With its outdated game design and insultingly superficial handling of the setting, Hogwarts Legacy is a tragic missed opportunity in the quest for the ultimate Harry Potter game.
THE GOOD
Nails the aesthetic of the world - Flying a broom is mostly fun and precise - One questline attemps to tackle intriguing moral dilemmas - Room of Requirement can be fun to customize and use
THE BAD
Fundamental and irreparable dissonance between gameplay and setting - Hogwarts school experience never goes beyond purely cosmetic - Looter gameplay is dull and unrewarding, hampers exploration - Worthless side activities - Weak cast of characters - Basic, tedious story - No Quidditch - Sanitized setting does away with anything controversial from the source material - Substandard accessibility options
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The turn of the century was a time of great transformation for the gaming industry: the definitive switch from 2D to 3D opened up a whole new frontier for game developers to expand upon, with the sky being the limit. How fortuitous then that a franchise ripe with potential and mystique like Harry Potter happened to hit the mainstream around the same time, chiefly thanks to the excellent 2001 Chris Columbus film. What followed in the next few years was a veritable gold rush, in which different studios would chase the expanding cinematic franchise by making multiple games based on the same movie, spreading them out on every platform in existence, often with varying result in terms of quality.
The XBOX, PS2 and Gamecube version of Chamber of Secrets is widely regarded as the best Harry Potter game, or at the very least the most fondly remembered: it was a fun spin on the Zelda formula, alternating rewarding exploration with collectathon mechanics, a fair transposition of the source material and a fun Quidditch minigame. Best of all, it was the finest example of virtual tourism that contemporary technology would allow, featuring an explorable Hogwarts castle and surrounding grounds, the forbidden forest and Diagon Alley shopping district.
Not surprisingly, when Hogwarts Legacy was announced, many saw it as the ideal opportunity to do what those older games couldn't due to hardware limitations. Not only that, but features such as being able to create one's character, join any of the four houses, attend classes and take part in a brand-new story in the Potter world promised to be the fulfillment of untapped potential twenty years in the making: the ultimate immersive Hogwarts experience. And boy, were those hopes dashed against the rocks for anyone but the easiest to please among Harry Potter fans. Let us discuss how.
First, an overview of what the game gets right. The atmosphere of the castle is excellent: while not tailored on the castle from the movies, which makes it less iconic, it is similar enough to still be familiar enough and it's packed with students roaming its halls, animated paintings, recognizable ghosts floating around and a plethora of little details, cameos and lore entries, this really has a lot of value as a virtual tour of Hogwarts. When you eventually get your broom, which is thankfully fairly quickly, this extends to the surrounding areas, an open world which can be a joy to fly over, especially early on. The broom itself controls very well, allowing for precise movement in the air both when speeding and floating, even though the game sees fit to plaster the open world with irritating invisible walls to prevent you from flying where you're not supposed to. I can't land in Hogsmeade or fly to the very top of the tallest Hogwarts tower, really?
Regardless, given this lovingly crafted castle and with the broom well implemented, one would think the rest would follow suit. Unfortunately it isn't so: the problems begin right away, as we step in the shoes of a 17 year-old muggle from victorian England, who has bafflingly just been accepted at Hogwarts, starting out as a fifth year. The backstory of this generic character (we can customize him/her completely) is never explained beyond the fact they possess the power to sense and use "ancient magic", a minor mention from the source material, which the game turns into a major plot device as a means to make the protagonist special. Another chosen one like Harry Potter but far less interesting.
With a simple turorial done, we are brought to Hogwarts to attend the sorting hat ceremony, which is where things really start falling apart: simply put, it's no sorting ceremony at all. You are asked one question as to which quality reflects you best (daring, curiosity, loyalty or ambition) meant to place you in one house or another (you know, just like it doesn't happen in the books or movies), but to anyone who knows the first thing about the Potter world, it is so pathetically obvious as to which house corresponds to which answer that there is no chance for error. The questions on the sorting page of the early 2000s Pottermore website were so much more ambiguous than this, and they were meant for children. The game might as well just let you choose hour house outright... which it does, as a last call selection to change your sorting before the game starts.
Dismal. It would have been so much better to offer a prologue going through a day of your character's muggle life, and present a number of moral choices through NPC interactions, profiling the player to then base the house sorting on that collected data. Instead we get a stupid question and a simple selection menu, completely negating the point of the sorting hat as a game mechanic. You don't even get to pick your pet between owl, cat, rat and toad, being automatically given an owl that sits on a perch in your room doing nothing like the prop that it is. Oh but you do get to customize your wand in great detail, which is a bizarre choice for a tiny item you will never see up close again for the rest of the game.
Worse still, the four houses are little more than a cosmetic element, with their differences flattened to the point of not even existing. With the exception of a scant handful of important NPCs, none of the students exhibit any of the traits that distinguish one house from the next: for instance you will never see Slitherin bullies harassing a meek Hufflepuff in the corridors, or any Gryffindor bravely stepping in to defend them, and your character is no exception: barring a few absolutely inconsequential dialogue choices in which you are allowed to behave egoistically or aggressively, this protagonist always defaults to a selfless goody-two-shoes whenever it is time for any important story moments. Try as you might, you will not be able to roleplay the Slitherin dirtbag or the pragmatic Ravenclaw of your dreams in this game. The house selection screen might as well just ask you what color you like best, which is essentially what it boils down to. At most you might get the occasional voice line reminding you that you behaved badly, but there is no lasting consequence to any of your actions.
Sadly, this extends to one more aspect of the game: house points. You can really tell the game started out as so much more than it is, and was stripped down to the bare basics to meet a deadline: at certain moments, lines of dialogue exist in which this or that professor awards or subtracts points from your or someone else's house for succeeding at something or breaking a rule. This hints at the intention of granting the player some kind of agency as to who wins the house cup at the end of the school year, much like some of the 6th gen games did. Needless to say, this is not an actual mechanic in Hogwarts Legacy. The four hourglasses keeping track of how many points each house has accumulated are present in the entrance hall of the castle, but they are nothing more than a static prop, serving no purpose whatsoever. At the end of the game you get a one-size-fits-all cutscene in which a professor declares that "considering the bravery displayed by our new fifth year, we award them 100 points and their house wins the house cup!" not even mentioning which house it is, because recording four different lines of dialogue would have been too much effort. It is safe to assert that the Hogwarts experience in this game is nothing more than purely cosmetic and perfunctory, a smoke screen with nothing of substance behind it.
