Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The Dementors are Coming

NA release: 29th May 2004
EU release: 2nd June 2004
JP release: 26th June 2004
Developer: EA UK
Publisher: EA
NGC Magazine: 79%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

Coming out only a few months after the last Harry Potter game, Prisoner of Azkaban borrows a lot more from the films than the previous one, with the characters looking more like their film counterparts and a lot more dialogue between characters (often just the same thing repeated every few seconds). As the films went darker for this story, it means the game has a lot less colour – but doesn’t have the use of lighting and shadows to make up for it, meaning it really looks much worse than the previous games.

The big change this time is swapping between characters – you play as Harry, Ron and Hermione instead of just Harry. This is done pretty terribly, as they’ve split powers between them. You’d think with the use of spells, then different spells would just be enough, but no. Harry is the only one that can jump, Herminie is the only one that can crawl and Ron can open up obvious secret doors. It makes everything a faff.

Combat is also tedious, you lock on to enemies and very slowly strafe, occasionally using a deflect button to send stuff back. Puzzles are mainly block puzzles and mirror puzzles, and because you have three characters, there’s a lot of standing on buttons. In terms of minigames, there’s owl racing, which barely works, and flying around on a hippogriff, which replaces broomstick flying as this one has no quidditch – they want you to buy the separate game.

Poor

It may be a touch technically ragged, then, but nonetheless this is a fine rendition of the boy Potter’s third adventure and genuinely satisfying.
Jes Bickham, NGC Magazine #95

Remake or remaster?

Emulation is fine for these.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban