Hogwarts Legacy

Hogwarts Legacy is a pretty decent open world action game of sorts, and an absolutely marvellous Harry Potter game. I've played older HP titles, watched the movies and, while I've never been a diehard fan of the franchise, I do like it in general. Therefore, although I enjoy certain musical cues and references, I mainly judge the game on its own merit.
Graphically, it's incredible with some caveats. The game has stunning breath-taking scenery, and spell effects are sharp and satisfying. However, the models and animations can be a bit stiff, and I constantly dropped FPS for some reason. I played on medium even though my PC should be able to handle ultra according to the specs; the game itself set everything to ultra after an auto-detect.
The game also features a day-night cycle, which changes the appearance of the location. For instance the Forbidden Forest at night looks as haunting as it rightfully should.
Moreover, there is also a season cycle with the entire map changing depending on the time of the year. Not only that, but the Hogwarts itself has different decorations for different seasons. Really cool attention to detail.
In terms of sound, it's OK. I enjoyed the female VA for the MC quite a bit, and the rest of the cast are also pretty good. I don't think it reaches the heights of, say, RDR 2, but it's definitely good enough and even excellent at certain points.
The OST is charming, though it might be my nostalgia talking since it utilises certain themes from the movies or older games.
Moving on to the gameplay and the world in general, as I mentioned, it's an open-world game, which means there are hundreds of collectibles, optional secrets, quests, etc. I found them pretty fun, but the sheer number can be a bit too much if you're a completionist. One pet peeve of mine is the level scaling: as you level up, the enemies level up with you. There is a per-area cap, so you will eventually outscale them, but I'm not a fan of this mechanic in general. It did not ruin the game, but I don't think it's particularly necessary either.
The gameplay itself is pretty fun. It mainly consists of attacking the enemies with your basic attacks while weaving in additional spells. Higher level enemies have shields around them which you have to break with a specific "type" of spell and cannot break with regular AAs. The enemies, in their turn, also attack you with basic AAs, which you can block with your shield, or with spells, which you cannot block and have to dodge.
To help you out, there are usable plants and potions, which, in my experience, can completely trivialise an encounter even on the highest difficulty. I actually think it's a plus since paying just a bit of attention to potion-brewing and herbology gives you a huge advantage.
I would not say it's the deepest or most challenging gameplay loop ever, but it's flashy, aesthetically pleasing, and does provide some challenge, at least on the hardest difficulty.
When it comes to the narrative, it's passable. As usual for me, I guess, I did not enjoy the main story as much as the side quests, specifically Sebastian's questline. It was not terrible and had its moment, but it also had some pretty dumb plot points at times.
Before summarising, I'd like to mention certain neat features the game has, which are not crucial, but are very welcome and show stellar work from the devs:
1. You can choose your house (a given, really) and there is actually house-specific dialogue, such as a character bad-mouthing Slytherin and apologising if your MC is in said house. It comes often enough to feel as if your house choice is acknowledged by the game and isn't just a checkbox in a save file.
2. Characters react to you with specific dialogue after their side-quest completion, although it can get a bit repetitive after a while.
3. There is an entire system to decorate your "base" with hundreds of cosmetic items to place, such as chairs, banners, statues, etc. I went for a more utilitarian approach and simply conjured things required to brew potions, but it's still a welcome feature.
4. You can capture beasts to care about them and periodically harvest magical ingredients. In addition, you can breed said beasts and sell the offsprings to get a bit of money.
5. The ingredients from the beasts can be used to upgrade your equipment and weave in special traits, such as "more damage with spell X".
6. An amazing feature: the way your clothes look is decoupled from what you're actually wearing, meaning you don't have to choose between min-maxing the stats or fashion, you can have both.
7. There are hundreds of snippets with HP lore about certain items, locations, people to be found in game.
To conclude, I think Hogwarts Legacy is a wonderful game. It can stand on its own without the franchise appeal, even though it does lose to titles like God of War in that regard. Taking the franchise into account, it's a must-play for any HP fan. For a non-HP fan, it can also be fun, albeit to a lesser extent.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10
Like to pet the cat
　　　　　 　____
　　　　　／＞　　フ
　　　　　| 　_　 _ l
　 　　　／` ミ＿^ノ
　　 　 /　　　 　 |
　　　 /　 ヽ　　 ﾉ
　 　 │　　|　|　|
　／￣|　　 |　|　|
　| (￣ヽ＿ヽ)__) __)
　＼二つ

