I couldn't finish it! IT WAS SO BORING.

I'm been a massive fan of Harry Potter since 1999 and IDK if that negatively or positively impacted my experience, but my experience was that this game f'n stinks. The game is visually stunning, but everything else about it is insanely dull.

Gameplay is too repetitive. I hate that in modern big-budget AAA gaming, we still have open world games that fill the map with a thousand little icons of meaningless crap to do. Not only that, but you cannot mark all these little areas off the map unless you've learned the correct spell first. Exploration is frustrating because most of the things you discover, you'll have to return to later in the game. This is like... fake gameplay. It's bad, it's stinky, it's no good, and this is not the correct way to extend a player's play time. Same goes for: boring and meaningless sidequests. Of which there are plenty. This is most of the game, in fact.

My biggest problem with the game, however, is this: it lacks heart and soul. It's so lifeless and uninspired. A boring and underwhelming main story is one thing, but this is excusable as long as the side stories and characters are good. But, they're not! All sidequests are BLAND, the supporting cast is BLAND, the main character is BLAND. Part of the magic of Harry Potter is friendship and seeing all of the bonds forming between the colorful cast of characters. In fact, I would consider friendship (and love and family) to be the most important theme of the series -- so why, then, are your classmates so dull and forgettable? I don't care about ANY of these people. They could all die and I wouldn't care. How are you going to make a story set in the Wizarding World and completely miss what makes it so great? Even Fantastic Beasts succeeded in representing the themes of friendship/family/love, even if it failed on every other front.

There's just no motivation to keep playing, for me.

Well, I finished the game and it was a chore.

The beginning is good, discovering Hogwarts, mastering your first spells, your first visit to Hogsmead...
And you expect something great but it never happens, it even becomes worst and worst the more your progress.

The main story could have been good, a classic but solid plot who could have lead to some good twists, secrets, side paths... But it just fall flat, like almost every side quests. As if a complex plot would have deterred the public, so they made a game for idiots.
Not a single choice have a consequence on the world or even yourself.

Most of the quests are just fillers, fetching is the main and only idea, think about the most basic Skyrim's level quests: "I was wandering in the forest and I lost my favorite book, could you retrieve it for me ? Oh, there's giants spiders around be careful..."

95% of the "dungeons" are just a straight line with an absolutely worthless loot at the end. Sometimes you have to solve a "riddle" to get it, be assured you won't have to use a single brain cell to solve it.
Same with all the Merlin's trial, you'll have to activate a few brain cells for a few of them but the developers decided to fill the map with it so again, that's an useless and repetitive chore.

The fun part, if you want to level up (apart from the quests of course), you'll have to complete a lot of these chores: collect, nurture, brush, breed animals for crafting, pop up some balloons with your broom, find hundreds of your field guide's pages and many more of the same kind. Think of Ubisoft's levels of useless grinding for the only purpose of filing a way too big map.
Of course I read reviews but I thought it was overexaggerated as often, it isn't !

But the worst part of the game are the dialogues, it belongs somewhere between uninteresting and pathetic. Everything is manichean and/or a stereotype, there's no depth to any character and the general tone is even more childish and moralizing than the first Harry Potter book.

Their also a more latent issue, I try to not pay attention to all these "woke/DEI" arguments but damn it, they really went overboard with it !

That's 1890 Scotland and yet at least 40% of the students, professors, general population are from all over the world to stay polite. Having a couple of Indians teachers or student is not an issue, it fits the late 1800s and even makes sense.
But when you get subsaharian africans everywhere, a Korean caretaker with a perfect english accent, a Japanese broom teacher... you get the idea.

When you hear about a married couple you can bet they're gay or at least interracial. They even put a trans character, of course you have to take pity on him because of his backstory. But i'd like to know why in a world where you can change your apparance that character have a male voice with a female body. It's not even logical.

To end that review (maybe more of a rant now...) on a slightly positive note there's a few good thing.

The game looks really good and apart from a few infamous UE4 engine stutters it runs well.
The combats are good but don't upgrade your clothes because it'll make you so ridiculously overpowered it'll take out all the fun.

Hogwarts is really great to explore, it's huge and full of thing to discover, see, listen, read...
Hogsmead really have that unique Harry Potter atmosphere.

Overall it's not worth the money nor the time I spent on it, I always try to avoid spoilers as much as I can so I didn't read enough review to have a realistic opinion on the game. It backfired...

SUPAFLYYY.

I'm leaving a cautionary review for anyone that doesn't live within North America and Europe.

I live in South America (Argentina specifically) and as soon as I launched the game I went through the Terms of use screen and found something I find rather damning.

