You've got to hand it to Electronic Arts; love `em or hate `em, these guys know how to pick a franchise. Vivendi get Eragon - EA nab Lord of the Rings. Activision picks up Lemony Snicket – EA secure Harry Potter. These kind of decisions must seem like no-brainers to us everyday folk, but for EA these are like million dollar bets that have paid off in spades. Hey, if the bet hadn't paid off, they've still go every American sports game under the sun to keep them afloat, right?

Yet despite the success of the Harry Potter books and films, the games – while successful – have never really had much in the way of critical acclaim or widespread acceptance amongst gamers. Whether this is just due to an ill-informed "kiddie” stigma attached to the wizard-wunderkind or the fact that the earlier games were fairly generic is hard to say. Either way, EA have gone back to the drawing board for their latest outing, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in an effort to better capture the magic that makes the books universally adored and the films a blockbuster success.

So how do the alchemists at EA fare this time around? Well if they were trying to turn lead into gold, they haven't succeeded...maybe into bronze, possibly silver if you're a Potter fanatic. Make no mistake: this game is designed for Potter fans, be they of the bookworm or film-fanatic flavour. Familiarity with the story and the world of Harry Potter will go a long way into making this game more enjoyable, and while it is still accessible to mugbloods like myself, at times you will be left scratching your head as to what the characters are talking about or what is going on, even if you have a passing familiarity with the series.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix picks up where the Prisoner of Azkaban left off, which is to say Harry has battled the dark lord Voldemort and lived to tell the tale, only it's a tale that the Ministry of Magic don't want him telling. Ostracised by much of the community, Harry begins his fifth year at Hogwart's school with more angst than your average Emo band. And with the threat of Voldemort all around and the school's lack of defence against the dark arts, it is up to the young boy wizard and his pals Hermione and Ron to prepare everyone for the inevitable clash between good and evil.

In a lot of ways, Harry's fifth outing is the culmination of much of what has gone before, and he does a lot of growing up during this adventure. Translating themes of young love, isolation and burgeoning maturity into a videogame was never going to be an easy task, and so it is not surprising that this aspect of the story is pretty weak in the game. So instead, the focus is on Voldemort, who is coming back to wreak havoc, despite nobody believing Harry about it. The game focuses a lot on Harry and the gang's endeavours to prepare the students of Hogwarts for the upcoming battle, and the formation of Dumbledore's Army.

Hearing that, you might be expecting oodles of combat and epic confrontations...well, you'd be wrong! None of that here! In fact, Order of the Phoenix is pretty mundane compared to what you might be expecting, unless of course you were anticipating fetch-quests, errand-running, a handful of combat encounters and much exploring. And I mean a LOT of exploring. In fact, running around every square inch of Hogwarts interacting with anything you find is the only way to come close to getting 100% completion in this game – and more importantly, earning Achievements.

It's lucky, then, that Hogwarts is the real star of the show here. The school of all-things sorcerous has been lovingly recreated in digital form based on the vision of the film, and the results are great. You can explore all the familiar haunts as well as a few less prominent locales, and the attention-to-detail actually makes the endless backtracking and collections pretty enjoyable. There's no camera control though, so you're stuck with the "cinematic” angles the game chooses for you, but they're pretty good and rarely cause you any problems.

Your seemingly unending exploration will require Harry to bust out some of his magical repertoire, and the results are about as consistent as Steven Spellmaster. You see, casting spells requires you to waggle the thumbstick in a predetermined sequence, and the implementation is a little sketchy. Thankfully there's no mana or limit to the amount of times you can balls it up, but this does little to offset the frustration, particularly during combat. Nor can you "die” and lose combat...take enough of a mystical beating and Harry will collapse like a Kiwi football team and you'll just have to try again.

That said, you will *want* to kill whoever designed the mission log in this game. It does a great job of directing you to your primary objective, but anything else tends to get confusing. It's especially bad for sub-quests or secondary objectives, which tend to not show up at all. Still, pointing Harry to a location on the map results in a set of spectral footprints running off in the right direction, allowing you to quickly follow them to your destination. It's a nice touch, and one that alleviates some of the frustration present in the game.

Visually, Order of the Phoenix is all over the shop, which is pretty much par for the course if you're dealing with an EA Game that is also a movie tie-in. Hogwarts looks great as mentioned, as does the environment in general, but character-models really let the game down. The celebrity likenesses are pretty solid, but the attention-to-detail here is really lacking, especially the hair on the female characters – Hermoine in particular boasts some of the worst looking hair on Xbox 360. Thankfully there's no real slow-down or any visual glitches, so the game manages to feel polished, if not a little patchy.

The strongest suit here though is definitely the audio, which is really great in every way it could be. The vast majority of the film's cast return to voice their characters, and they seem to genuinely enjoy themselves...which isn't surprising given most of them are teens or kids. Even the ambient chatter of the Hogwarts students is great, and there's plenty of nice touches too. For example, each of the main characters has four or five different ways of intoning a spell when they say it, which prevents it from getting repetitive. The ambient effects are solid too, but most importantly, the film's soundtrack is mostly intact too, which is awesome for fans of the cinematic version of the story.

Being a movie tie-in, one aimed squarely at the pre-teen/young adult market, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is not a difficult game. The emphasis here is on exploring Hogwarts and engaging with the characters more than it is about combat, platforming or puzzle-solving. It has its challenging moments of course, but for the most gamers, there's about 6-8 hours playtime here. Obviously completionists, Achievement-junkies and avid treasure-hunters will get more out of it since there's so much to explore, but other than that, there's little replayability here once you're done. Still, there's always another Harry Potter novel, movie or colouring-in book around the corner if you're desperate!