and Dueling are both just okay. They don't actually tell you that you can go and do more Quidditch after the first time, but there's a whole season of it. It's a shame it boils down to mashing a button over and over. Dueling was much more fun and even had a modicum of strategy to it. But it also completely fucked the bean economy, meaning I could buy the most expensive stuff in the game with ease as soon as I got access to it. I guess, in a way, it is serving its intended purpose though: a neat side thing with a reward if you want to grind at it.

I think where the game truly excels however is the atmosphere. Hogwarts has a certain feel to it that oozes magic. The NPCs are all running around going from class to class, it always feels like there's something going on.

And then, when the game wants to, it rips it all away and the warmth of the castle becomes a cold and lonely place at the drop of a hat. The words written in blood on the wall in the charms corridor is genuinely haunting. I have no clue how that got into an E for Everyone game, for real.

Overall, I'd say this one's pretty darn good. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to play it, but if you like HP and are looking for something to play you can't go wrong with the good ol Chamber o Secrets.

(Note: This is not an endorsement of JKRs shitty behavior. Trans rights.)