“Sorcery” is the best “Harry Potter” game never made. It transorms the PlayStation Move controller into a magic wand, allowing you to wield all manner of spells against an army of darkness.
Beneath its boy-wizard facade, though, “Sorcery” is a game of serious ambition. Or at least purports to be. The game promises to address, at last, the great imbalance in motion-controlled games: that they receive way more input than they can use. Asked to pantomime swinging a sword upward, a hundred different people will swing a controller upward a hundred different ways. But your garden-variety motion-controlled game translates them all into “up,” reducing this diversity of input into the equivalent of a button press.
“Sorcery” aims to do more. The game casts you as Finn, a sorcerer’s apprentice who runs around blasting the armies of the Nightmare Queen with a magic wand and is joined in his journey by a wisecracking, vaguely British cat (how is it that this has become a stereotype?). Swinging the Move controller — Sony’s answer to the Wii Remote — makes Finn fire an bolt of magic in the direction you swing. The game at first seems to do a good job making your swings more than the equivalent of a button press. For instance, if an enemy is taking cover behind a pillar, putting a little English on your swing by twisting your wrist will give your shot a nice curve, bending around the pillar to clock the bad guy. Before long, though, you realize the game developers weren’t quite as brave as you thought. You get the constant impression the game is helping your aim. Swing in the general direction of a pillar, and give it some English, and your bolt of magic will almost for sure hit the guy behind the pillar. So the game is still translating your input into something a lot simpler, it’s just being sneakier about it.
“Sorcery” does a better job with the actual sorcery. Over the course of the game, Finn gains five elemental attacks (earth, ice, fire, wind and lightning), which can be combined to form new spells. Light the ground in front of you to create a firewall, and then blast a wind spell through it to send a fiery tornado at distant enemies.
| ‘Sorcery’ |
| » System: PS3 |
| » Price: $39.99 |
| » Rating: 2 out of 5 stars |
It’s easy to imagine kids, or Harry Potter wannabes of all ages, having a good time messing with the spells to take down the skeletons and such advancing on their character. But most people who spend time with “Sorcery” will wonder why their wand has training wheels.