There is even the vestigial remain of a curfew mechanic: a tutorial message states that you're expected to return to the common room of your Hogwarts house every evening, but this is not true, since you can roam around the open world at night to your heart's content, and even sit on the ground to wait and advance time with no consequence of any kind.
Disconcertingly, the dissonance between game and world applies to an even bigger stumbling stone, whose lore implications are absolutely insulting in the context of the game, and that is the handling of the unforgivable curses. If you know anything about the Harry Potter world, you know that there are three main spells that no wizard is ever allowed to use: Crucio, which causes unbearable pain, Imperio, which takes control of a human being to do the caster's bidding and Avada Kedavra, which kills on the spot. All of these are present in the game, and acquired over the course of what's perhaps the best of the optional questlines the game has on offer: in it, a Slitherin student is trying to find a way to dispel a consuming curse placed on his sister, who as a result of it is slowly dying. To achieve this goal, the young man is ready to do whatever it takes, even dabbling in the dark arts. A good side story (even though, like everything else in this game, it ends with a dud) and this is where the player is offered the opportunity to learn or reject the three unforgivable curses.
Now, one might assume that there would be some momentous consequence to this choice, that learning and using the unforgivables would drastically alter the way the story progresses and ends, or at the very least the way Hogwarts staff and students relate to you. The reality is, of course, that it does not: you can run around using the forbidden arts on any enemy you want, be it human, goblin or beast, with no repercussion of any kind, and that is because the game treats them as just another one of many combat spells. This is but one of many aspects that constitute a fundamental and irreconcilable disconnect between the gameplay style they went with and the world the action takes place in, and it segues into an analysis of the combat system and why it clashes with the story and shatters the immersion.
Let's make a parallel with a Star Wars game that offer a similar perspective, but properly developed: in Knights of the Old Republic, the player is allowed to pursue dark side powers, with disastrous consequences, such as party members leaving or dying, as well as a different ending, shaped by the choices made throughout the game. There is no having your cake and eating it, you have to choose between the "fun" destructive powers and a happy end to the story. You couldn't have both, since your dabbling in the forbidden arts choices had hefty consequences. Not so in Hogwarts Legacy, where the unforgivables are just yet another skill on cooldown like any other, whose use bears no stigma at all.
Combat in this game is fairly simplistic but not the worst thing in the world: you lock onto enemies, dodge roll out of the way of attacks and fire at them with your wand. As you progress through the main story you will gradually gain access to over twenty spells, divided in five main categories: red for raw damage, purple for kinetic force (pushing, pulling), yellow for control (levitating, paralysing, transmutating), green for unforgivables and grey for utility essentials (moving puzzle elements around, casting light, unlocking doors, repairing things, obfuscate). You will also unlock up to four sets of four spells each, assigned to the directions of the dpad or the number keys on a keyboard, for a total of sixteen spells assignable for quick access during combat or exploration. If you've played the console versions of one of the Dragon Age games, this isn't too dissimilar from how those games handle their spells and skills, though more clunky: having to let go of the movement stick to switch spell set is irritating, and can lead to undeserved deaths, especially if you have trouble remembering with direction has which spells. The idea here is to find which purple or yellow magic works in staggering a specific enemy, then unloading on them with damage spells to deplete their health bar. Sometimes enemy wizards will shroud themselves in a colored barrier which negates all damage and all you have to do is use any spell of the same color to dissipate it. When an enemy is about to attack you, an Arkham-style "sixth sense" icon appears to signal you can either block and riposte or dodge. It's all very basic but it works well enough.
Here is the problem: anyone familiar with the Potter universe knows that killing is a big no-no in wizarding society, which is why murder spells like Avada Kedavra are so vehemently opposed. Even Aurors (the combat commandos of the Ministry of Magic) will resort to incapacitation spells instead of lethal ones. Enter the Hogwarts Legacy protagonist, who learns all sorts of combustion and conflagration spells from his teachers, and uses them to kill everything he sees. Seriously, this kid will take on dark wizard camps alone and kill every single one of them in an orgy of fire and curses. Even were the player to choose the virtuous (though inconsequential) path and reject the unforgivables, the protagonist will char his enemies into cinders with flames, hurl them off cliffs to their death, shatter their bones by smashing them on the ground, even transform them into exploding barrels to hurl at their allies, killing two birds with one stone. Even the old XBOX 360 Gears of War ripoffs set in the Potter universe, Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2, knew better than to have Harry Potter kill his enemies, using spells like expelliarmus and stupefy as lore-friendly alternatives, and those were cover shooters! And in case you're thinking that surely this is the same, that the Hogwarts Legacy kid isn't really murdering fools left and right, that it's just a case of ludonarrative dissonance, the game makes a point to include the loud death rattles of your victims, and to top it all off, the main character often shouts "your blood is on your leader's hands!" when an area is cleared of enemies and only bodies and smoldering ruins are left. there is no doubt about it: those enemies are dead.
Tonally, this is a huge mess: this Harry Potter stand-in racks up a body count worthy of an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, and nobody cares. In fact, the only person who raises an objection to students being taught deadly explosive spells is the main character himself: "Are these safe to teach students?" he asks. "Better they learn it at school than elsewhere," answers the professor. What?
It would already have been bad enough had the game punished the use of kills using unforgivables while neglecting doling out consequence for killing with standard spells, but since there is no downside to using the unforgivables either, this is just the worst possible case scenario and a complete betrayal of Potter lore. It treats the fundamental rules of the setting with such wanton disregard that it cheapens the world to the point its conventions no longer mean anything. Hilariously, you are also expected to break into people's homes with the unlocking spell, to rifle through their belonging for loot (and drink their tea). imagine a Hogwarts student breaking into your home in broad daylight and stealing from your chest, and you can imagine how jarring this is.
