This Past March Out of boredom i subjected myself to Hogwarts Legacy and has someone who has seen 3 or 4 HP movies in their childhood and then never bothered to do so again nor really thought about them, i will say that hogwarts legacy is a very pretty game, the castle itself is actually pretty interesting to explore, you can tell they focused 75% of the effort of the game into getting that core aspect of hogfarts experience just right and I will applaud them for that, however the game falls short several key aspects .
In Hogwarts Legacy You Sort Yourself At the Beggining of the game because the developers knew their audience, Im sure the idea of a somewhat long and poignant questionairee was played with at some point, but knowing their auidence, the developers of this game opted to belay all criticisms and twitter meltdowns by just letting you exclusively choose what house you are in. Great! Self induced indentity crisis avoided! I don't really care about this , i just thought it was interesting they went against one of the very first traditons ever established in JK TERFherder's frankly kind of medicore library abecedarian YA novels.
I would be lying if i said this game wasn't well made in a coventional sense, technically the game runs quite well on my System, but what really matters to me is gameplay and frankly the gameplay loop of hogglefart smegmacy is not engaging enough to carry the game to the end of the story I Put about twenty hours into bogglecarts biopsy before realizing that the journey was kind of just as bland as the destination I was heading for< so i dropped it. i dropped it cold , i played for a week or so and thought that the game was okay at best, this game is made exclusively for hardcore HP fans or someone who has not touched any open world game since farcry 3.
Lets get into gameplay, You have a Four slot wheel where you can equip a spell in each slot, these spells come in four different flavors, Control spells that sun or pause an enemy, damage spells that do big damage,k and movement oriented spells that pull and push people away from you, all of these spells are coolodwn based and you activate them by holding right bumper and pressign the corresponding face button. These special spells are also combined with a basic magic missle attack that you can use by hitting the right trigger, which brings me to my first gripe about combat, every attack in this game FEELS the same to use, none of them particulary feel good, because they are all just different colored blasts especially the damage spells, the only one that is mechanicaally different is IGNIO and is is just a shotgun blast of fire. Fine combat is simplistic, but the ven bigger problem is enemy design, i am not exggaratin when i say there are 4 enemy types in this game, enemy wizard (goblin or human), spider, wolf or dog, and armored knight guy with mace or sword, there is nothing else to be seen for a world full of mystical creatures how do we never fight or encounter a dementor or something more threatining, the armored knights feel especially out of place and unfortunately the enemies are not fun to fight, they all are one trick ponies , especially the human enemies which dont operate under the same rules as the player, these enemies can put up a colored shield red purple or yellow to correspond to damage control and push/pull spells. Once again game devs have not learned the lesson taught to ninja theory in 2011 that color -coated enemies are a huge crock of shit and being forced to match the color of spell with what bubble the enemy arbitarily blows on themselves makes the combat feel frustrating, not to mention that if you don't get the other quick switch spell slots from the upgrade tree you are seriously gimnping your character, i wouldn't be surprised if people played all the way throguh the game without ever knowing you could unlock more spell bars. The bubbles on the enemies force you to use certain spells on targets that are moving around and con stantly regenerating those shields making for a frustrating game of spamming doge roll until the correct color ability comes off cooldown, it simulatanely makes fights drag while simplifying your options. Matching the color of the bubble takes almost no skill, aside from not being colorblind, it is also the game very u8pfront telling you that only one type of tactic will work on these types of enemies. Hogwarts legacy could have created a vast roster of enemies with different weaknesses that weren't blatanly signposted like the big glowing colored bubbles .
