LIke a lot of other people my age, I too love Harry Potter with a burning passion. When I was six, I devoured "Harry Potter and the Sorcer's Stone" under the table in kindergarten while the rest of my classmates played house and traded Mancala stones. The same six-year-old me had recurring nightmares over the basilisk in the "Chamber of Secrets."

At nine, I was a little rebel when my dad took me to see the "Goblet of Fire" (which I thought was significant at the time because it was rated PG-13). And, like a lot of us, I waited eagerly for the "Deathy Hallows" feeling melancholic when the last movie drew to a close.

(Then, of course, I squealed with delight when they opened Hogsmeade in Universal Studios. And now that they’ve opened Diagon Alley, there’s much more reason for screaming.)

One of the latest things the franchise has added to its multitude of theme parks, side novels, and iconic websites is its very own mobile game (titled Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Mystery), which just recently released.

At first, when I saw that there would finally be a game that had taken pains to pander to the complete Hogwarts experience, I was ecstatic. I’ve been to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter -- twice, in fact -- but for those who can’t afford the experience, the game promised to be pretty close.

According to the developers, they’d even drawn in the actors who’d made the roles iconic. You would hear Professor McGonagall teach you Transfiguration. Snape would dress you down for every House Point on your person and then some. You would get to pick a house, create your avatar, and poof! Off you’d go to live your own adventures at Hogwarts. Psyched didn’t even begin to describe how I felt when I saw that pre-registration was available for the app.

At its first delivery, the app seems like everything you’ve ever dreamed of. The opening credits detail your acceptance into Hogwarts, Dame Maggie Smith and all -- and you think wow, maybe you’ll get to explore the world of Harry Potter in a way you never have before! That’s what new technologies are supposed to do, right? Push the boundaries of things that already exist?

Alas, no. Once you get past the initial excitement of getting to Hogwarts and hearing your acceptance letter read out to you, there’s a lot of tapping that’s done. You get faced with a lot of commands to ‘tap this’, ‘tap that’, and end up reading a lot of silent commands from the professors that aren’t even voiced. Even tapping takes energy, which refills quickly, but it’s somewhat absurd that you have to tap at all.

There’s no denying that the plot isn’t bad. Your avatar has a pretty serious past, which includes your brother having disgraced (apparently) his house, his family, and the whole of Hogwarts. From what I’ve seen so far, you’ll be spending a majority of your time trying to get out from under your brother’s shadow. It also makes you enemies -- one, in particular, seems to have a lot of fun trying to ruin your life at every turn.

But you also make new friends. Admittedly, it’s with one of the weirder girls in school, but it’s a friend nonetheless. Fans can also recognize character traits of Neville Longbottom in a boy that’s too afraid to stand up to the school bully. So really, it’s true that you end up being a Harry Potter of sorts.

All in all, the mobile game has potential to grow: perhaps in the amount of Hogwarts the main character is allowed to explore, perhaps in the way that the lessons and interactions are run. But so far, it’s an enjoyable game, if not for the pure curiosity of what’s going to happen in each annual arc.