Combat isn't only nonsensical in context, it is also quite boring in the long run. You will soon find yourself trying to avoid it altogether because it tends to be very repetitive and monotonous. This where the obfuscation spell comes in. Think of it as an unlimited cloak mode from Crysis, with which to sneak past enemies or behind them for a stealth takedown with the petrificus totalis spell. Obfuscate can even be upgraded to decrease movement penalty, sound emitted, overall visibility and even allow to incapacitate two foes in close proximity instead of one. Needless to say, stealth is as unbalanced and overpowered as they come: it is laughably easy to pick off enemy after enemy in every camp, stronghold or dungeon, since they tend to stand there staring off into nothingness, have very predictable patrol patterns and generally like to stay away from one another, like commuters at a Swedish bus stop, making your job trivially simple. Not even bosses are immune to this, since they can be dealt critical damage with stealth takedowns, so long as they are humanoid and begin in an unalerted state, after which finishing them off is a walk in the park.
///Plot spoilers follow///
The story is boring and completely devoid of any kind of twists or surprises: a generic macguffin pursued by a cast of unengaging characters and one-dimensional villains: if only they had made the leader of the goblins more sympathetic, enabling the player to perhaps empathize with their plight. Instead they make him kick the puppy during his very first appearance, and he never moves from the role of purely malicious antagonist.
If you're like me you would have been suspecting either the kindly mentor character or Professor Weasley of using you to reach the secret of the ancient magic to keep it for themselves or hand it over to some dark lord they might be serving, but none of that happens. In a series that makes subversion of expectation one of its stronger points, this game has none of it. There is even an ending where you choose to keep the secret power for yourself, implying some kind of turn towards evil, but it's so poorly executed and unearned (boiling down to the usual three choices after the final boss for which ending MP4 to play) that you wouldn't blame people for not even realizing what's happening.
///Spoilers end///
The cast of characters largely feels like a store brand version of the ones from the source material: you have the shifty potions teacher, the bubbly herbology teacher, the stern but well-meaning McGonagall stand-in, but they are all different degrees of weak and unconvincing, making you wish this game were based on the books/movies instead. There is a huge focus on diversity, with a caleidoscope of different races and sexual orientations that is all well and good, but clashes with the victorian England setting quite a bit. If you absolutely want to have your cast be inclusive, you probably should not make a period piece. Why not set this in our more inclusive present times? It's not like it being set in the 1800s factors into the game in any capacity anyway, aside from meaning there is no Whomping Willow to be found anywhere. What is the reason for this meaningless choice?
Thing is, much of the aforementioned disconnect between game and lore could have been sidestepped simply by either sticking closer to the source material or by avoiding the scolastic aspect of Hogwarts entirely. Considering the Harry Potter fanbase is usually composed of people who were children or early teens in the year 2000, thus are today in their thirties, why did Hogwarts Legacy insist on making the protagonist a schoolboy/girl? Even the recent spinoff film series, Fantastic Beasts, centers itself on adult wizards, realizing that the original audience has grown older, so why not this game? The concept of a wizard running around setting people on fire would have been much more acceptable when, say, playing as an Auror tasked with investigating a conspiracy taking place in Hogwarts and the surrounding area with some license of bending the rules to get results. Still not quite lore-friendly, but definitely more sensible than a student doing the same with no repercussions.
The issue is compounded by another aspect, that is the appearance of the clothes you can wear: the art team of this game have clearly gone to great lengths to include dozens upon dozens of pieces of clothing that are not only period appropriate for the victorian era, but also fit right in with the fashion aesthetic of the potter world, especially the movies. From gaudy suits to top hats, from ample Merlin robes to bizarre eyewear to menacing all-black dark wizard attire, the freedom of choice on how to dress is nothing the game can be knocked for... if not for the fact that we are playing a student in an exclusive school with a very strict dress code. What could possibly shatter the immersion any more than seeing an idiot student running around Hogwarts attending classes wearing a Death Eater skull mask and a black cape with animated screaming skulls dancing on it? Of course this could have been made into a mechanic: perhaps the game could have allowed for two sets of clothes: one for school hours and the other for outside exploration, maybe with the teachers commenting on inappropriate attire and deducting points on that basis, but as we have discussed above, this sort of cards simply aren't in this game's deck.
Discussing the clothes segues into the loot system, which is, quite simply, atrocious. This is the most uninteresting and unengaging sort of colored loot imaginable in a videogame, with every chest containing randomly generated trash loot you have to dump off at a store. Clothes are armor, while gloves and eyewear are damage boosts, and that's as far as the depth goes. Thankfully the game was wise enough not to force the player to wear these gaudy clothes and accessories, allowing to choose a look in the equipment menu, even though it has to be set again every time a new piece of loot is equipped, which is often. For the user interested in salvaging what little role-playing the game allows, this feature is a real godsend.
Nothing can save this loot system, which is perhaps even worse than similar ones found in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Nioh: after a while you will stop opening chests altogether, since there is almost invariably nothing good in them. Furthermore, the inventory is severely limited, something done to force mediocre minigames on you (more on that later), so picking up trash loot is highly inadvisable. Should you bother solving puzzles or spending hours collecting hidden statuettes to upgrade your unlocking skills to plunder that Hogsmeade home, when the rewards that await you are the same random chests you can find anywhere else in the world? The answer is no. This severely hampers exploration as well: should you land and explore the umpteenth copied and pasted tomb or cave found around the world? Refer to the answer above: unless you are cool with opening chests and finding trash you will never need, the answer remains no, don't even waste your time. On top of that, you are showered with legendary items early on, which means you will be decked in better gear than the game is ready to give you for the rest of the game, making all loot completely inconsequential.