This could have lead to interesting experimentation but instead the developers chose to cater to the lowest common denominator for people who are not traditional gamers,ergo a singular path through the enemy and most encounters, you might say "well APE turn up the difficulty then" as far as im aware the dififculty makes enmies put up their shields more often makes the player take more and deal less damage. The odd thing is they do kind of have this in the game, the inferi are zombie creatures weak to fire, you can find that out just by playing the game, no tutorial message needed, the dugbog will flip on their belly if you hit it with a force spell, theese are neat, but when a large majority of your games emeny roster are 18 different variations of goblin or human evil wizard who throws magic at you, and puts up a colored shield the fights never seem any different from the front half to the back half of the game. By the ten hur mark you will basically have every spell in the game minus the last curse and the combat loop never evolves past the first fight you have with a dark wizard. The combat in this game reminded me alot of the arkham games and not in a good way it has that same style of loose auto targeting stick flicking kind of action right down to the counter being on the top face button of you respective controller. One of the things btman got right which Hogwarts does not is the flow of combat, even to this day i wouldn't call the rocksteady melee combat formula exactly deep or memorable, but i still feel like the game is trying to nudge me into staying active instead of slowing me down arbitraily. There are no mechanics that actively make you wait on cooldowns in batman tyo get the upper hand, you could shift from defense to offense dynamically, while troghearts dynasty way too much of the combat in this game is spent dumping your abiities on poor sods who get too close and then dodge rolling around the arena like maniac until your spells come off cooldown so you can burst more shields. This may sound like an nitpick, but i can't think of many action games (Except for dmc devil may cry) where the game forces you to wait around for so long before its "effectivley your turn to attack" Lets take sifu for example a game that has absolutley excellent combat, some of the best ive played in a game, there is never a moment where the game makes you sit and wait for things to happen in combat you are more or less alweays in control and can alway be gaining the upper hand through creative and masterful play. Granted I myself am not an expert at Sifu, but I have absolutley played enough action games to realize where skill ceiling might land, Sifu has high higher skill floor than hogwarts does a ceiling. Unfortunately the potential for creative play in snogtarts pregnancy is severly limited by just hopw mucgh the game insits you wait around for your chance to attack. The human enemies while annoying to fight are sadly the most interesting enemy, every other enemy is a nothing-burger melee fight with i frame dodge rolls. The ennemies of the game operate under different rules than the player, those shields seem really strong, if the player charcter could pop a shield that was resitant to all but one school of magic the game would be an absolute cakewalk, the human enemies of the world know a secret magic technique completly unknwon to school staff and students Colored orb shield.
Unfortunaetly for hogwarts combat against humanoids (all 19 variants of them) Feels like a bit like simon says (simon says red , simon says yellow, simon says purple spell. The game give you a toolbox of mechanic that must be used how they want it based on what color the shield is. In my oppinion if hogwarts wanted to get away with thnis combat system the shield sytem needed to be removed, even in the dueling minigame where you partner up in the courtyard with other students only the enemy team can put up the funny glwoing colored orbs, where if my team could do that we would wipe the floor with the AI. I would have much preferred to see the humans more varied, as it is they are poachers hunters and genral crooks and all share the seam movesets, i was more expecting something in line with differentiall factions of badits or evil wixard who have different themes or only use fire magic for example, instead every enmy thowes out the same colored blast from the begging of the ga,e to the end, and while some people love hogwarts so much that this will nevr bother them, the repetive combat is what made me want to drop the game ther fastest.
My otherr major gripe with the game in general is how the open world adds literally nothing to hogwarts universe, the open world does not feel like the wizarding world, it is about the most bos-standard european looking forest blandess i have ever seen, once outside of hogwarts or hogsmeade the game stops feeling like anything HP related this has got to be one of the least rewarding games to explore of all time, i mean there is literally ntohing to do in the open world aside form when the game demands you go meet a charcter on a far away part of the map for a story misssion. The worldbuilding in and around hogwarts and hogsmeade is fantasic, these are the tow standout areas of the game and as a reult there is a huge open world around the castle that just their to fly over essentiallty I personally could not care less about the open world activites in this game, its all standard copy paste icons, dens of monster and villains, go get this item festch quests and etc .
Hogwarts legacy is a well made product, product being the operative word here you can squee out for a few hours being impressed by all of the seemingly moving parts before the honey moon phase ends, i don't see alot of people finshing this game as the story is largely uninteresting, the combat sytem has one too many frustrating desicions from it lack of depth to the froced cadence it requires you play at with its coolodwn system. This combat is further excaberated by the game extrem lack of enemy variety, its the same reason why god of war (2018) was let down, really annoying and samey enemy design, what the fuck is it with these wird action rpg's boner for trolls, it same like every boss fight in GOW (2018) is a troll and much the same can be said about dogbarks tegrity, a giant hodgepodge of trite triple A design tropes all blended into a homogenous grey slurry that the masses will consume without a second thought, this is literally the game that made me never want to play an open world action rpg game ever again.
