The announcement of Hogwarts Legacy in September 2020 caused real cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, there were no games in the magical world for a whole decade, and on the other hand, the development was entrusted to Avalanche Software, who worked on the Disney Infinity series and other games for Disney, and had no experience with AAA games, even in an open world. At the time of publication of the first reviews, no one believed that as a result, the developers would cope with the task, albeit with certain nuances.

Welcome to Hogwarts

A gifted high school student, accompanied by a mentor and a representative from the Ministry of Magic, heads to Hogwarts to study magic and manage his talents. Halfway to school, an incident occurs during which another talent of the hero is revealed – to see the flow of ancient magic. Almost no one knows about its existence.

Arriving at the school, we go through the faculty selection ceremony led by the distribution cap. You can use your Harry Potter Fan Club account, and then your faculty will automatically join the game, and you will also receive several cosmetic bonuses.

To do this, you need to create a WB Games account and link to it a Wizarding World account, a PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and EGS profile (depending on which platform you play on). Then the game will do everything automatically, although at the stage of choosing a faculty, it will allow you to choose a dormitory independently.

A fifteen-year-old newcomer, who is immediately enrolled in the fifth course, quickly attracts the attention of teachers and students. Such a storyline allowed the developers to immediately immerse the player in the whirlwind of events, without preludes in the form of the first years of study, and also gave an opportunity to tell a more mature story than the adventures of first-graders.

And yet we are at school, so we will have to pass the academic difference and combine magic lessons with the investigation of the intentions of the main villain. This will be our main occupation throughout the game, story quests cover both training and investigation, often you can even choose what to do first.

The more important choice Hogwarts Legacy allows you to make in defining our character is to be kind and polite, or a selfish asshole, rudely responding to classmates and appropriating their things.

Everything is not clear with the storyline (no details here), but the principle by which the school arch was built is sometimes surprising. Some quests teach basic magic and skills, while others tell individual stories of the students, while the beginning of the story is presented to us in the form of a story mission, during which we learn something that is necessary for passing the game, and the continuation of the story unfolds in an additional quest.

On the one hand, this approach allows you to skip a story you don’t like. On the other hand, Hogwarts Legacy has many plots that at first look like ordinary tasks, but later grow into a large-scale and interesting adventure, sometimes even tragic.

And this is another problem, at the beginning of the game almost all additional missions are banal and not interesting, but you still need to go through them in order to further interact with the students and learn about their history.

Another type of activity is the assignment of teachers. They should be performed to learn new spells, some are required to progress through the story. As a rule, these tasks consist in collecting resources or defeating enemies in the specified way. After fulfilling the conditions, we return to the teacher and perform a simple mini-game on learning a spell and immediately test what we have learned on a dummy.

There are not many spells, but this is the main argument in battles, and there are also potions. You have to actively use them and switch between their sets, which looks spectacular during the battle, but the gameplay itself descends into chaos due to the not entirely convenient way of switching these sets. Also, in some locations, you need to use non-combat skills to feed animals or arrange your own room.

For this, we assign, for example, feed to one of the buttons, feed the animals, and then return the battle spell again. As a result, for the sake of a two-minute activity, we spend a minute reassigning skills. It is possible to leave peaceful magic on a permanent basis, but then there will be less room for combat spells.

Not so charming

Sometimes you get the impression that Hogwarts Legacy is not finished, especially in details that slightly spoil the overall impression of the game. For example, interactions with some objects or dialogues start through a black screen (blackout), even just to pet the kitty script turns on through the screen blackout. And there are many cats here and you want to play with them all, so imagine the scale of the problem.

Setting dialogues is as simple as possible, even in plot conversations it is just a change of the interlocutors’ plans, which eventually gets a little tiring, because, first of all, the game is long and we spend most of the time in dialogues, and already at the tenth hour you want to promote these talking heads. The second reason is more technical. With each change of plans, all the environment and lighting are re-rendered and this is noticeable, which knocks out of the atmosphere of the game and distracts.