I almost quit at first.
This game had the chance to be a masterpiece but unfortunately fails short in some departments which make it just good. In fact, there are aspects of it that are pure genius 10/10 while others are really bad.
Rarely have I seen such a gap in quality within the same game.
This developer got ahold of an incredibly powerful, fleshed out IP rich with lore and personality.
And to their credit, they recreated that atmosphere impeccably. The world feels magical, dreamy, cozy, and superbly crafted as a whole. There's a lot of attention to detail that really brings this whole vibe to life.
The music, and even sound effects, which are both excellent help even further when it comes to the mood and ambiance. It is a real pleasure to just wander around, and especially to fly on your broom seamlessly across the gorgeous map. That too was perfectly recreated, you feel a real sense of freedom and liberation.
That said, the masterpiece part of this game comes from the art direction. Few games have had this kind of quality and there are some side missions that blew my mind, particularly one in a haunted basement. It felt like that side level took more effort and creativity than the whole main story put together. I wouldn't want to spoil anything so I shan't go into details. But let's just say it was a work of art. The art direction team is goated.
Visually, the one issue I had was with the face animation tech. That part looks like it's a 20 year old game. Stiff faces with barely any expression, which resets after every line, like the old point & click games.
While that's nothing major, it does hurt the otherwise extremely high standard the rest of the game has set.
The game itself starts off REALLY slow, I was wondering what the heck was going on when 5 hours into it, I was still just going from class to class doing relatively boring quests. I almost quit, But then, about 7hrs in, it picks up steam as Hogwarts opens its doors to the outside.
The main issue I've had with the game was the writing. It is just bad. It's childish and as cringe as it gets.
It was painful having to listen to the conversations most of the time, so much so that I skipped a lot of it.
Now, I do realize Harry Potter are children's books and perhaps the game is meant for a much younger audience, but it is still based on books that are written amazingly well, poignant, funny, witty, engaging. This game has none of that, every conversation is so bland, weak, void of character, even AI would've come up with better.
There is no reason it should be this way, even if small kids are the audience, they are not redacted, they're smarter and sometimes more mature than we old people are.
And I've noticed this is becoming a trend unfortunately. It is so hard to find good writing anymore.
When it comes to combat and gameplay, it's in between the incredible art direction and abysmal writing, it's neither horrible nor is it great, it's just mid. Very easy, same 5-6 enemy types, pretty much the same 3-4 buttons on repeat. The lack of diversity and challenge handicap an otherwise interesting base idea of hitting combos in a timely and reactive manner.
Now the puzzles, which are the vast majority of the game, are even more mediocre, and even simpler. A puzzle will literally consist of you jumping on 3 platforms in a row, or shooting 10 balls without moving from your spot, and you're done. It's mind numbing and that's a real shame too.
Funny story, at one point I encountered what I thought was a really challenging puzzle. Finally!
You're supposed to turn cubes on top of columns until all 3 sides match, a sort of a simplified Rubik's cube.
Only here, one of the cubes was floating above the column,
AHA! I knew exactly what I had to do, I had to first flip it while it was hovering, then slam it down with Descendo. BOOM.
But wait, no that didn't actually work, 15min later I gave up, feeling shame.
Here I was wanting a challenging puzzle and I couldn't solve it, so I looked it up.
Turns out it's a bug, it's not supposed to be floating at all :/
Speaking of, the game has a lot of bugs. Nothing game breaking, but definitely a lot of achievement breaking ones. If you're a completist you're gonna have hell in some cases. From getting stuck in the ground and having to load an old save, to crashes to desktop, to icons not showing up on the map, enemies becoming invisible mid fight so you cant hit them back, to chests not opening, and a ton of others I don't remember.
There are a lot of strange and nonsensical decisions within the game too. For example you often cannot fast travel outside a dungeon even if you completed it, you have to backtrack the whole way. The menus require multiple clicks to reach the area you want, the map is also kind of a mess. There's room for a lot of QoL improvements in Hogwarts.
And why cant I pause during cutscenes? I almost peed myself once.
So, TLDR, while the game is a masterpiece in the art direction department, it lacks in almost every other one, in some very badly. They seem to want to do too much and end up watering everything down. Ok, the Pokémon style animal hunting is cute and fun for a minute, but then what? So many resources went into building biomes for them and giving you all those tools to craft a nice place but there is zero incentive to do it. It's fun for a total of 5 minutes.
Those animals could've had a use. For example keeping your puffskin with you could have helped you sniff particular chests or items more easily, or perhaps some of them could help you in a fight.
They could've come up with a lot of incentives for all those systems they built that are completely useless and unnecessary.
They also give you map nausea with 3000 icons each of which is a 20s pointless event with nothing interesting to do it for.
Developers need to focus, make 20 epic puzzles instead of 100 ultra short mind-numbing ones. Make 10 epic fighting arenas instead of 500 small villages with 2 enemies each and ridiculous loot.
Too much emphasis is placed on quantity at the expense of quality and it's overly diluted in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, ultimately failing to fully satisfy any of them.
It's a game riddled with missed opportunities and shortcuts.
While Hogwarts is alright, it had the potential to be a complete experience with deep systems, compelling writing, and challenging yet rewarding puzzles. And I hope that, if they ever make a sequel, it'll be just that.

