EA’s Quiditch World Cup was something I’d been looking forward to. Being able to play the sport that had so incredibly captured my imagination was finally a possibility. I could virtually zoom around on a broom and relive all of those very weird middle school fantasies of being a wizard.
Perhaps due to my childhood dreams, but I think mostly due to the game’s simplicity, it fell short. The game is just far too easy. I’m aware that you can later unlock more difficult modes, but forcing a player to slog through awards just so that they can finally be challenged is ridiculous.
Let us start at the beginning: your first matches are played at Hogwarts contending for the House Cup. There are of course the familiar face from the book series circa Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban. However before you step into a match the game gives you a tutorial on some of the different aspects of play. These were pretty useless as they were more confusing than instructive and I learned far more by simply jumping into my first match and flying around. Once you learned your stuff you move onto beating the three other houses at Hogwarts. I chose to play for Ravenclaw, because they’re the coolest, straight-up, but of course you can play for any of the four houses. You then move into the World Cup phase that the game is named for. The play gets a little bit more difficult and you unlock some combos but not enough to challenge. I assume eventually you win the world cup and there are fireworks or whatever, however, I never completed it because the easy game got too boring and I didn’t have the patience to work through to the harder difficulty.
The game is played, not like a flight sim but, like a rail shooter. This was the first of many disappointments. Your character does move up and down, but it is more along the lines of a roller coaster than a flying broom. The vertical axis has no effect on the games tactics. In fact the game doesn’t sport much in the way of tactics. The gameplay is based on very easy skill challenges. For instance one can auto-steal the quaffle by simply running in to the opposing character who is never fast enough to dodge or out fly away. My games usually amounted to stealing the quaffle and scoring, and then wait for the other team to aquire the quaffle until two seconds later, when I’d steal the quaffle and score. As I got further into the season the computer opponent did get a little tougher. But even when the AI captured the snitch(securing 150 points) I’d always win by a couple hundred points.
Which brings us to snitch game play: the snitch races are played much like a one- on-one sprinting game. You have to stay in the middle of a stream to maintain maximum velocity and depending upon… something(?) perhaps on how badly your team is losing…you get a boost. I always had a very low amount of boost I assume because I was always winning by hundreds of points.
The final basic component is the beating of bludgers into players. This too is a little mini game in which the player attempts to smack a bludger into the quaffle carrier forcing them out of quaffle possession. I found no use for the bludger as it was just too easy to steal the ball as aforementioned.
You can do some pretty niffity combinations in which the ball quickly moves down field between your characters, however, they’re unlocked as each match progresses making them one-off tricks that only stem the tide as the player pummels the AI into the ground.
One of the prettiest parts of the game are the special team moves. You press a button and then sit back while the wizards and witches score a cool looking goal. Once again, though, these are one-offs that only serve as a stop gap.
As stated throughout, the game was just too simple. This game was made by EA, the people who put out yearly sports games. However it wasn’t developed by EA Sports. And I think this is where the problem was. The game wasn’t approached like a sports game. It was approached like a children’s toy, a money-grab on the multi-million dollar franchise that J.K. Rowling has built up. Maybe multiplayer could be fun, but as I played it on a PC, that just wasn’t an option. Here’s to hoping EA sends this license down to their sports department.