At least there is a passably interesting minigame which is used to acquire the materials needed to upgrade your legendary loot: around a third through the game, you will gain access to a personal base of operation called the Room or Requirement, which you can decorate to your liking and outfit with utility tables like plant pots for growing ingredients, cauldrons for brewing potions and pens to keep your animals in, which you "rescue" around the world and groom and feed in echange for materials. Quotation marks on "rescue" are in order, since you have to chase them down, stun them with debilitating spells and suck them into a bag of holding against their will. You can even sell them at a "rescue shop" for a fat wad of cash, which is totally not a front for a poaching racket.
As you make progress, you will gain access to other mounts besides your broom: a hippogriff, which is another flying vehicle whose clunkier controls make it absolutely redundant, and a large terrestrial beast, whose ability to ram enemies is fun enough for five minutes, but is completely useless as far as world navigation goes when flying and fast travel are an option. One can only wonder why they spent so much time creating these mechanics, instead of implementing something that matters.
So the main story is tedious and uninteresting and the loot is pointless, so how is the side content? Can it salvage this game in any way? Well, yes and no: while acquiring new spells is tied to grueling busywork meant to ensuure you use every mechanic in the game at least once (collect and use all potion types, use a chomping cabbage on three enemies simultanously), the three optional questlines (one focused on protecting magical beasts from poachers, one dealing with a crime ring and the other, mentioned above, with the dark arts) offer some passingly intriguing moments, the many minor side quests are nothing more than garden variety fetch quests that you should not waste your time with: find 5 hidden objects, retrieve an item from a cave, get me 8 herbs, you know the deal. There are also a number of optional puzzles to complete for useless loot, and they are pitifully easy, the sort of thing you'd test a monkey with.
Also scattered around the world are so-called Merlin trials, which are pedestrian physics-based puzzles that will bore you after the first handful. The game tries to force you to do all of the above by level gating progress into the main quest and severely restricting inventory space (you increase it by completing an ungodly amount of Merlin trials), but you can just do the quality side questlines and reach the required level that way, as well as just ignore all loot and have no need for merlin trials. You will get to the point where you will see them from the sky while flying around on the broom and disregard them completely, useless and tedious as they are. They are a far cry from the fun and clever Riddler's trophies from the Arkham games which clearly inspired them.
Another baffling omission: there is no Quidditch either. The stadium is there but aside from some Superman 64 flying through rings, it is never used for anything. There is even a series of cutscenes in which the game establishes that the Quidditch season has been cancelled due to safety concerns. You keep expecting it is bulding up to a grand reopening of it but no: there simply is no Quidditch. Why? Glass half full sort of people might surmise the developers didn't have time to include it, while cynics might point out that there is a separate Quidditch game (still upcoming as of writing this) being made by the same company. You draw your own conclusion.
On top of all that, the lore has been sanitized to the point of pure stupidity. It is no secret that J.K. Rowling has been in hot water with a lot of people due to her controversial socio-political opinions, so in turn it is no surprise that this game tries to step on as few toes as possible, but this does not justify the absence of many elements that make the Potter universe what it is. Let's face it, Wizarding society is far from the best of all possible worlds, by narrative design: it's a universe in which elves are routinely enslaved and mistreated by wizardkind, which also looks down on non-magic people and often discriminates against families who include them, considering them of impure blood. We are also talking about a society which maintains a prison in which inmates are deprived of their will to live by mind-bending Dementors. The Wizarding World is far removed from any kind of idyllic utopia.
Hogwarts legacy tries to steer clear of all of that: only the most fleeting of mentions is made concerning the pure blood debate, blink and you miss it, and off the top of my head I can't even remember a single instance of anyone using the word "Muggle". House elves are present as an inescapable part of Hogwarts decoration but very little effort has been made to highlight their condition, relegating them as little more than a tutorial element for the Room of Requirements mechanic, bypassing all the rest. This is the kind of aseptic version of this world that you would expect from a Harry Potter-themed corporate-run summer camp for spoiled children, and aside from the violence of the combat, this is precisely how this game feels.
They even sanitized the funny candy items: in a multimedia franchise in which children eat cockroach clusters, fudge flies, live chocolate frogs and surprise flavor jelly beans that may or may not taste like vomit, used underwear or earwax, plus a billion spells and items meant to make you fart or barf, Hogwarts Legacy makes sure to scrape all of that away, to better suit its corporate overlords and no risk offending any modern sensibility with any icky or gross. The most you get is a brief verbal mention of the stinking liquid of gobstones, though never seen in action.
The game also feels retro, like it began development on the Xbox 360 and only saw a release a decade too late. The English voice acting is not very good, with a lot of actors turning out B game performances and even the really bad idea of procedurally pitch shifting the protagonist's voice to make it sound more childish or mature depending on player's preference, which results in occasionally very noticeably artificial delivery, so when I was made aware that the localized Italian dub was far superior, I went into the options to switch the dialogue to that language. To my surprise there isn't a language menu, at all: you have to change your console's language in order to access the localized content, like it often happened on the Xbox 360. Another standard feature that's absent is any kind of control customization: beyond tweaking the camera turn speed you don't even have different control presets, meaning you are stuck with the default control scheme. You can't pause cutscenes either, a standard feature for many years which, in a game featuring fairly long ones, is a real problem. You get this feeling like the lead designer hasn't played any games in the past decade or so, and has remained unaware of the recent advancements in accessibility options. In a post-The Last of Us 2 world, this is simply no longer acceptable.
And that's what ultimately goes for the entirelty of Hogwarts Legacy: it is evident that the original vision for it was so much more than what we got, which is a bare minimum effort ubigame, which thinks randomized loot is a good substitute for compelling gameplay, and which handles the source material with such an absolutely insulting degree of cavalier disinterest, that it leaves you with the question of who exactly this game is for.
As such, it is impossible to recommend to anyone but the most undiscerning of Potter fans, who are so starved for any harry Potter-themed game that they will accept anything they can get. Anyone else can skip it with extreme prejudice: there is simply nothing here of much value.
