Game Review: Hogwarts Legacy

Harry Potter is a beloved franchise which has cemented itself in the hearts of millions of people. Ever since I was a kid, I was mesmerized by story of the young wizard who attends Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry and fights alongside his friends to defeat the dark lord Voldermort. There was this clear charm and allure behind this magical world and its wonderous depths. Whether it’s the books or the movies, the appeal of Harry Potter has captured so much attention over the decades and that widespread adoration still remains strong today. Since Harry Potter’s adventures ended in 2011 though, there’s been a clear desire from the fans to return to that world in some capacity. The Fantastic Beasts films have done a great job in exploring the wider Wizarding World within a different period of time but in reality, those stories have only scratched the surface of that itch. What was clear was fans wanted to return to Hogwarts itself in some way or form and it just so happened Warner Brothers and Avalanche Software heeded that call with their 2022 video game; Hogwarts Legacy. 

Developed by Avalanche Software and published by Warner Bros Games, Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world, third person, action-adventure RPG title which allows the player to live their Hogwarts fantasy to the fullest extent.  Placing the player in the role of a self-created character, they are given so many options to explore Hogwarts and its outer regions as a student and define their character with player driven choices and mechanics. It’s the quintessential realization of the Hogwarts fantasy any Harry Potter fan would have had at some point or another. With such an ambitious concept being promised, the important question to ask in relation to this is does the game actually deliver on this fantasy in a satisfying fashion? Well as far as being a good Harry Potter video game goes, it hits that out of the park. As for being a good open-world, RPG video game though; that’s where this experience ends up failing to some notable extent. 

The story of Hogwarts Legacy follows a young student enrolling in Hogwarts as a late addition to the fifth-year class. While being escorted to Hogwarts by Professor Fig, your appointed mentor and teacher of Magical Theory, your carriage is attacked by a dragon sent by a vicious Goblin rebel leader called Ranrock. It’s made clear quite early that the reason Ranrock is seeking you out is based on your rare aptitude to call forth a powerful form of Ancient Magic very few wizards can utilize. As you and Professor Fig narrowly escape Ranrock and his army, you soon find yourself at Hogwarts and waste no time in being enrolled into your respective house and familiarize yourself with fellow students such as Natsai Onai, Poppy Sweeting and Sebastian Sallow. As you begin to catch up to speed at Hogwarts through classes and exploration, you and Professor Fig soon come to learn there is a deep secret tied behind Hogwarts and the Ancient Magic which may have the potential to shift the course of the Wizarding World forever. This mystery serves as the core crux of the game’s narrative, following you and your friends as you seek to uncover the secrets and protect them from falling into the hands of those would do great harm with them. Outside of the main plot there is a number of supporting plots running parallel which allows the player to further explore the relationships with their fellow Hogwarts students.

The narrative offerings behind Hogwarts Legacy is ultimately disappointing. The main plot in itself offers a clear mystery but there is no clear stake established when the main villains have so little presence in the story. You are expected to understand the weight of the secret behind the Ancient Magic due to its powerful nature but when the opposing forces have so little interaction or clear intention to obtain it then how can I be expected to be invested in protecting this secret? It’s a story which fizzles out very quickly despite some glimmers of captivating potential. As for side components of the narrative, this is where I actually found more intriguing potential writing wise. The plot lines linked to your fellow students range notably in interest but there’s at least a consistent narrative woven between each of their stories. Sebastian Sallow’s questline has the most depth behind it when compared to the others too and actually makes me wish they had taken the themes of his quest and tailored that into the main plot somehow as that would have been a far more interesting set up than what we ultimately got.

When it comes to gameplay, this is the area where I feel I have a lot of criticism to raise for this game. This isn’t me saying the game’s mechanics are inherently bad in any way, but their initial appeal fades all too quickly in the wake of some of the most abhorrent design choices I’ve seen in open world video games as of late. I remember discussing the idea of what makes an open world video games special back in my Elden Ring review. On that note I raised how important it is to make the world itself the driving force for your engagement and how much damage ‘busy-work’ mechanics can do in deteriorating that engagement. It seems Avalanche Software clearly didn’t get my memo however as this game is rife with all the worst trademarks of poor open world design. The map is extremely big, with a huge variation in terrain and biomes to admire, but none of that really amounts to anything when the game has no clear reason to explore any of it. The minute you open your map page and see this world, your screen is literally flooded with so many icons, each reflecting some kind of repetitive task you need to do across all regions of the map. I absolutely despise this kind of visual diarrhea because it completely ruins the immersion when you realize how much a chore working through this world is going to be. It’s not even good content either, every single element of the open world’s side content shows its repetitive stink all too quickly. The game tries to encourage you to keep exploring and ticking off stuff like Merlin Trials, Treasure Caves, Bandit Camps, Butterfly Trials and many other kinds of tasks through unlocking rewards in your Study Guide the more you do. None of the rewards however ever feel like a satisfying payoff to enduring all this tedium. The entirety of the map is littered with these redundant objectives and it does nothing but diminish the beauty of this world when I know there’s nothing of substance to engage within it. 