Apparently the "do not sell or share my personal data" option is not available in some regions including my own. I find this frankly absurd and while I had to accept to be able to play the game I made sure to email them afterwards and ensure that they wouldn't share or sell my data.

Needless to say the negative review is based exclusively on that factor, I think removing the option to not sell your personal data based on region is absolutely scummy.

I liked the game, its pretty and some of the story tie ins were neat. But as far as big budget games go it really lacked depth. The charters were in-distinguishable from each other most of the time. The whole game is one big railroad, there is no dialogue or side character work that feels really immersive or choose your own adventure-ish. It felt directed towards younger audiences, both with the one dimensional charters and the ease of the logic problems.

There aren't many clickable elements in comparison to other games. There isn't really any differentiation to the loot... like you just defeated 10 big boss creatures... have a scarf worth 60 bucks.... you walked into a house on the side of the road have a scarf worth 60 bucks. None of the loot really matters, or adds to the story. The quests don't increase your friendliness with characters, or really change anything. Sometimes if you do a bunch of side quests characters will reference some task you did 20 game days ago as if it was this afternoon, and super relevant.

The puzzles are repetitive, and if you don't solve it the first time they just tell you the answer.

There is no real day cycle-that makes you feel like you are at a school, or on a schedule. You kind just run around on your own time, don't ever sleep, or eat or socialise outside of quests.

Hogwarts Legacy manages to re-create some of the vibe / atmosphere from the books and movies, but the meaningless tasks that fill the open world do little to captivate. And NO QUIDDITCH (!)
Average. 5/10
Total size on ssd: 71 GB

++ Hogwarts is a maze of hidden rooms and puzzles. Prowling the castle just to see what was around the next corner was easily the best part of the game.
+ Level of environmental detail is impressive.
+ Some great character writing among the students. Sebastian, Natty and Poppy all have good arcs. I enjoyed their quests more than I enjoyed the main story tbh.
+ Some good side-quests. Finding a certain chest in the back of a shop in Hogsmeade was easily one of my favorites.
+ Music is good.
+ Can continue playing after the story is complete.

+/- Story is meh. Stakes are high, but Ranrok just can’t compare to Voldemort.
+/- combat is fun for the most part. Bosses are annoyingly spongy.
+/- Role-playing / The Room of Requirement. The Room of Requirement is the answer to all your wizarding needs! Want to pretend to be Newt Scamander with a menagerie of Fantastic Beasts? The Room of Requirement has what you need! How about your own greenhouse for growing plants? Room of Requirement. Potion making? Room of Requirement. Playing house & decorating? Room of Requirement. Would much rather have had to go to Biology class to grow plants, or potions class to brew potions. You know, like a Hogwarts student might do? Once the tutorials are completed, there’s little reason to go to any of the classrooms. Was hoping my House’s common room would be a centerpiece of my time at Hogwarts – as it would be for a student at Hogwarts – but not only was I barely there, I had almost zero reason to ever go there.

- - NO QUIDDITCH?! The headmaster has canceled quidditch for the current school year. Why? Someone was injured or something idk. Point is, there is NO QUIDDITCH in the game.
- terrible optimization, more than a year after release. Frequent stutters and frame-drops. Ray-tracing makes it worse, and activating upscaling doesn’t fix it. (Ryzen 5950X + RTX 4070TiS)
- high system ram usage. Regularly spiked past 20GB total (Windows + the game)
- relies on switching between “spell sets” to access the plethora of possible spells. There are four possible spell sets, and each set can have four possible spells and no more. You can put whatever spell you want into a spell-set, but you only have four available at any one time without switching between them. Switching sets relies on the F-keys (F1, F2, F3 and F4) and is cumbersome as heck. Console-itis at its worst.
- flying on the broom feels slow
- no penalty for being out and about after hours. Curfew is meaningless.
- no penalty for being evil (like using Unforgivable Curses)
- after the first mission, no penalty for entering the Restricted Section of the library
- since when are students allowed to roam the countryside around Hogwarts killing bandits and goblins?
- most side quests are meaningless busy-work
- frequent copy-pasting of parts of dungeons
- lock-picking is a mini-game. Alohomora is supposed to be an instantaneous spell. And you will be picking a LOT of locks in Hogwarts Legacy.
- best way to fight poachers is… to become a poacher. BUT we’re doing it to save the creatures, not exploit them, so it’s okay, you see. Except we are exploiting them for fur, hair, feathers, etc. which we can use via crafting, or sell for money. We can even breed them.

If you’re a Harry Potter fan, or have seen the movies without reading the books, Hogwarts Legacy is a decent nostalgia trip, though the lack of true role-playing will irritate and annoy. If you know nothing about Harry Potter and are just looking for a fun magic game, Hogwarts Legacy checks some of the boxes, but the Ubisoft-style open world will be a burden to complete.

