Magic and Monsters: The best and worst portable Harry Potter games

With the latest film in the extraordinarily successful Harry Potter franchise set to premier tonight, we thought we’d take a glance back at our coverage of his excursions into pocket gaming.

We’ve reviewed five Potter games over the years, fact fans, and the latest mobile release has tilted the series into ‘mostly good’ territory. It’s been a precarious balance, though, as the following will show.

What might surprise you is that it’s the mobile games that have done the most justice to J.K. Rowling’s creation, not to mention the host platform. It’s the PSP and DS games we’ve covered that have let the side down, as it were.

So without further ado, let’s look into the crystal ball of time (or the review search function as it’s better known) and sort the magical from the monstrous.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (mobile)

The first mobile Harry Potter game sets the tone admirably, offering a beautifully detailed Hogwarts to play around in. It’s also distinct from its successor, so well worthy of a purchase even if you own the new one.

This one’s a bit of a Metal Gear Potter: you spend most of your time skulking around the game’s lushly appointed environments, avoiding the attentions of your fellow students and extinguishing light-sources to make good your continued anonymity.

As with the other games, there’s a welcome dose of variety included with some simple mini-games, including potion brewing and duelling. All in all, and excellent start for the boy Potter.

Somewhat inevitably, it was decided that the popular brain training mini-game genre and the even-more-popular world of Harry Potter should be brought together. Perhaps less inevitable, though, was that Harry Potter Mastering Magic was going to be any good. Fortunately, it is.

Featuring eight magically themed tasks that will test your powers of observation as well as your mathematical and spatial acuity, Mastering Magic weaves its success spell by placing them all in a brilliant structure. After taking part in a number of tasks you’re given a test that grades you on a number of the disciplines.

It’s these crunch-moments that really lift Harry Potter Mastering Magic above a whole raft of similar games. Of course, that old HP magic lends a helping wand, too.

Featuring gorgeous graphics and a nice open world to wander around in, the latest Harry Potter mobile game represents the pinnacle of the series. From the context-sensitive controls, fun side-games and incidental animations, everything’s geared up to get you immersed in EA’s rendition of the HP universe.

There may be a little too much to-ing and fro-ing on fetch quests, but it’s all in keeping with the spirit of the fiction, and you’ll be having way too much fun to care anyway. Needless to say, fans of Harry Potter will get far more out of this than non-fans, but there aren’t many of those about nowadays, are there? (There's at least one - ed.)

Fertile source material and the most powerful portable hardware should have led to the PSP version of Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix being the definitive version. Instead, it’s arguably the worst.

The trouble is it’s just no fun to play, with dull level design, unhelpful instructions for the tasks you have to carry out, and a shonky game engine that gets very picky about how and where you cast your spells. The game also features a contender for ‘worst in-game map ever,’ with a vague mess of squiggles apparently representing the layout of Hogwarts. Perhaps you have to say the magic word to get it to reveal itself.

The other contender for ‘worst Harry Potter game’ is the DS version of Order of the Phoenix. Here your trundle around Hogwarts is punctuated by a range of ill-conceived, poorly executed stylus workouts.

Ideas from other, better games are clumsily implemented - such as the need to play a beat-matching mini-game to cast a certain spell. It doesn’t make particular sense, and it’s done with only a basic level of competence.

Even when negotiating the traditional sections, the inherent sloppiness seeps through, with accompanying characters blocking your passage and the use of confusingly edited cut-scenes leaving you none-the-wiser. Best put on your cloak of invisibility and avoid this one.