The second installment of the popular Harry Potter series. While it vaguely follows the books, much of the orignal plot is simplified to a voice over and animation sequence.
If you have played the first game, this is much much the same.
Movement while Harry is on the ground is simple. You just use the arrow keys to move in a direction. While moving, Harry can also jump again just a keypress away. Once you start learning to fly, you need to coordinate Harry's movements in three dimensions (tricky) and his flight speed (even trickier). You'll be helped on your journey by Fred and George, by Nearly Headless Nick and by many other Hogwarts characters.
Learning spells in this game is much simplier than the first. Instead of tracing the wand movements, which gets quite difficult, you need to correctly press arrow keys. It still does require good timing and concentration, especially during the last pass where you are using all four direction keys. This is not as difficult as tracing the path though.
Harry learns to wizard duel. There are three different spells that can be used during a duel.
Quidditch is simplier to play. But unlike the first time, you have to regularly go to the field for the tournament. After the tutorial, you won't be reminded of the games. If you don't play and win the matches, Griffindor won't lead in the house points.
There are four house point ceremonies in the year. At each, one person from the leading house gets to collect as many beans as possible. So you want to ensure that Griffindor is in the lead or very close to it. This can mean taking some time before doing some of your goals to play Quidditch or challenge another student to a duel.
You can actually do the challenges for each of the spell types multiple times. So on the first attempt, try and pick up all wizard cards. On the second attempt, go for speed.
Like the first game, you cannot save the game at different spots. Once you pass one of the automatic save points, your game data is overwritten. This means that a few critical areas, you can only explore once and if you miss anything important, you would need to start a new game. For this reason, I suggest grabbing a walkthrough that tells you where each of the Wizard Cards are.
Hogwarts must have an unusually short year. There are four house point ceremonies in the year. They occur weekly? I think that at some point, it went from weekly to four times a year but they forgot to update the game properly for this.
If you have and loved the first game, you have long since finished this one. I you are thinking of trying one of the Potter games, this one does have some advantages over its predecessor. As appropriate for a game meant for kids, there is no gore and no death. If Harry faces too much, he faints and you pick up from the last saved point.
As a final rating of the game, buy Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets from Amazon for any Harry fans in the family. There is a lot to explore at Hogwart's so get on your broomstick and go for it.
The voice actors in the game sometimes sound just like those from the movie. I didn't spot any names from the movie but the character voices match what you expect.