Open world design is not my only grievance with the gameplay. One other big gripe I have with the gameplay is it’s combat which also loses its appeal quickly enough. Enemies in this game seem to be damage sponges in the sense that they require a flurry of spells to wither down their health bars. Initially the prospect of firing off quick fire attacks and combining spells seems really fun, added along with a nice buff and support system with potions and plants there’s a clear blueprint here to get the player experimenting and having fun with battles. That prospect never comes to fruition though because of how repetitive and tiring these combat encounters all end up feeling like. Whether you’re fighting Goblins, Spiders, Inferi or Dark Wizards; all the fights end up feeling the same. You are forever bound to wither down these enemies with their large health bars from start to finish and there’s no sense of variation in encounters, even with bosses. You may argue the idea is to upgrade your gear to give yourself a better edge in fights but I’d refute that by saying the upgrade system is superficial at best. The idea of upgrading gear never feels appropriate because the way gear is deployed in this game feels akin to a live service game, with level tiers and stat variations. What point is there in banking hard earned resources to upgrading gear which will become redundant with 20 or 30 minutes when I find a better piece? The redundancy only serves as one gripe too because I’d argue the so called ‘buffs’ these upgrades offer don’t often fix the repetitive issue which weighs down every combat encounter in this game.

It's a shame the games core gameplay components feel so fundamentally flawed because when you look deep enough you can see there’s some glimmer of potential behind some of the game’s other aspects. The Room of Requirement is one such example of one of the games better offerings. The level of customization offered to the player within this open environment feels refreshingly expressive. You have so many options on how to style and tailor the room with decorations and utilities to suit your most intricate desires. That vast level of options is embedded in all facets of the games customization options allowing you to lose countless hours to fully define your character and your environment to just how you like. Beast Management is also a worthy function worth recognizing within the game. As you progress through the world and capture new beasts, you are given a lot of options on how to maintain them back in the Room of Requirement. In order to obtain rare resources from these animals you can care for them and breed them in order to obtain a maximum return. It’s a small aspect to the games wider focus but again it highlights my point in which the games has a lot of hidden quality buried under the top layer of monotony. 

In terms of visuals and presentation this is an element of the game I cannot take anything away from. This is the best representation of the world of Harry Potter on so many levels. Whether it’s Hogwarts, the Black Lake, the Forbidden Forest, the Hogsmeade or the surrounding highlands; this game fully realizes the distinct and magical beauty behind their design. Environments are littered with so many fine decorative details which add a whole other sense of life to these places which gives the player a greater level of immersion to lose themselves in. The scale and detail on show go all the way across the map and it's clear beauty makes the hollow nature of the gameplay even more disappointing because you want to have a fun reason to explore every avenue of this varied world. Even on a deeper presentation front with audio and sound, the developers nailed the aura and feel of this world. The soundtrack for the game itself stands out as a real compelling collection of music by Peter Murray, J. Scott Rakozy, Chuck Myers, and Alexander Horowitz.

It's a shame that I had so much hype going into playing Hogwarts Legacy because I was ultimately left disappointed by it’s overall quality. Despite some notable depictions of quality on several fronts, the game just doesn’t do enough to wash away the substantial amount of tedium layered within its narrative and gameplay. When you look at this game on a fundamental level it’s easy to say that this is a great Harry Potter experience on a lot of levels but it’s one of the most average and monotonous open world experiences I’ve endured in a long time. If you’re a Harry Potter fan you will get a decent amount of mileage out of a good proportion of this game but just consider stopping the game once you have finished the story, the open world gameplay is so trivial and worthless that’s really not worth your time or energy to fully complete.