Hogwarts Legacy is a game of two parts, and is best when it’s all fresh and new. The first
dozen or so hours are truly magical, and it’s difficult to imagine anybody who wouldn’t find
delight in exploring the halls of Hogwarts and in taking their first few classes. I couldn’t
believe the amount of love and attention the castles of Hogwarts had received. The number
of small details, the animations, the THINGS to do… it’s overwhelming and with each passing hour,
opens up more to you and feels like there’s no end to the delights you’ll encounter.
But surrounding Hogwarts is a hyper-generic open world with some of the dullest and most
copy+pasted activities ever seen in a game. And as the game progresses, you’ll find yourself spending
more and more time beyond the castle walls and so by the end, you’ll grow numb and may even feel
resentment towards this game’s obsession with time-wasting side activities. The game starts
with a bang, and ends with a splutter. But don’t let that put you off. Because
Hogwarts Legacy IS worth the asking price for that first section of the game alone. It achieves the
impossible by doing justice to the Hogwarts you may know and love from the books and movies. You
see, as I’ve grown older, the magic has drained from my gaming experiences and it’s become about
completing games in an efficient manner whilst analysing how their individual gameplay elements
interact with each other. It’s cold, and calculated. But the halls of Hogwarts made me
forget about all that and I found myself simply… exploring, for exploring’s sake. To witness what’s
around that next corner, or what that strange sound is behind that doorway. Sometimes I’d just
stand there, bathing in the atmosphere, imagining the many people who had passed through those
halls – and who were yet to do so- observing students messing about with magic spells,
and staring at the hundreds of animated portraits and wondering how the devs had the time to make
so many. Its many halls could have so easily been boringly copy+pasted, but they aren’t. It
NAILS the feeling of Hogwarts. Every part of this gigantic school feels unique and hand-crafted,
with so many moving, interactive and animated assets that it feels alive. That’s high praise
from me. I love to try and break games down into their textures and polygons, their chunk-based
world loading and primitive NPC routines, but give it a few moments and Hogwarts will
surprise me with another gorgeous hand-crafted surprise and I’m back under its spell again.
Seriously, let me gush about this remarkable achievement because the game deserves it,
plus the rest of this video is going to be a lot more critical, and I don’t want you getting the
impression that it isn’t worth experiencing. Because it is, if for Hogwarts alone. Or the
combat. If gaming had 7 wonders of the world, then this game’s depiction of the Hogwarts
castles would confidently sit among them. You don’t need to be a fan of the series to
appreciate it. I don’t think you even need to be a gamer. Drop anyone in front of the screen and
it’ll rekindle the child in them and they’ll just want to venture around the next corner.
And the game plays serious fan-service, letting your character go through the
same or similar motions to Harry Potter in his time at Hogwarts. You’ll get to make the same
pointless -yet somehow welcome- choices about your houses and wand, and most characters from
the books have a 19th century doppelganger to ensure fans don’t feel like they’re missing
out on reliving the Harry Potter experience. And then the seasons change, and it all looks
different again. Stunning. It’s impossible not to get all caught up in the student experience,
especially during the quieter moments when you feel you’re just being a student doing student-y
things, instead of trying to save the world from a threat that you feel would be better left to the
authorities. Same strengths and weaknesses as the movies, really. And unfortunately,
this game also thinks you want to be something special and by the end every character you pass
wants to remind you of how awesome you were for saving this or for doing that. I don’t want to
be. The fact I’m the most important thing in this world belittles everything else.
Some parts of this game have had endless lovely touches, like how your character switches to a
whisper when creeping about. ‘LEVIOSO!’
‘(levioso)’
But then there are other parts of the game that they’ve seriously skimped on.
I guarantee you you’ll hear the same 2 or 3 voice lines literally dozens
of times and you’ll ask why they make more variations. ‘Mine now, Demiguise!’
If I hear that statue bragging about floo powder one more time, or my character saying how cosy a
place looks, or how all roads lead to Hogsmeade, or how I’m off on another adventure are we,
‘Off on another adventure, are we?’ or my house elf’s sarcastic-sounding remarks
‘Deek thinks you should be proud of all the potions you’ve brewed!’
