I wasn't planning to play this at first, but the excitement around the possibility of a Harry Potter dream game got me, and I decided to give this a try. As many others, I was a big fan of the series when I was younger, reading the books and watching the movies, but truth be told, after the movie adaptions were over, I was kinda done with it. Pretty much everything that followed them up seemed to be terrible, and Rowling turned out to be a very hateful person to boot. In such a climate, WB finally releases a game that seems to break the curse, and offer something positive to the series. Well, or at least, there's a valiant attempt at that.
The first few hours of Hogwarts Legacy feel great, the game follows the classic intro with the letter for Hogwarts, and instead of following the story of someone else, you create a character yourself. The tutorial is after, but you're also greeted with a lot of action and mystery, along with a lot of familiar elements from the wizarding world, and eventually, you take full agency of your character and you're at Hogwarts. Exploring that huge castle is just a delightful experience, as you keep seeing familiar places, finding secrets and interacting with professors and students. Magic also is surprisingly neat, as you keep getting new spells and experiment with them in various ways. I think this is truly what most people wanted from such a game, and it certainly delivers.
As I kept playing though, the reality of the situation started to show itself. I loved my time exploring Hogwarts, but once you step out of it, the world is mostly empty of anything with its level of detail. Yes, there's Hogsmeade and a couple of other interesting locations, and they are quite nice, but the rest of the world is simply generic and full of the same few activities and collectibles you slowly unlock as you're going through the story. Same goes for the enemies, it's pretty cool when you fight a troll or a spider at first, but then you realize it's one out of the like five enemies in the whole game, along with endless variations with no substantial differences. The world is littered with puzzles, literally hundreds of them, but besides the repetition, there aren't clever solutions or unique approaches to them. The progression-locked collectibles also proved to be a nuisance, mostly because of their sheer number. These are common issues with a lot of open world games to be fair, in varying degrees, but Hogwarts Legacy honestly feels like a very basic attempt to alleviate those issues. The great start feels like a promise for an even better continuation, but it turns out that the game has showed its hand in the first few hours for the most part. I think one cool exception was the flying broom and the mounts though.
Story wise, I'd say the game is serviceable, some parts certainly drag, and the finale felt a bit tepid. A lot of fanservice and world building that is pleasant, but I don't think the narrative really had anything interesting, even if some story beats had potential. Some of the side quests were the highlight of the game for me, like the one with the haunted shop or the line of quests regarding the unforgivable curses, but all in all, most quests felt in line with the main story. Also, while I loved the voice acting, I was a bit put off by how stiff the character animation is, outside of some of the main story cutscenes. It doesn't help that the vast majority of the characters don't really exhibit much personality, though again, I think some side quests were exceptions on that.
As far as the combat goes, this is another thing that seemed promising at first, but kind of ended up as a let down. Action is fluid and I love how you can use most spells on both objects and opponents, but the fights themselves are pretty basic. The core of the gameplay isn't bad, but everything around it is very uninteresting, the game doesn't really make the best out of it. The limited number of enemies doesn't really have a lot of ways to react, or interesting attack patterns. You don't really need to do much, other that protect yourself and then attack, you can try some more glamorous approaches in combat from time to time and have some fun, but due to the repetitive nature of the game, and the fact that you have to manage a couple of dozens of spells, that becomes more of a chore later. The game also barely has any bosses, and even then, they're usually repeats of normal enemies.
Overall, I can't really say this is a bad game, it's full of fanservice and has a good core, but once you start digging deeper into it, you start to see that the core of it has been stretched for the sake of having a bigger game, making its weaknesses more pronounced and barely doing anything with its strengths. It certainly manages to capture some of that "dream game" feel at times, but at others, it just fails to reach full potential and doesn't really do anything interesting at all.
The first few hours of Hogwarts Legacy feel great, the game follows the classic intro with the letter for Hogwarts, and instead of following the story of someone else, you create a character yourself. The tutorial is after, but you're also greeted with a lot of action and mystery, along with a lot of familiar elements from the wizarding world, and eventually, you take full agency of your character and you're at Hogwarts. Exploring that huge castle is just a delightful experience, as you keep seeing familiar places, finding secrets and interacting with professors and students. Magic also is surprisingly neat, as you keep getting new spells and experiment with them in various ways. I think this is truly what most people wanted from such a game, and it certainly delivers.
As I kept playing though, the reality of the situation started to show itself. I loved my time exploring Hogwarts, but once you step out of it, the world is mostly empty of anything with its level of detail. Yes, there's Hogsmeade and a couple of other interesting locations, and they are quite nice, but the rest of the world is simply generic and full of the same few activities and collectibles you slowly unlock as you're going through the story. Same goes for the enemies, it's pretty cool when you fight a troll or a spider at first, but then you realize it's one out of the like five enemies in the whole game, along with endless variations with no substantial differences. The world is littered with puzzles, literally hundreds of them, but besides the repetition, there aren't clever solutions or unique approaches to them. The progression-locked collectibles also proved to be a nuisance, mostly because of their sheer number. These are common issues with a lot of open world games to be fair, in varying degrees, but Hogwarts Legacy honestly feels like a very basic attempt to alleviate those issues. The great start feels like a promise for an even better continuation, but it turns out that the game has showed its hand in the first few hours for the most part. I think one cool exception was the flying broom and the mounts though.
Story wise, I'd say the game is serviceable, some parts certainly drag, and the finale felt a bit tepid. A lot of fanservice and world building that is pleasant, but I don't think the narrative really had anything interesting, even if some story beats had potential. Some of the side quests were the highlight of the game for me, like the one with the haunted shop or the line of quests regarding the unforgivable curses, but all in all, most quests felt in line with the main story. Also, while I loved the voice acting, I was a bit put off by how stiff the character animation is, outside of some of the main story cutscenes. It doesn't help that the vast majority of the characters don't really exhibit much personality, though again, I think some side quests were exceptions on that.
As far as the combat goes, this is another thing that seemed promising at first, but kind of ended up as a let down. Action is fluid and I love how you can use most spells on both objects and opponents, but the fights themselves are pretty basic. The core of the gameplay isn't bad, but everything around it is very uninteresting, the game doesn't really make the best out of it. The limited number of enemies doesn't really have a lot of ways to react, or interesting attack patterns. You don't really need to do much, other that protect yourself and then attack, you can try some more glamorous approaches in combat from time to time and have some fun, but due to the repetitive nature of the game, and the fact that you have to manage a couple of dozens of spells, that becomes more of a chore later. The game also barely has any bosses, and even then, they're usually repeats of normal enemies.
Overall, I can't really say this is a bad game, it's full of fanservice and has a good core, but once you start digging deeper into it, you start to see that the core of it has been stretched for the sake of having a bigger game, making its weaknesses more pronounced and barely doing anything with its strengths. It certainly manages to capture some of that "dream game" feel at times, but at others, it just fails to reach full potential and doesn't really do anything interesting at all.