God I wasted my fucking money on this
In Hogwarts Legacy You Sort Yourself At the Beggining of the game because the developers knew their audience, Im sure the idea of a somewhat long and poignant questionairee was played with at some point, but knowing their auidence, the developers of this game opted to belay all criticisms and twitter meltdowns by just letting you exclusively choose what house you are in. Great! Self induced indentity crisis avoided! I don't really care about this , i just thought it was interesting they went against one of the very first traditons ever established in JK TERFherder's frankly kind of medicore library abecedarian YA novels.
I would be lying if i said this game wasn't well made in a coventional sense, technically the game runs quite well on my System, but what really matters to me is gameplay and frankly the gameplay loop of hogglefart smegmacy is not engaging enough to carry the game to the end of the story I Put about twenty hours into bogglecarts biopsy before realizing that the journey was kind of just as bland as the destination I was heading for< so i dropped it. i dropped it cold , i played for a week or so and thought that the game was okay at best, this game is made exclusively for hardcore HP fans or someone who has not touched any open world game since farcry 3.
Lets get into gameplay, You have a Four slot wheel where you can equip a spell in each slot, these spells come in four different flavors, Control spells that sun or pause an enemy, damage spells that do big damage,k and movement oriented spells that pull and push people away from you, all of these spells are coolodwn based and you activate them by holding right bumper and pressign the corresponding face button. These special spells are also combined with a basic magic missle attack that you can use by hitting the right trigger, which brings me to my first gripe about combat, every attack in this game FEELS the same to use, none of them particulary feel good, because they are all just different colored blasts especially the damage spells, the only one that is mechanicaally different is IGNIO and is is just a shotgun blast of fire. Fine combat is simplistic, but the ven bigger problem is enemy design, i am not exggaratin when i say there are 4 enemy types in this game, enemy wizard (goblin or human), spider, wolf or dog, and armored knight guy with mace or sword, there is nothing else to be seen for a world full of mystical creatures how do we never fight or encounter a dementor or something more threatining, the armored knights feel especially out of place and unfortunately the enemies are not fun to fight, they all are one trick ponies , especially the human enemies which dont operate under the same rules as the player, these enemies can put up a colored shield red purple or yellow to correspond to damage control and push/pull spells. Once again game devs have not learned the lesson taught to ninja theory in 2011 that color -coated enemies are a huge crock of shit and being forced to match the color of spell with what bubble the enemy arbitarily blows on themselves makes the combat feel frustrating, not to mention that if you don't get the other quick switch spell slots from the upgrade tree you are seriously gimnping your character, i wouldn't be surprised if people played all the way throguh the game without ever knowing you could unlock more spell bars. The bubbles on the enemies force you to use certain spells on targets that are moving around and con stantly regenerating those shields making for a frustrating game of spamming doge roll until the correct color ability comes off cooldown, it simulatanely makes fights drag while simplifying your options. Matching the color of the bubble takes almost no skill, aside from not being colorblind, it is also the game very u8pfront telling you that only one type of tactic will work on these types of enemies. Hogwarts legacy could have created a vast roster of enemies with different weaknesses that weren't blatanly signposted like the big glowing colored bubbles .