…or if I hear one more time that he’s never seen so many rare creatures even
before I’ve even collected any, then I’m going to make sure that next creature
I meet is going to get avada kedabra’d. It was Hogwart’s atmosphere and the game’s
decent combat that kept me with it until the end, but everything else about it began to drag
and frustrate and I found the last few hours particularly difficult to endure. And there
wasn’t the same sense of ability improvement or progression that I felt early on. The difficulty
curve kind of flatlines far sooner than it should have done- roughly mid-game, which again,
shrinks how large and mysterious this game’s world COULD have felt. You’re introduced to the
room of requirement and then are expected to grow plants, brew potions, care for animals,
to harvest rare materials to upgrade your stuff with- and that stuff is GREAT… if you care about
it. As I was there, brushing the hair of the dozens of ethically-poached creatures in my zoo,
I was thinking about how much my sisters would have liked this game when they were younger.
Problem is, I’m not them. But hey, I paid for a Hogwarts game, and it’s a bit hypocritical of
me to complain that I get too much of it, and that the developers have bothered to implement
virtually every aspect seen in the movies. But to me, once that initial curiosity about
it had worn off, it became just another thing to grind away at and to keep on top of, going
back and forth to harvest plants and items and it became a dull time-wasting exercise that got in
the way of everything else I COULD be doing. That pretty much sums this game’s open world
experience up. There are dozens of every type of minigame, which can comprise of popping balloons,
walking down lots of stairs to a single chest and then back up again, or figuring out which
spell you must cast at a rock sculpture in order to gain a few EXP. And it would have been better
had there been 5 times fewer of everything, with each rewarding you 5x the amount of experience.
It’s like the developers felt obliged to have a massive world full of things to do,
but didn’t know what to fill it with so just used the most boring bits from Elder Scrolls
and Assassins Creed games. Such a shame. They’ve literally copied some bits from those
games, EVEN THE BAD BITS, like that constellation minigame that has no real use, and the god-awful
gear and loot system where you pick up ridiculous looking outfits with randomly generated stats.
Opening a treasure chest should be an exciting experience- not a predictably disappointing item
drop with a chance it will tell you that your inventory is full. It adds NOTHING to the game,
yet waste a lot of your time as you have to micromanage your inventory every few hours,
mindlessly selling everything you have every time you frequent a shop. Some are
unidentified unless you return to your room of requirement to press a button to identify it,
which again, wastes a few more precious seconds of your life. And you can upgrade these items,
but why bother when you’ll start getting dropped ones with better base stats the moment
you level up any way. It seems they copied Assassins Creed almost note-for-note here,
right down to the artificial delay you have to sit through as you sell each and
every item in the shops. It's horrible. And pointless, given how easy the combat
in this game is. I think I died from combat… once. I died far more from falling too far.
The demiguise statues are worth collecting earlier on… because they let you unlock tougher locks,
which itself is a minigame that’s simultaneously too simple and too
fiddly. There’s no progression with this, no joy to be had from spinning the locks… this was
another thing I felt became a time-wasting exercise by the end of my playthrough.
I didn’t mind the broom stick races. One of the few minigames where I wish there
had been more of them to do, and perhaps more of a challenge because they were all so easy to ace.
The game controls your movement in a really obnoxious way. When you’re pulling platforms
around, your character moves in a forced and artificial manner which messed up some of the
jumps I attempted. And those blasted Merlin trials where you leap from rock to rock for
some irrelevant reason were made HELLISH by my character automatically changing
direction or over-stepping a jump or just randomly diving off instead of going in the
direction I wanted them to. GOD All these problems are minor,
but there are so many of them, and they occur frequently enough that I got quite agitated by
them by the end of my playthrough, and that’s why I’m ranting about them so much here.
And I suppose all these things frustrate me because the combat in this game is really
rather good, and I would have liked to have spent more of my time doing it,
and against harder enemies than the game threw at me. It’s a fantastically devised gameplay loop:
you have unlimited uses of every spell type there is -even Avada Kedavra- with the only limit being
a cooldown of some sort. This means that you end up juggling 4 similar, but slightly different
attacks, and I guess there’s the option to do cool combos if you really want to but the game
wasn’t hard enough to require it and I found I did perfectly well with a brutal button mash in a
cyclical fashion until all foes lay dead, cursed and mangled at my feet. It’s satisfying stuff.
