Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world RPG set in the Wizarding Universe of Harry Potter, a century before the events of the book series. This is a game that is designed for fans of that universe – Hogwarts Castle, the centerpiece of the series, is marvelously detailed, and the game is full of the whimsy that the brand is known for. Visually, the game is a marvel, full of intricate details – Hogwarts Castle is the single best looking area in any video game, ever, and the world at large is quite nice.
The game has you play as a fifth year student – a 16 year old – of the visual appearance and name of your choice. You get to get sorted into your house (though in reality, you can choose it), get a wand, and get to explore Hogwarts. You learn spells, and instead of fighting like a FPS or a standard action game, the game has a wholly original combat system based around matching shields and managing spell cooldowns and choosing your targets. It actually works well, and unlike most games which either abstract it a lot or feel like third person shooters, it actually feels like it is its own thing.
But, while this game is a visual masterpiece, it falls a bit short on the actual experience. The game has a really good opening sequence, full of marvelous visuals and a lot of interesting set pieces, but after you get through the tutorial and start in on the game proper, you realize that there were some sacrifices made along the way to get this out the door, and this unfortunately makes the game world feel much less alive than it should.
The other students are basically scenery – you barely interact with them, and the only times you really do is quests, of which there are an enormous number. Few of your fellow students or professors get much characterization – really, only four or so characters in the game really get explored all that much, and even then, one of them is terribly bland, and all but one of them have very bland designs.
There are no companions here – there are some quests where you are accompanied by one of four fellow students, or by a professor – but they don’t last all that long, and they don’t do enough to characterize most of them. Ironically, the Slytherin companion is the most interesting one – and in fact, there are two interesting Slytherin characters, which works very well as they have a pre-existing friendship and you are sort of “intruding” on it, which creates an intersting dynamic. Moreover, one of them is very much into Dark Magic and is very emotional, while the other rejects it as dangerous. The one who is into it befriends you and influences you to try and find a cure for his sister, Anne, who has been cursed, at whatever cost – but even as he seduces you to the Dark Side, it kind of becomes clear that he is going too far and nothing he is doing is ultimately going to work out.
Unfortunately, while this is a good tragedy, it is interspersed with a general plot that is nowhere near as good. One of the other students is okay – she has a bunch of beast-related sidequests – while the third is a fairly lame do-gooder whose characterization isn’t exactly exciting, and who is presented as some exotic figure – except the school is *extremely* international (much more than in the series) resulting in her not seeming so exotic at all. It just doesn’t work.
There’s theoretically one more companion, but his existence is so fleeting that he shows up basically one and a half times. It is obvious he was meant to play a bigger role, but it seems like whatever subquest he was getting got cut – either because it wasn’t very interesting or because of a lack of time.
Indeed, it is very obvious that the game was meant to have a companion system, where you brought people around with you; there’s remnants of dialogue from that, and unfortunately, without it, the world feels very sterile. You can’t interact with anyone but shopkeepers outside of quests, and so while the world is pretty, all there really is to do is to run around collecting stuff – which there is a plethora of, but it is mostly the same stuff, over and over again, outside of Hogwarts.
The greater open world is honestly pretty weak – it looks good visually, but gameplay-wise, there’s just not enough enemy variety to sustain the game. The game could do some interesting puzzles, but there’s only a handful of them, mostly in Hogwarts, with most of the rest just being “use spell on object”. The actual combat is okay at first, but by the end you are just an overpowered wrecking ball and nothing can stand in your way, even without the use of Dark Magic, and the lack of enemy variety makes it increasingly repetitive the longer you go on.
As a result, the game at times had a hard time holding my attention – I have “171” hours in this game, but the actual 100% time was 77 hours, with the rest being alt-tabbed out. And of that, I’d say that about a third was high quality quests, and about two-thirds was wandering around exploring the open world to collect stuff that was, frankly, kind of pointless.
Finally, the game has some performance issues. It does not run terribly well, and if you are running an older rig, expect to have to upscale the graphics to get something other than a slide show.
Overall, I think this is a valiant effort, but the shortcomings hold it back from greatness. It’s worth playing if you’re into the Wizarding World and don’t mind open worlds, but I would recommend focusing on the quests, particularly the main quest, and mostly ignoring the open world – there’s not much that’s all that fun out there.
3.0