This could have lead to interesting experimentation but instead the developers chose to cater to the lowest common denominator for people who are not traditional gamers,ergo a singular path through the enemy and most encounters, you might say "well APE turn up the difficulty then" as far as im aware the dififculty makes enmies put up their shields more often makes the player take more and deal less damage. The odd thing is they do kind of have this in the game, the inferi are zombie creatures weak to fire, you can find that out just by playing the game, no tutorial message needed, the dugbog will flip on their belly if you hit it with a force spell, theese are neat, but when a large majority of your games emeny roster are 18 different variations of goblin or human evil wizard who throws magic at you, and puts up a colored shield the fights never seem any different from the front half to the back half of the game. By the ten hur mark you will basically have every spell in the game minus the last curse and the combat loop never evolves past the first fight you have with a dark wizard. The combat in this game reminded me alot of the arkham games and not in a good way it has that same style of loose auto targeting stick flicking kind of action right down to the counter being on the top face button of you respective controller. One of the things btman got right which Hogwarts does not is the flow of combat, even to this day i wouldn't call the rocksteady melee combat formula exactly deep or memorable, but i still feel like the game is trying to nudge me into staying active instead of slowing me down arbitraily. There are no mechanics that actively make you wait on cooldowns in batman tyo get the upper hand, you could shift from defense to offense dynamically, while troghearts dynasty way too much of the combat in this game is spent dumping your abiities on poor sods who get too close and then dodge rolling around the arena like maniac until your spells come off cooldown so you can burst more shields. This may sound like an nitpick, but i can't think of many action games (Except for dmc devil may cry) where the game forces you to wait around for so long before its "effectivley your turn to attack" Lets take sifu for example a game that has absolutley excellent combat, some of the best ive played in a game, there is never a moment where the game makes you sit and wait for things to happen in combat you are more or less alweays in control and can alway be gaining the upper hand through creative and masterful play. Granted I myself am not an expert at Sifu, but I have absolutley played enough action games to realize where skill ceiling might land, Sifu has high higher skill floor than hogwarts does a ceiling. Unfortunately the potential for creative play in snogtarts pregnancy is severly limited by just hopw mucgh the game insits you wait around for your chance to attack. The human enemies while annoying to fight are sadly the most interesting enemy, every other enemy is a nothing-burger melee fight with i frame dodge rolls. The ennemies of the game operate under different rules than the player, those shields seem really strong, if the player charcter could pop a shield that was resitant to all but one school of magic the game would be an absolute cakewalk, the human enemies of the world know a secret magic technique completly unknwon to school staff and students Colored orb shield.
Unfortunaetly for hogwarts combat against humanoids (all 19 variants of them) Feels like a bit like simon says (simon says red , simon says yellow, simon says purple spell. The game give you a toolbox of mechanic that must be used how they want it based on what color the shield is. In my oppinion if hogwarts wanted to get away with thnis combat system the shield sytem needed to be removed, even in the dueling minigame where you partner up in the courtyard with other students only the enemy team can put up the funny glwoing colored orbs, where if my team could do that we would wipe the floor with the AI. I would have much preferred to see the humans more varied, as it is they are poachers hunters and genral crooks and all share the seam movesets, i was more expecting something in line with differentiall factions of badits or evil wixard who have different themes or only use fire magic for example, instead every enmy thowes out the same colored blast from the begging of the ga,e to the end, and while some people love hogwarts so much that this will nevr bother them, the repetive combat is what made me want to drop the game ther fastest.
My otherr major gripe with the game in general is how the open world adds literally nothing to hogwarts universe, the open world does not feel like the wizarding world, it is about the most bos-standard european looking forest blandess i have ever seen, once outside of hogwarts or hogsmeade the game stops feeling like anything HP related this has got to be one of the least rewarding games to explore of all time, i mean there is literally ntohing to do in the open world aside form when the game demands you go meet a charcter on a far away part of the map for a story misssion. The worldbuilding in and around hogwarts and hogsmeade is fantasic, these are the tow standout areas of the game and as a reult there is a huge open world around the castle that just their to fly over essentiallty I personally could not care less about the open world activites in this game, its all standard copy paste icons, dens of monster and villains, go get this item festch quests and etc .
Hogwarts legacy is a well made product, product being the operative word here you can squee out for a few hours being impressed by all of the seemingly moving parts before the honey moon phase ends, i don't see alot of people finshing this game as the story is largely uninteresting, the combat sytem has one too many frustrating desicions from it lack of depth to the froced cadence it requires you play at with its coolodwn system. This combat is further excaberated by the game extrem lack of enemy variety, its the same reason why god of war (2018) was let down, really annoying and samey enemy design, what the fuck is it with these wird action rpg's boner for trolls, it same like every boss fight in GOW (2018) is a troll and much the same can be said about dogbarks tegrity, a giant hodgepodge of trite triple A design tropes all blended into a homogenous grey slurry that the masses will consume without a second thought, this is literally the game that made me never want to play an open world action rpg game ever again.
God I wasted my fucking money on this