Congratulations to them for not shying away from the overpowered aspects of the ‘Wizarding World’.
Avada Kedavra really does kill stuff in one hit- even special enemies and mini bosses! And flying
a broomstick about is as overpowered as you’d imagine. They prevent you from flying in some
indoor areas, for obvious reasons. But outdoors, it lets you get wherever you want, making short
work of puzzles and enemy outposts. Sneak up to an enemy and it’s a one-hit kill, too. So
it greatly helps to sneak about for as long as you can to make the ensuing battle easier and shorter.
It's just a shame the control system SUCKS. Maybe it’s designed for controllers, I don’t
know. I assume it is, though. To dismount your broom is B, but slip and press N and it will load
up a menu that takes several seconds to escape from. Want to fast-travel to somewhere? That
involves pressing M, waiting for the animation to end, clicking to the map you want to explore,
then zooming in and out so the thing you’re trying to click on isn’t half-obstructed by another icon.
It’s cumbersome. Menus are the one bit of the game where you don’t want lengthy animations
and loading screens and it made me resent the dozens of different screens needed to
get the most out of your time at Hogwarts. You can have up to 4 lots of 4 spells,
which you can cycle between using your scroll wheel or F1, F2 and so on. This too is horrible,
preventing any sort of muscle memory forming as your fingers are blobbing about the keyboard and
your eyes, constantly darting to the bottom right to ensure you’ve got the correct loadout selected,
then in addition to this you’ll want to be pressing Q to block attacks,
and alt to evade them and it doesn’t work if you only have 5 digits on each hand.
As proven on Twitter recently when I objected to Jedi Survivor’s HORRIBLE keyboard controls,
people are quick to point out that you CAN do these weird button mashes. Like, it is POSSIBLE.
I’m not denying that; it’s just needlessly fiddly when ideally you’d like your fingers left on WASD
all the time because they’re the ones that control your character! Especially since you tend to need
these awkward button combinations during stressful moments of gameplay when you need WASD as well.
It definitely feels like it was designed for controllers, again. With PC controls being a
very distant afterthought. But since I’m a PC player who bought the PC version of the game,
it became something that constantly irritated me throughout my playthrough. Towards the end
I assigned 2 ‘combat loadouts’ and put shortcuts to them on my mouse’s side-buttons which made it
a lot more manageable, and proof that you can play this game on PC, provided the control system isn’t
horrible. But the default controls? Awful. Oh and you can hold down TAB to use special items
during combat, which is something you’ll never do because it too breaks the flow in a horrible way.
And all that’s a shame because, despite all this, the combat is still really good fun! Master the
basics and you’ll feel like a GOD as you’re stood there, surrounded by enemies, micromanaging each
one, chipping away at their health bars, breaking their shields and deflecting their attacks.
It feels good. But with a better control system, it could have been more. And I didn’t feel like
the combat evolved much. Stuff just gets easier and easier, the better you get and the more spells
you unlock. They could have put a few challenging enemy outposts on the world map for people such as
myself. But no- it’s all painfully easy. Even the ones that are supposed to be challenging.
‘AVADA KEDAVRA’ The
missions in this game range from the ridiculously low-effort and dull, like where you go walking
about a town talking to people, to the surprisingly hand-crafted and enjoyable, like
where you fight a dragon through some ruins until you reach her nest. Or whatever it is that dragons
have. I did find myself choosing the missions that would reward me with the most tangible stuff,
like new spells. And I skipped all the ones that promised a NEW OUTFIT TO WEAR. Because
who cares about that. Well I know some of you do but I don’t. And while I started off with good
intentions, listening to everything and trying to take every silly name seriously, by the end
I was speed running conversations, farming several missions at once and really just trying to get the
last bit of EXP required to ‘finish’ the game. I don’t want to spoil how the choices you make
affect the storyline (or rather how they don’t) but I DO like how much of a dick you
can be during the more mundane moments of the game. I loved collecting an item for someone,
then saying to their face that I’ve decided to keep it for myself.