Still. its sales were so strong that a sequel is all but guaranteed. Who knows if the next one will make good on the promise that this one failed to fulfill? One can only hope.
THE GOOD
Nails the aesthetic of the world - Flying a broom is mostly fun and precise - One questline attemps to tackle intriguing moral dilemmas - Room of Requirement can be fun to customize and use
THE BAD
Fundamental and irreparable dissonance between gameplay and setting - Hogwarts school experience never goes beyond purely cosmetic - Looter gameplay is dull and unrewarding, hampers exploration - Worthless side activities - Weak cast of characters - Basic, tedious story - No Quidditch - Sanitized setting does away with anything controversial from the source material - Substandard accessibility options
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The turn of the century was a time of great transformation for the gaming industry: the definitive switch from 2D to 3D opened up a whole new frontier for game developers to expand upon, with the sky being the limit. How fortuitous then that a franchise ripe with potential and mystique like Harry Potter happened to hit the mainstream around the same time, chiefly thanks to the excellent 2001 Chris Columbus film. What followed in the next few years was a veritable gold rush, in which different studios would chase the expanding cinematic franchise by making multiple games based on the same movie, spreading them out on every platform in existence, often with varying result in terms of quality.
The XBOX, PS2 and Gamecube version of Chamber of Secrets is widely regarded as the best Harry Potter game, or at the very least the most fondly remembered: it was a fun spin on the Zelda formula, alternating rewarding exploration with collectathon mechanics, a fair transposition of the source material and a fun Quidditch minigame. Best of all, it was the finest example of virtual tourism that contemporary technology would allow, featuring an explorable Hogwarts castle and surrounding grounds, the forbidden forest and Diagon Alley shopping district.
Not surprisingly, when Hogwarts Legacy was announced, many saw it as the ideal opportunity to do what those older games couldn't due to hardware limitations. Not only that, but features such as being able to create one's character, join any of the four houses, attend classes and take part in a brand-new story in the Potter world promised to be the fulfillment of untapped potential twenty years in the making: the ultimate immersive Hogwarts experience. And boy, were those hopes dashed against the rocks for anyone but the easiest to please among Harry Potter fans. Let us discuss how.
First, an overview of what the game gets right. The atmosphere of the castle is excellent: while not tailored on the castle from the movies, which makes it less iconic, it is similar enough to still be familiar enough and it's packed with students roaming its halls, animated paintings, recognizable ghosts floating around and a plethora of little details, cameos and lore entries, this really has a lot of value as a virtual tour of Hogwarts. When you eventually get your broom, which is thankfully fairly quickly, this extends to the surrounding areas, an open world which can be a joy to fly over, especially early on. The broom itself controls very well, allowing for precise movement in the air both when speeding and floating, even though the game sees fit to plaster the open world with irritating invisible walls to prevent you from flying where you're not supposed to. I can't land in Hogsmeade or fly to the very top of the tallest Hogwarts tower, really?
Regardless, given this lovingly crafted castle and with the broom well implemented, one would think the rest would follow suit. Unfortunately it isn't so: the problems begin right away, as we step in the shoes of a 17 year-old muggle from victorian England, who has bafflingly just been accepted at Hogwarts, starting out as a fifth year. The backstory of this generic character (we can customize him/her completely) is never explained beyond the fact they possess the power to sense and use "ancient magic", a minor mention from the source material, which the game turns into a major plot device as a means to make the protagonist special. Another chosen one like Harry Potter but far less interesting.
With a simple turorial done, we are brought to Hogwarts to attend the sorting hat ceremony, which is where things really start falling apart: simply put, it's no sorting ceremony at all. You are asked one question as to which quality reflects you best (daring, curiosity, loyalty or ambition) meant to place you in one house or another (you know, just like it doesn't happen in the books or movies), but to anyone who knows the first thing about the Potter world, it is so pathetically obvious as to which house corresponds to which answer that there is no chance for error. The questions on the sorting page of the early 2000s Pottermore website were so much more ambiguous than this, and they were meant for children. The game might as well just let you choose hour house outright... which it does, as a last call selection to change your sorting before the game starts.
Dismal. It would have been so much better to offer a prologue going through a day of your character's muggle life, and present a number of moral choices through NPC interactions, profiling the player to then base the house sorting on that collected data. Instead we get a stupid question and a simple selection menu, completely negating the point of the sorting hat as a game mechanic. You don't even get to pick your pet between owl, cat, rat and toad, being automatically given an owl that sits on a perch in your room doing nothing like the prop that it is. Oh but you do get to customize your wand in great detail, which is a bizarre choice for a tiny item you will never see up close again for the rest of the game.
Worse still, the four houses are little more than a cosmetic element, with their differences flattened to the point of not even existing. With the exception of a scant handful of important NPCs, none of the students exhibit any of the traits that distinguish one house from the next: for instance you will never see Slitherin bullies harassing a meek Hufflepuff in the corridors, or any Gryffindor bravely stepping in to defend them, and your character is no exception: barring a few absolutely inconsequential dialogue choices in which you are allowed to behave egoistically or aggressively, this protagonist always defaults to a selfless goody-two-shoes whenever it is time for any important story moments. Try as you might, you will not be able to roleplay the Slitherin dirtbag or the pragmatic Ravenclaw of your dreams in this game. The house selection screen might as well just ask you what color you like best, which is essentially what it boils down to. At most you might get the occasional voice line reminding you that you behaved badly, but there is no lasting consequence to any of your actions.
Sadly, this extends to one more aspect of the game: house points. You can really tell the game started out as so much more than it is, and was stripped down to the bare basics to meet a deadline: at certain moments, lines of dialogue exist in which this or that professor awards or subtracts points from your or someone else's house for succeeding at something or breaking a rule. This hints at the intention of granting the player some kind of agency as to who wins the house cup at the end of the school year, much like some of the 6th gen games did. Needless to say, this is not an actual mechanic in Hogwarts Legacy. The four hourglasses keeping track of how many points each house has accumulated are present in the entrance hall of the castle, but they are nothing more than a static prop, serving no purpose whatsoever. At the end of the game you get a one-size-fits-all cutscene in which a professor declares that "considering the bravery displayed by our new fifth year, we award them 100 points and their house wins the house cup!" not even mentioning which house it is, because recording four different lines of dialogue would have been too much effort. It is safe to assert that the Hogwarts experience in this game is nothing more than purely cosmetic and perfunctory, a smoke screen with nothing of substance behind it.