Overall, I enjoyed it. But some downsides
-Your choices don't really matter at all(no alignment or anything)
-Can get really repetitive if you like to 100% games(looking at you Merlin Trials) with very little pay off
-While the outfits can be fun, it becomes a chore after a while
-Very little time is spent in classes and almost zero time feeling like you are part of whatever house you are sorted into
-NO QUDDITCH
-A very big drawback is that the world is empty and there is nothing to see except Hogwarts and Homesmead...but I understand that's what they were aiming for
-It's literally like you're playing a spin-off from the HP movies
"After all this time?"
"Always." ❤

A Beautiful Yet Shallow Dive into the Wizarding World
Hogwarts Legacy invites you to step into the shoes of a wizard or witch in the late 19th century, delivering a visually stunning and magical experience that captures the atmosphere of the Harry Potter universe. From the moment you enter the Hogwarts grounds, it’s clear the developers poured immense effort into crafting an environment filled with charm, wonder, and nostalgia. While the game excels in creating a vivid magical atmosphere and engaging combat mechanics, it falls short in terms of narrative depth and quest design.
Summary
Pros
✪ Magical Atmosphere: The world is brimming with enchanting details, from secret passageways in Hogwarts to the lush landscapes of the Forbidden Forest and beyond.
✪ Combat Mechanics: The dueling system is surprisingly robust and engaging, offering plenty of spell combinations and strategies that make every encounter thrilling.
✪ Visuals and Audio: From the detailed interiors of Hogwarts to the ambient sounds of bustling Hogsmeade, the game’s aesthetics are phenomenal.
Cons
✪ Predictable Storyline: Despite its potential, the narrative lacks depth and often feels like a missed opportunity to explore more nuanced or surprising paths.
✪ Repetitive Quests: Side missions often boil down to fetch quests or simplistic tasks, failing to provide meaningful engagement or variety.
My Experience
As someone who values immersive gameplay, I was delighted by the fluid and satisfying combat system. The ability to mix and match spells in dynamic ways added an extra layer of strategy to encounters, keeping me hooked for hours. Exploring the castle and its surrounding areas was equally enjoyable; every nook and cranny seemed to have a secret or collectible waiting to be discovered. The atmosphere and attention to detail were so strong that I found myself simply wandering around, soaking in the magic.
However, the quests and storyline left much to be desired. While I expected the narrative to weave a complex web of intrigue, it instead delivered predictable and shallow outcomes. The main questline lacked memorable twists, and side missions often felt like filler. I kept hoping for more significant consequences to my actions or surprises along the way, but they never materialized.
Final Thoughts
Hogwarts Legacy is a visual and gameplay marvel that captures the essence of the Wizarding World but misses its mark on storytelling. If you’re looking for an immersive and visually captivating adventure with solid combat mechanics, this game will surely enchant you. However, if you prioritize deep narratives and meaningful quests, you might find the experience a bit underwhelming.
Rating: 8.5 /10
A must-play for fans of the franchise, but with room for improvement in its storytelling.

I’m not a Harry Potter fan, but Hogwarts Legacy is hands down one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. The open-world design is incredible, reminding me of the sense of wonder and freedom I felt when Skyrim first came out. Every corner of the world is filled with detail, and the game offers a rich, immersive experience that kept me hooked for hours.
One thing I kept thinking while playing is how amazing this game would be with a co-op or multiplayer mode. Imagine exploring Hogwarts with friends, tackling challenges together, breeding beasts, grinding or just roaming the world side by side. It would take an already great game and elevate it to a whole new level.
If you’re on the fence because you’re not into Harry Potter, don’t let that stop you. Hogwarts Legacy is a mustplay for any fan of openworld games. It captures that same thrill and excitement that made Skyrim a legend, and I can’t recommend it enough.

I would like to start off by saying - has anyone every played the classic Harry Potter games on PC? I'm talking about the old school games, like when you used to be able to collect as many Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans before the clock runs out, or when they used to give you SOME simple freedom as a young Harry Potter to be able to explore the castle before moving on to your next puzzle.
This game has scratched an itch I've had for probably 20+ years since playing those games as a child. Hogwarts Legacy gives you freedom to explore as MUCH of Hogwarts as probably physically possible. We have all seen scenes in the movies we may or may not have dreamed of exploring like the common rooms, hogsmeade, the forbidden forest, and even the kitchens underneath the great hall that were only mentioned in the books. I have waited so long to be able to finally explore as much of the castle as possible and could easily see myself putting hours into just the castle which is breathing with new life.
I know there have been a lot of talk in the past about Hogwarts and the like, but being a fan for a very long time, and having fond memories of playing the retro games my parent's extinct "computer room", and remembering my dad standing outside of Walmart for every book release, I can proudly say that I am a fan and always will be of games like Hogwarts Legacy that literally bring magic to life.