Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I

The problem is, in first-person you can't actually see when someone is walking up behind you. The AI is so bad that people Apparate into rooms and walk around at random (including up against or even inside solid walls) so there is nowhere safe to hide. Harry's cloak is inexplicably rechargeable, meaning that you're forced to stand stock still in the middle of a crowd of hostile wizards whilst a little triangle in the bottom-left of the screen recharges at an incredibly slow pace.

It's nearly impossible to avoid detection under such circumstances. The best way to progress is to dash towards wherever you're supposed to go as fast as possible, ignoring the Invisibility Cloak, and hope that you reach the next checkpoint before you die from the inevitable barrage of spells. It's utterly broken.

Hilariously, the same tactic works for the shooting sections. Just run past everything, and you might make progress. If you try to play the game the way it wants you to – by sneaking around in the stealth sections, or using cover in the shooting galleries – you'll just fail, over and over.

The cover system doesn't even work half the time. Harry will stick to low walls without crouching, or cling pointlessly to pieces of scenery that appear to offer him no protection. Throwing potions with the d-pad is similarly temperamental – half the time he'll just blast off a standard spell instead.

The spells themselves, depressingly, are guns in all but name. There's a machine gun spell, a shotgun spell, a few incapacitating spells. But there's barely any need to do anything other than spam the the first, most basic spell, which is what the enemies usually do as well. "Stupefy! Stupefy! Stupefy!" shouts everyone, appropriately, as your brain starts to leak out of your ears from tedium.

To a Potter fan, Deathly Hallows is an endless list of disappointments and incongruities. Casting Expecto Patronum at Dementors doesn't even conjure a stag, just a pathetic silver sphere. To non-Potter fans, thanks to the game's complete inability to explain itself, the mission objectives must sound like an obscure parody. "Rescue the Muggle-borns from the Snatchers." "Follow Mafalda Hopkirk and attempt to subdue her without being discovered." "1/3 Polyjuice collected." It doesn't once, for instance, explain to you what a Horcrux is, despite spending most of the game telling you to go after them.

In its Xbox 360 incarnation, Deathly Hallows has a series of one- and two-player Kinect challenges lined up obediently beside the main single-player story on the title screen, desperate to add value. These actually do turn the game into an on-rails shooter. Harry and Ron move by themselves, and you cast spells at the Death Eaters that appear on the screen by waving your arms around in various configurations.

In my living-room conditions – the same living-room that proved a perfect home for my imaginary pet leopard earlier this month – I couldn't get it to work properly. Casting my arm out in front of me for the basic Stupefy spell worked about one in three times, and aiming at enemies had wildly unpredictable results. The defensive spell – holding you arms up in front of your face like you're hiding behind a sheet – didn't work at all. Even if it did work properly, though, it would still be a basic and imprecise shooting gallery with no real sense of control.

There's one thing I like about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When Dementors are near, the screen ices over at the edges. That's quite cool. Everything else is awful. Even Harry, Ron and Hermione's limp-wristed spell-casting animation looks half-hearted. It's an insult to the fiction, an insult to the increasingly good films, and an insult to bad videogames.