There is even the vestigial remain of a curfew mechanic: a tutorial message states that you're expected to return to the common room of your Hogwarts house every evening, but this is not true, since you can roam around the open world at night to your heart's content, and even sit on the ground to wait and advance time with no consequence of any kind.
Disconcertingly, the dissonance between game and world applies to an even bigger stumbling stone, whose lore implications are absolutely insulting in the context of the game, and that is the handling of the unforgivable curses. If you know anything about the Harry Potter world, you know that there are three main spells that no wizard is ever allowed to use: Crucio, which causes unbearable pain, Imperio, which takes control of a human being to do the caster's bidding and Avada Kedavra, which kills on the spot. All of these are present in the game, and acquired over the course of what's perhaps the best of the optional questlines the game has on offer: in it, a Slitherin student is trying to find a way to dispel a consuming curse placed on his sister, who as a result of it is slowly dying. To achieve this goal, the young man is ready to do whatever it takes, even dabbling in the dark arts. A good side story (even though, like everything else in this game, it ends with a dud) and this is where the player is offered the opportunity to learn or reject the three unforgivable curses.
Now, one might assume that there would be some momentous consequence to this choice, that learning and using the unforgivables would drastically alter the way the story progresses and ends, or at the very least the way Hogwarts staff and students relate to you. The reality is, of course, that it does not: you can run around using the forbidden arts on any enemy you want, be it human, goblin or beast, with no repercussion of any kind, and that is because the game treats them as just another one of many combat spells. This is but one of many aspects that constitute a fundamental and irreconcilable disconnect between the gameplay style they went with and the world the action takes place in, and it segues into an analysis of the combat system and why it clashes with the story and shatters the immersion.
Let's make a parallel with a Star Wars game that offer a similar perspective, but properly developed: in Knights of the Old Republic, the player is allowed to pursue dark side powers, with disastrous consequences, such as party members leaving or dying, as well as a different ending, shaped by the choices made throughout the game. There is no having your cake and eating it, you have to choose between the "fun" destructive powers and a happy end to the story. You couldn't have both, since your dabbling in the forbidden arts choices had hefty consequences. Not so in Hogwarts Legacy, where the unforgivables are just yet another skill on cooldown like any other, whose use bears no stigma at all.
Combat in this game is fairly simplistic but not the worst thing in the world: you lock onto enemies, dodge roll out of the way of attacks and fire at them with your wand. As you progress through the main story you will gradually gain access to over twenty spells, divided in five main categories: red for raw damage, purple for kinetic force (pushing, pulling), yellow for control (levitating, paralysing, transmutating), green for unforgivables and grey for utility essentials (moving puzzle elements around, casting light, unlocking doors, repairing things, obfuscate). You will also unlock up to four sets of four spells each, assigned to the directions of the dpad or the number keys on a keyboard, for a total of sixteen spells assignable for quick access during combat or exploration. If you've played the console versions of one of the Dragon Age games, this isn't too dissimilar from how those games handle their spells and skills, though more clunky: having to let go of the movement stick to switch spell set is irritating, and can lead to undeserved deaths, especially if you have trouble remembering with direction has which spells. The idea here is to find which purple or yellow magic works in staggering a specific enemy, then unloading on them with damage spells to deplete their health bar. Sometimes enemy wizards will shroud themselves in a colored barrier which negates all damage and all you have to do is use any spell of the same color to dissipate it. When an enemy is about to attack you, an Arkham-style "sixth sense" icon appears to signal you can either block and riposte or dodge. It's all very basic but it works well enough.
Here is the problem: anyone familiar with the Potter universe knows that killing is a big no-no in wizarding society, which is why murder spells like Avada Kedavra are so vehemently opposed. Even Aurors (the combat commandos of the Ministry of Magic) will resort to incapacitation spells instead of lethal ones. Enter the Hogwarts Legacy protagonist, who learns all sorts of combustion and conflagration spells from his teachers, and uses them to kill everything he sees. Seriously, this kid will take on dark wizard camps alone and kill every single one of them in an orgy of fire and curses. Even were the player to choose the virtuous (though inconsequential) path and reject the unforgivables, the protagonist will char his enemies into cinders with flames, hurl them off cliffs to their death, shatter their bones by smashing them on the ground, even transform them into exploding barrels to hurl at their allies, killing two birds with one stone. Even the old XBOX 360 Gears of War ripoffs set in the Potter universe, Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2, knew better than to have Harry Potter kill his enemies, using spells like expelliarmus and stupefy as lore-friendly alternatives, and those were cover shooters! And in case you're thinking that surely this is the same, that the Hogwarts Legacy kid isn't really murdering fools left and right, that it's just a case of ludonarrative dissonance, the game makes a point to include the loud death rattles of your victims, and to top it all off, the main character often shouts "your blood is on your leader's hands!" when an area is cleared of enemies and only bodies and smoldering ruins are left. there is no doubt about it: those enemies are dead.
Tonally, this is a huge mess: this Harry Potter stand-in racks up a body count worthy of an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, and nobody cares. In fact, the only person who raises an objection to students being taught deadly explosive spells is the main character himself: "Are these safe to teach students?" he asks. "Better they learn it at school than elsewhere," answers the professor. What?
It would already have been bad enough had the game punished the use of kills using unforgivables while neglecting doling out consequence for killing with standard spells, but since there is no downside to using the unforgivables either, this is just the worst possible case scenario and a complete betrayal of Potter lore. It treats the fundamental rules of the setting with such wanton disregard that it cheapens the world to the point its conventions no longer mean anything. Hilariously, you are also expected to break into people's homes with the unlocking spell, to rifle through their belonging for loot (and drink their tea). imagine a Hogwarts student breaking into your home in broad daylight and stealing from your chest, and you can imagine how jarring this is.