This is the most beautiful pile of garbage ever created. The game is visually stunning but the gameplay is atrocious. It's a very obvious console port and the game mechanics are bad. I haven't finished it yet, although I intend to, just to see if the story is any good, but it is a painful slog.

The architecture of Hogwarts is amazing, but sadly it simply doesn't matter because you can just fast travel everywhere anyways, with a map that is harder to navigate than the terrain. The whole castle is what I want to call "false seamless", that is you are supposed to be able to just walk through any door in the castle at least, but very often, even with my state of the art PC with an M2 SSD, the second fastest processor on the market, enough RAM to store the whole game on it, the other area isn't loaded yet, and you collide with a door that doesn't open (how about increasing the loading trigger area or something?). So the initial impression is that there are doors that go nowhere. Literal loading screens would be better than what they ended up producing. Interspersed with this unfinished experiment you still have loads of loading zones here and there, so it all feels really messy and disappointing. The game could very well feature something like having to memorize certain aspects of the layout of Hogwarts to get around, maybe asking the paintings where to go or sneaking around at night, attending classes and being penalized for missing them, a time turner that has a limited amount of charges, an actual need to sleep or eat (and maybe a spell to alleviate that need), just about anything that meets a single expectation of realism (or in this case, magic) like that after navigating the castle for the first time. Sadly the whole castle is nothing but a very large prop and it might as well not even be there. The magic is there for a split second when you start the game and then it gets gnawed away in huge chunks as you realize that this is just the same bad game you probably already played many times before with a different skin. The game could be forgiven if it had other redeeming qualities. Sadly it does not.

Flying, while sometimes pretty, is mechanically very boring. It's very obviously made for consoles. Jumping on your broom requires pressing Tab+3. Sometimes you accidentally just press Tab and waste a potion or worse. If you collide with a wall, you stop and keep floating in the air, and it clearly isn't due to some protection magic, it's just immersion breaking bad physics. So there is no danger to flying, except for accidentally wasting resources when jumping on your broom. You can't always jump on your broom or land and it is infuriating (like if you're standing on a rock or on a hill that's too steep or something). Let me land and die if I do it wrong, just don't force arbitrary flying zones and tell me I can't jump off a broom that's right above the ground. Also many things you wish you could do in regards to flying is simply impossible. See a nice tower you want to go stand on for a bit? Not acceptable, you can't land here. Want to fly over the highest tower of Hogwarts? Also impossible, there's an invisible sky wall there. God forbid something like flying upside-down or using the mouse to look straight down or something (which you want to do surprisingly often to check what type of enemy you just flew over). Not to mention flying indoors or in Hogsmeade. The game is full of these little details that let you know that you lack the freedom the game promises, the freedom you might have experienced and have come to expect in basically any other game with any decent quality. There is something very wrong with how the game handles consequences by lacking them. If you cast spells on people nothing really happens. Fire doesn't spread. People don't react to an explosion right next to them. Casting Avada Kedavra in the middle of school doesn't result in anything. Nothing matters, and so the game feels empty.

You keep leveling up, but so do the enemies, and the equipment you find follows the exact same curve. The first troll you fight is just as difficult as the last one, and the equipment you use is exactly the same with different numbers. This is a complete disaster from a gameplay perspective. Nothing changes and nothing matters. The mouse you fight at level one should be easy to kill when you're level 10, but here it just keeps leveling up with you, so there is no sense of progression whatsoever. The numbers go up, but that's it. There are special tricks to dealing faster with enemies (like Dugbogs, which you can kill with just two different spells in the correct order), but it remains unclear if those exist for all enemies or just some of them. The variety of enemies is also atrociously low. There are spiders, animals, goblins, dark wizards and animated knights and that's it. 5 different enemies that are always at your level. 6 different types of gear that are basically just numbers that follow your level (sometimes they have an effect on certain spells or protect against a certain enemy type, but the exact numbers are never revealed and as a player I haven't cared about them at all). Cosmetic wand handles, cosmetic brooms, cosmetic everything. You keep playing the same boring game through every level and nothing fundamentally really changes.

The game bombards you with quest after quest and you completely lose any sense of what you're supposed to do for who and why. Non-linearity is great when it works, but in this game it simply does not. There is no real purpose to the side-quests, except maybe for learning spells in the first place or acquiring more cosmetic items. Quest dialogue gets cut off by something like NPC chatter, the main character casting a spell, or even another quest starting. Every quest is basically a fetch-quest, sometimes in disguise, but mostly just the same old thing you've already done a hundred times.