In this game, there are evil poachers all over the place, capturing rare animals.
What terrible people! Luckily, you’re here to save the day by… MURDERING those people, and
then by capturing the rare animals. And then you can then sell them for money, or choose to lock
them away in your zoo and farm for ingredients! The whole thing is made much darker by how your
character speaks with an air of goodwill, which is hilarious when their intentions are anything but.
I always felt that centring the Wizarding World around a school like Hogwarts was
limiting the lore’s potential. How just a few students, after just a few short years,
could be the greatest heroes ever, or how the villain’s story always involved raiding a
secondary school. Why were teachers so cautious, students so foolhardy and villains so childish?
Why did they always have such convoluted plans for world domination, and why weren’t they all just
firing avada kedabra around with gay abandon? Hogwarts Legacy continues with this tradition,
since the bad guys in this game daren’t cast it either. It seems there are some moral standards
that even the bad guys won’t stoop below. But your character has no such moral quandaries!
The moment you learn the unforgivable curses, you’re free to use them whenever. All these
bad guys will be hanging around somewhere, minding their own business, only for me to
come zooming in on my broomstick and to begin firing unforgiveables in every direction. Some
will scream in sheer pain, while others remark they’ve never seen spells like this before as
you’re busy cursing, torturing and stringing combos together in the most efficient way to
wipe their tribes off the face of the Earth. My character was the epitome of evil and towards the
end of the game, this was made all the better by my character’s well-intentioned statements
the moment the last body had hit the floor. Just a shame you can’t cast them on students
is all I’m saying. ‘AVADA KEDAVRA!!!’
‘Aarrghghghgh’ ‘Nobody will believe
I defeated an Ashwinder by myself!!!’ So Hogwarts Legacy is a game of two parts:
there’s the good, and then there are lots and lots and lots of small,
niggling annoyances which eventually become the bulk of your playtime. And no part of it shows it
better than the very end. Minor spoilers alert, though it’s more of a warning than anything.
So after having arrived at Hogwarts mere months before, cramming 5 years of lessons into a single
year, aced every exam I’ve done, every spell I’ve learned and every assignment I’ve been sent on,
having saved Hogsmeade from evil, Hogwarts from evil, numerous rare animals from evil, and the
WORLD from evil, the deputy headteacher looks at my guidebook. I assume she’s going to praise me
for being a remarkable student, like everybody else is. But NO: she has the NERVE to tell me
that I’ve got to do a bit more before I can finish the year. That’s when I began
the most brutal grind yet, flying about popping balloons, drawing constellations and using DARK
MAGIC in abandoned castles until the headteacher deemed me worthy of finishing a year at Hogwarts.
As a reward for reaching level 34 (for some reason) I got the laziest end scene ever, where
they didn’t even bother mentioning the house I’m in. A far cry from the detail at the start of the
game, and a rude farewell that has left me sour. It’s very clear to me that this game’s development
was cut short because the same beautiful attention to detail seen earlier in the game,
and in the castles of Hogwarts, very evidently runs out before the end of the academic year.
So Hogwarts Legacy: a baffling game. Stick with it for long enough and your experience will be
soured by its many minor irritations, but a few sky-high strengths make it a solid and atmospheric
experience, and at best, a really enjoyable game set in the Harry Potter universe. I do
feel I was wanting something a bit more grown up than what I got, but that’s fair enough-
I enjoyed Harry Potter more when I was younger too. And having 100% completed Assassins Creed
Odyssey -twice- I guess the novelty of open world minigames is wearing off for
me. But I’m sure there will be many people who will enjoy these things, and give it 10,
15 years and there will have been a generation of gamers who will have grown up with this game
and I think they’ll have nothing but praise for it. Because that’s really the userbase that a lot
of this game’s features are geared towards: The Room of Requirement alone is like the best bits
of all those CATZ games and the horse racing ones that my sisters used to spend hours on,
with a bit of the SIMS room design thrown in as well. I just wish I’d had this game
20 years sooner. Though I don’t think my PC at the time would have liked it