Combat isn't only nonsensical in context, it is also quite boring in the long run. You will soon find yourself trying to avoid it altogether because it tends to be very repetitive and monotonous. This where the obfuscation spell comes in. Think of it as an unlimited cloak mode from Crysis, with which to sneak past enemies or behind them for a stealth takedown with the petrificus totalis spell. Obfuscate can even be upgraded to decrease movement penalty, sound emitted, overall visibility and even allow to incapacitate two foes in close proximity instead of one. Needless to say, stealth is as unbalanced and overpowered as they come: it is laughably easy to pick off enemy after enemy in every camp, stronghold or dungeon, since they tend to stand there staring off into nothingness, have very predictable patrol patterns and generally like to stay away from one another, like commuters at a Swedish bus stop, making your job trivially simple. Not even bosses are immune to this, since they can be dealt critical damage with stealth takedowns, so long as they are humanoid and begin in an unalerted state, after which finishing them off is a walk in the park.
///Plot spoilers follow///
The story is boring and completely devoid of any kind of twists or surprises: a generic macguffin pursued by a cast of unengaging characters and one-dimensional villains: if only they had made the leader of the goblins more sympathetic, enabling the player to perhaps empathize with their plight. Instead they make him kick the puppy during his very first appearance, and he never moves from the role of purely malicious antagonist.
If you're like me you would have been suspecting either the kindly mentor character or Professor Weasley of using you to reach the secret of the ancient magic to keep it for themselves or hand it over to some dark lord they might be serving, but none of that happens. In a series that makes subversion of expectation one of its stronger points, this game has none of it. There is even an ending where you choose to keep the secret power for yourself, implying some kind of turn towards evil, but it's so poorly executed and unearned (boiling down to the usual three choices after the final boss for which ending MP4 to play) that you wouldn't blame people for not even realizing what's happening.
///Spoilers end///
The cast of characters largely feels like a store brand version of the ones from the source material: you have the shifty potions teacher, the bubbly herbology teacher, the stern but well-meaning McGonagall stand-in, but they are all different degrees of weak and unconvincing, making you wish this game were based on the books/movies instead. There is a huge focus on diversity, with a caleidoscope of different races and sexual orientations that is all well and good, but clashes with the victorian England setting quite a bit. If you absolutely want to have your cast be inclusive, you probably should not make a period piece. Why not set this in our more inclusive present times? It's not like it being set in the 1800s factors into the game in any capacity anyway, aside from meaning there is no Whomping Willow to be found anywhere. What is the reason for this meaningless choice?
Thing is, much of the aforementioned disconnect between game and lore could have been sidestepped simply by either sticking closer to the source material or by avoiding the scolastic aspect of Hogwarts entirely. Considering the Harry Potter fanbase is usually composed of people who were children or early teens in the year 2000, thus are today in their thirties, why did Hogwarts Legacy insist on making the protagonist a schoolboy/girl? Even the recent spinoff film series, Fantastic Beasts, centers itself on adult wizards, realizing that the original audience has grown older, so why not this game? The concept of a wizard running around setting people on fire would have been much more acceptable when, say, playing as an Auror tasked with investigating a conspiracy taking place in Hogwarts and the surrounding area with some license of bending the rules to get results. Still not quite lore-friendly, but definitely more sensible than a student doing the same with no repercussions.
The issue is compounded by another aspect, that is the appearance of the clothes you can wear: the art team of this game have clearly gone to great lengths to include dozens upon dozens of pieces of clothing that are not only period appropriate for the victorian era, but also fit right in with the fashion aesthetic of the potter world, especially the movies. From gaudy suits to top hats, from ample Merlin robes to bizarre eyewear to menacing all-black dark wizard attire, the freedom of choice on how to dress is nothing the game can be knocked for... if not for the fact that we are playing a student in an exclusive school with a very strict dress code. What could possibly shatter the immersion any more than seeing an idiot student running around Hogwarts attending classes wearing a Death Eater skull mask and a black cape with animated screaming skulls dancing on it? Of course this could have been made into a mechanic: perhaps the game could have allowed for two sets of clothes: one for school hours and the other for outside exploration, maybe with the teachers commenting on inappropriate attire and deducting points on that basis, but as we have discussed above, this sort of cards simply aren't in this game's deck.
Discussing the clothes segues into the loot system, which is, quite simply, atrocious. This is the most uninteresting and unengaging sort of colored loot imaginable in a videogame, with every chest containing randomly generated trash loot you have to dump off at a store. Clothes are armor, while gloves and eyewear are damage boosts, and that's as far as the depth goes. Thankfully the game was wise enough not to force the player to wear these gaudy clothes and accessories, allowing to choose a look in the equipment menu, even though it has to be set again every time a new piece of loot is equipped, which is often. For the user interested in salvaging what little role-playing the game allows, this feature is a real godsend.
Nothing can save this loot system, which is perhaps even worse than similar ones found in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Nioh: after a while you will stop opening chests altogether, since there is almost invariably nothing good in them. Furthermore, the inventory is severely limited, something done to force mediocre minigames on you (more on that later), so picking up trash loot is highly inadvisable. Should you bother solving puzzles or spending hours collecting hidden statuettes to upgrade your unlocking skills to plunder that Hogsmeade home, when the rewards that await you are the same random chests you can find anywhere else in the world? The answer is no. This severely hampers exploration as well: should you land and explore the umpteenth copied and pasted tomb or cave found around the world? Refer to the answer above: unless you are cool with opening chests and finding trash you will never need, the answer remains no, don't even waste your time. On top of that, you are showered with legendary items early on, which means you will be decked in better gear than the game is ready to give you for the rest of the game, making all loot completely inconsequential.