The game contains 26 spells/things you put in your spell slots, but just 16 slots. You can almost instantly unlock all 16 slots, so unlocking them doesn't really feel like a thing. So there are 10 spells (or similar things) that you might randomly need that you can't equip at all times, but that you can manually re-equip. I can't even describe how dumb this feels. You have access to every spell, no limit to how often you can switch them around, you just have to pause the game to access them, which makes no sense. Why not give people two more "Spell Sets"/rows of spells? It is perhaps the most atrocious UI design decision I have ever seen in a game.

There are two things you can do to defend in a fight, and they are casting protego to defend against spells or weak melee hits or dodging away if the spell or hit can't be shielded against. These two are indicated by a warning circle which is either yellow or red. That's not very helpful if somebody is color blind, and my reflexes seem to be just that. Certain other games with similar systems with shapes instead of colors are easier. Anyways, there are basically two different ways to protect yourself, however dodging works against everything. So you end up just rolling in a circle around the enemies, casting a spell every now and then. Combat isn't very interesting when you end up doing that all the time. It's cool that you have to pair up the right spell color to break the right enemy shield, but sadly it isn't that interesting after a while and only works with dark wizards. Even a tiny bit more of that with other enemies might have been great.

The game takes absolutely no risks in regards to any system whatsoever and you end up with porridge when you wanted a fine meal. I would have loved an unfinished, half-baked, crazy-ideas-filled mess over this latest mass-produced goo from the game mines. A bad game that took even a single risk would have been better than this. The writing isn't bad, the graphics are better than perfect, the ambiance is great, but the game itself stinks.

kinda boring tbh. combat doesn't feel great and the combos seem kinda useless. ill prolly give it another try sometime though.

This game is everything the child version of myself would desire from a Potter fantasy.

i LOVE this game!
few games have done a better job making you FEEL like you are in the world of a previously established non-game based franchise as this game does. the other that immediately comes to mind is the Mad Max game, and i guess cp77 deserves this praise as well. the point being tho that this game feel just so perfectly potterverse (you even get shades of the fantastic beasts movies). yes its a bummer that quiddich is missing, as it is another defining aspect of the wizarding world, esp when it comes to hogwarts, but im sure it was for technical reasons more than anything else. and, if im being perfectly honest, i dont miss it THAT much. as an open world game it does a great job, with many things to do around the map, even if they are mostly very simple puzzles or basic fetch based encounters. the quests so far feel appropriate to the world, and you get to play another "special" wizard/witch, pursued by the current big bad of the time period, and pulled into a deep mystery that puts your formal education on the back seat. the game does a great job pacing itself, introducing new features and abilities once youve had time to learn the previous ones, and so far the mix of story and side quests works for an openworld game. it has decent character customization and a robust transmog system so you can look just as you want to. in fact one of my only complaints is that you cant set presets for your transmogs, so anytime you change gear, or want to swap to a new look you have manually go through each item and set the look you want. it would be great if you could save a loadout into a wardrobe or something (like in diablo 4). my only other real complaint is the lack of any kind of consequences, or rather the mismatch between the stated flavor of the world and the reality of said world. for example, there is a strict curfew for students, meaning you are not allowed to go out at night (this is talked about several times), but this is NEVER enforced unless you are actively on a quests that has you out at night, at which point there are guards looking for you and if they find you you fail the quest. yet if you are not on a quest you can be out as late as you want and no one cares. there are no guards looking, and even other npcs are all at their posts, waiting for you to talk to them as tho it were daytime. i get this from a design standpoint, but there is a wait feature already in the game, so it would make going out at night much more interesting if you could get caught and sent back to your room, so youd have to sneak out again, or just wait for morning to do your business. there are a few other minor things too, like the mention of the classic shifting staircases, but nothing like this exists in the game, and the map is fully fixed. again, i get this from a design standpoint, but there is a feature to guide you to where you want to go, so even if the map could change to a few different configurations, its not like you couldnt still find your way. and speaking of maps, my other biggest complaint is that the map suuuuuucks. or to be clear the map for the school sucks (the worldmap and hogsmead map are ok). it doesnt show room/floor layouts, just waypoints floating in space, and its clumped in odd ways so you have to toggle to the right location based menu to see the waypoints where you want to go, but even these can be very hard to actually know which is right because what LOOKS closest might actually be quite far from where you want to go as it could be on a different floor with a winding rout to get where you want. it is unclear and confusing. still all these detractors dont make it a bad game. i still love it, and i look forward to seeing where it all goes. lets hope they dont completely ruin the sequel by filling it with live action slop and microtransactions like it sounds like they are planing to do...

tldr: great game so far. minor issues, but they dont ruin the rest. the FEEL of the game is spot on!