Recent reviews by Pion

Like most modern games, a lot of love has been put into the graphics, and almost none has been put into creating good gameplay. Hogwarts is incredibly beautiful and the surrounding area is rather large.

Been looking forward to being a student at Hogwarts? I have, for literally more than 2 decades. This one still disappoints. Your first potion making class is a press-the-right-button-cutscene.. Your undercover dueling club is a infinite tries, and then everybody becomes extremely impressed when you suceed at your 10th try, like you are the god of dueling. And the difficulty is scaled by adding 4 people to fight you, so a "duel" is you vs 4 other people, you can bring a friend if you want. But somehow they always outnumber you.
Fighting, it looks pretty and feels OK at best, and fighting is clearly the most developed of the game mechanics in the game.
The broomstick flying is horrendous - Both on gamepad and key/mouse, the controls are terrible, they can not be changed on gamepad and only a few of them can be changed on M/K. And there's a lot of invisible walls, want to go through those cool little archways in the bridge? Too bad, not allowed. Want to do some cool diving maneuvers, well the game will make sure you only angle to about 45 degrees downwards, because more would be.. fun?

They could have done so much with this great set, but they seemed to have spent too long on overscoping instead of nailing some core game features.
Immersive roleplaying experience? Not really, unless you love waypoint markers telling you where to go exactly instead of actually looking around and exploring the world. And if you want to play without the waypoint markers, good luck then. Just after you arrive at Hogwarts, Professor Fig will send you an owl (read: you will get a voice message like you had a cell phone or something) telling you to come to his office. With 0 explanation of where that'd be and no options to ask anyone. The game assumes you play with waypoints on, it does not assume you want to actually explore by yourself.

My character keeps talking to himself like some crazy guy. And it gets repetitive.

This game has A LOT of issues, and yet it's so beautiful, it sort of makes me sad that I don't want to spend more time in this pretty game. 2 years more development time, maybe it would have been great. As it is, it's decent at best.

Love the innovative army controls!