Hogwarts Legacy is a game built upon the world of Harry Potter. It takes place long before the events of the famous J.K. Rowling series. You, as the main character, are a new 5th year student at Hogwarts who must catch up to the other students while also working with Professor Fig to deal with a mystery surrounding goblins and poachers. It’s a game that does an amazing job of immersing the player into the world of Harry Potter, but it also reuses many of the familiar mechanics of open world games. The game is a total mixed bag, with some of the artwork and world building fitting beautifully, while other aspects just felt crammed into an existing game engine. The story is mid-tier, and much of the dialog is pretty awful. It’s a game I put down for a few months, but I did eventually finish it.

The first thing that infuriated me about this title is that the game did not come on the physical disc! This game has been out for well over a year when I purchased it, and yet I didn’t even notice the front of the disc case said an internet connection was required. Already opened and out of the case, I couldn’t return it to the store. You don’t even learn that an Internet connection is required until playing through the intro. It means the publisher shipped discs, and continued to ship discs, that do not contain the actual game. This is totally unacceptable for game preservation and archival, and I regret buying it instead of pirating it.

With that sour taste in my mouth, the game really needed to be exceptional. Unfortunately, it’s mid-tier at best.

World and Art

The game is essentially a discount Far Cry, but in the world of Harry Potter. I will say that the world is amazingly built. I’m honestly not a fan of the Harry Potter novels. J.K. Rowling isn’t that great an author, but her personal story somehow made her books famous. I always felt the movies were far superior to her books and hoped for a similar adaptation in this game. All the magical elements, from the jumping mushrooms to fantastic beasts to magical ingredients, were all incredibly well done. Running around the Hogwarts school does feel somewhat enchanting.

However, many of the character designs look absolutely awful. The attempt to bring in a diverse set of students and professors has led to an absolute gobbledygook of design consistency. There are some talented voice actors, but a lot of the dialog just really feels boring and falls flat.

I’m really torn because the world art is incredibly well designed. The music is wonderfully crafted. Parts of this game really immerse the player into the Harry Potter world, warts and all. However, the game just utilizes all the standard mechanics of open world games and they don’t really fit. For example, picking locks and searching for chests just feels like theft and stealing from other wizards. “Rescuing” magical beasts from poachers, only to breed and sell them yourself, just feels like poaching with extra steps. Constant combat and battle just feels like murder campaigns for high school students. Custom outfits just make you feel like you’re constantly out of uniform.

There are so many little elements that don’t really add up or make sense, and it’s a massive missed opportunity to try to break from all the mechanics of traditional open world games and make something truly unique to the world of Harry Potter. Instead, we get something that feels like The Flintstones, where Harry Potter elements are carefully shoehorned into what everyone expects out of open world slop.

Gameplay

Most of the game consists of quests involving battles and puzzles. The fighting mechanics involve learning spells and assigning them to different parts of your casting wheel. As the game progresses, you learn flight and beast mechanics as well. The ability to customize the casting control allows players to adapt their spells to their particular fighting style. However, it also require players to carefully lay out their controls based on the large number of potential spells that can be learned. Reassigning spells based on the quest also makes it difficult to gain muscle memory, and greatly increases the complexity of the controls.

The game engine does a good job of making the player feel like you are using magic to take down enemies, as opposed to traditional guns and bombs. Certain combinations are best for different enemy types. However, the controls do feel generally clunky. The lock-on controls aren’t the best, and the battles often involve very fast dodging and attack strategies. Difficultly can be mitigated by spamming healing potions, similar to Cyberpunk 2077.

You can fly a broom, but you cannot play Quidditch. This is probably a good move, since the game of Quidditch, with the overpowered Golden Snitch, is absolutely terrible from a game design perspective. However, broom handling is bad. The only way to upgrade to better mechanics is to win time trials. It’s frustrating and can easily be skipped.

The menu system awful is playing on a console. It’s obviously designed around keyboard/mouse interactions. It feels slow and counter-intuitive when playing on a game controller.

Conclusion

I purchased this game last August, and after being frustrated with the required Internet connectivity and bored with the opening missions, I shelved this game after a few hours of gameplay for several months. I recently picked it back up and made it through the main story and a significant amount of the character relation quests in 33 hours.

There was a lot of the world I didn’t explore, and normally this would be good for those seeking 100% completion or just want more time in the world of Harry Potter. However, the final credit sequence requires you to achieve a level of 34. I finished the game at level 28, so I had to do an additional 10 hours of maddening grinding with boring shitty side quests, just to get to an underwhelming 3 minute cut sequence, and the fucking credits. That’s one of the absolute worst game designs I’ve seen. It’s a worthless level lock and ruins any mercy I was considering on this review. It’s a final nail in this game’s terrible structure.

There are parts of this game that attempt to be really deep. The story does not shy away from death and consequences. However, there doesn’t appear to be any moral meter like in Mass Effect or Red Dead Redemption II, where your character decisions affect the overall story. There doesn’t seem to be any consequences for learning dark arts. Choices seem to change small parts of the dialog, but the rest of the story continues on a linear path.

Overall, this game had so much potential. There’s a lot this game gets right, especially with the world, artwork and some aspects of combat. The soundtrack is exceptionally well done. However, the character art is odd and the overall feeling of the game is boring. Additional leveling is needed just to get to the final cut sequences, forcing the player to explore a world that’s honestly not all that interesting, in order to view the ending credits. It’s a game that tries desperately to capture the spirit of Harry Potter. Yet, instead of designing a game around that world, it caters to open world expectations and ends up being a mediocre time-wasting mess. It’s a game I’m glad I finally finished so I can say I’ve finished every game I’ve purchased for the PS5, but it’s also such am abysmal disaster that it feels completely overrated and over-hyped by the die hard Harry Potter fans.