At least there is a passably interesting minigame which is used to acquire the materials needed to upgrade your legendary loot: around a third through the game, you will gain access to a personal base of operation called the Room or Requirement, which you can decorate to your liking and outfit with utility tables like plant pots for growing ingredients, cauldrons for brewing potions and pens to keep your animals in, which you "rescue" around the world and groom and feed in echange for materials. Quotation marks on "rescue" are in order, since you have to chase them down, stun them with debilitating spells and suck them into a bag of holding against their will. You can even sell them at a "rescue shop" for a fat wad of cash, which is totally not a front for a poaching racket.
As you make progress, you will gain access to other mounts besides your broom: a hippogriff, which is another flying vehicle whose clunkier controls make it absolutely redundant, and a large terrestrial beast, whose ability to ram enemies is fun enough for five minutes, but is completely useless as far as world navigation goes when flying and fast travel are an option. One can only wonder why they spent so much time creating these mechanics, instead of implementing something that matters.
So the main story is tedious and uninteresting and the loot is pointless, so how is the side content? Can it salvage this game in any way? Well, yes and no: while acquiring new spells is tied to grueling busywork meant to ensuure you use every mechanic in the game at least once (collect and use all potion types, use a chomping cabbage on three enemies simultanously), the three optional questlines (one focused on protecting magical beasts from poachers, one dealing with a crime ring and the other, mentioned above, with the dark arts) offer some passingly intriguing moments, the many minor side quests are nothing more than garden variety fetch quests that you should not waste your time with: find 5 hidden objects, retrieve an item from a cave, get me 8 herbs, you know the deal. There are also a number of optional puzzles to complete for useless loot, and they are pitifully easy, the sort of thing you'd test a monkey with.
Also scattered around the world are so-called Merlin trials, which are pedestrian physics-based puzzles that will bore you after the first handful. The game tries to force you to do all of the above by level gating progress into the main quest and severely restricting inventory space (you increase it by completing an ungodly amount of Merlin trials), but you can just do the quality side questlines and reach the required level that way, as well as just ignore all loot and have no need for merlin trials. You will get to the point where you will see them from the sky while flying around on the broom and disregard them completely, useless and tedious as they are. They are a far cry from the fun and clever Riddler's trophies from the Arkham games which clearly inspired them.
Another baffling omission: there is no Quidditch either. The stadium is there but aside from some Superman 64 flying through rings, it is never used for anything. There is even a series of cutscenes in which the game establishes that the Quidditch season has been cancelled due to safety concerns. You keep expecting it is bulding up to a grand reopening of it but no: there simply is no Quidditch. Why? Glass half full sort of people might surmise the developers didn't have time to include it, while cynics might point out that there is a separate Quidditch game (still upcoming as of writing this) being made by the same company. You draw your own conclusion.
On top of all that, the lore has been sanitized to the point of pure stupidity. It is no secret that J.K. Rowling has been in hot water with a lot of people due to her controversial socio-political opinions, so in turn it is no surprise that this game tries to step on as few toes as possible, but this does not justify the absence of many elements that make the Potter universe what it is. Let's face it, Wizarding society is far from the best of all possible worlds, by narrative design: it's a universe in which elves are routinely enslaved and mistreated by wizardkind, which also looks down on non-magic people and often discriminates against families who include them, considering them of impure blood. We are also talking about a society which maintains a prison in which inmates are deprived of their will to live by mind-bending Dementors. The Wizarding World is far removed from any kind of idyllic utopia.
Hogwarts legacy tries to steer clear of all of that: only the most fleeting of mentions is made concerning the pure blood debate, blink and you miss it, and off the top of my head I can't even remember a single instance of anyone using the word "Muggle". House elves are present as an inescapable part of Hogwarts decoration but very little effort has been made to highlight their condition, relegating them as little more than a tutorial element for the Room of Requirements mechanic, bypassing all the rest. This is the kind of aseptic version of this world that you would expect from a Harry Potter-themed corporate-run summer camp for spoiled children, and aside from the violence of the combat, this is precisely how this game feels.
They even sanitized the funny candy items: in a multimedia franchise in which children eat cockroach clusters, fudge flies, live chocolate frogs and surprise flavor jelly beans that may or may not taste like vomit, used underwear or earwax, plus a billion spells and items meant to make you fart or barf, Hogwarts Legacy makes sure to scrape all of that away, to better suit its corporate overlords and no risk offending any modern sensibility with any icky or gross. The most you get is a brief verbal mention of the stinking liquid of gobstones, though never seen in action.
The game also feels retro, like it began development on the Xbox 360 and only saw a release a decade too late. The English voice acting is not very good, with a lot of actors turning out B game performances and even the really bad idea of procedurally pitch shifting the protagonist's voice to make it sound more childish or mature depending on player's preference, which results in occasionally very noticeably artificial delivery, so when I was made aware that the localized Italian dub was far superior, I went into the options to switch the dialogue to that language. To my surprise there isn't a language menu, at all: you have to change your console's language in order to access the localized content, like it often happened on the Xbox 360. Another standard feature that's absent is any kind of control customization: beyond tweaking the camera turn speed you don't even have different control presets, meaning you are stuck with the default control scheme. You can't pause cutscenes either, a standard feature for many years which, in a game featuring fairly long ones, is a real problem. You get this feeling like the lead designer hasn't played any games in the past decade or so, and has remained unaware of the recent advancements in accessibility options. In a post-The Last of Us 2 world, this is simply no longer acceptable.
And that's what ultimately goes for the entirelty of Hogwarts Legacy: it is evident that the original vision for it was so much more than what we got, which is a bare minimum effort ubigame, which thinks randomized loot is a good substitute for compelling gameplay, and which handles the source material with such an absolutely insulting degree of cavalier disinterest, that it leaves you with the question of who exactly this game is for.
As such, it is impossible to recommend to anyone but the most undiscerning of Potter fans, who are so starved for any harry Potter-themed game that they will accept anything they can get. Anyone else can skip it with extreme prejudice: there is simply nothing here of much value.
Still. its sales were so strong that a sequel is all but guaranteed. Who knows if the next one will make good on the promise that this one failed to fulfill? One can only hope.