Also, if you quickly run to another large part of the castle near the door, a loading icon may appear, which stops the hero at the exit for a few seconds. I’ve only seen this in one place directly at Hogwarts, but for the most part the whole world is intact, except for a few isolated locations.

There are also bugs, but nothing critical and their number does not exceed the “norms” for a typical open world game. In over 30 hours the game crashed once and had to restart from a checkpoint once more and that was it.

I want to give a special mention to the broomstick control, it’s fine when you just need to fly to the required point on the map, but when it comes to the competition… ugh. I’m sure the developers left the best of the controls, but this is the element of the game that will cause the most pain.

Hogwarts Legacy has a character editor, but for creating a unique hero, the editor is too lame, the face is generally chosen from one and a half dozen standard sets. Individual elements: eyes, mouth, eyebrows, can be adjusted, but they do not make the general weather, in social networks I have already come across screenshots of characters similar to my hero.

Moreover, even some non-player characters are similar, I won’t elaborate, but one ghost is very similar to the student we meet in the first hours of school (they are different personalities) and we meet both of them in the main plot.

But the main thing is that most of the defects are not critical. Yes, you pay attention to them when you notice them, but after a second you forget when the majestic castle of the school appears on the screen, or the mysterious Forbidden Forest shrouded in thick fog, or the cheerful town of Hogsmeade, in which every day is a holiday.

The world of magic is real

Although the events of Hogwarts Legacy take place 100 years before the story of Harry Potter, the castle itself has remained unchanged. For the first minutes and even hours of the game, you just want to walk around the school, look at pictures, spin globes, visit different classes and observe the lives of students. The attention to detail is incredible, as is the amount of detail in the frame, it’s hard for me to imagine the amount of work involved, every centimeter of the castle is handcrafted.

When we come to the class, we are shown a small screen saver with the students in the learning process, how they succeed or fail the task. Someone learns to use a broom, someone sits by the fountain or catches butterflies. Guards beat each other, a magical secateur trims bushes, and somewhere on the horizon, students compete in speed on brooms.

I just noticed that there are some teenagers at school, probably first of all it is connected with legal and age issues, and only then with an artistic decision.

The surrounding settlements are made with the same level of attention to detail and a sense of the magic of these places. Hogsmeath really looks like a city full of life, and when you personally visit a sweet shop or a small shop, you can understand why Harry’s classmates were so happy when they got the opportunity to visit this magical place. Ollivander’s Shop and Three Broomsticks with Butterbeer are also on site.

And only in Hogssmith can you buy the necessary training equipment. The Forbidden Forest really looks ominous and creates a feeling of unease with its darkness and inhabitants who are not always happy to see uninvited guests. And some locations or settlements do not want to leave at all. If there was an opportunity to sit on a bench with a great view, I’m sure I would have spent several hours in a state of complete peace and watching the charming animals or plants.

The entire game is accompanied by music that is not inferior to the John Williams soundtrack for films. But the SAME sound when using Lumos that sounded with DualSense made me finally convinced of the love of the developers for the series, that’s where the real magic is.

As a lover of game photography, I constantly mentioned the developers with a nice quiet word for the lack of a photo mode or at least the ability to turn off the entire game interface with one menu item.

I am sure that hardcore fans of the universe will find something to criticize, but even such will be an opportunity to test their knowledge. The developers have prepared a small quiz with questions about the universe, it will open during the story mission, so you will definitely not miss it.

To heat up the debate, I will say that one of the controversial solutions was the Alohomora spell, for opening locks. The developers made a minigame, and on the one hand, it is an additional mechanic, although not difficult, and on the other, it slightly destroys the atmosphere of witchcraft, when simply knowing the spell is not enough for it to work.

How to properly study at a magic school?

Hogwarts Legacy is more about the process of being at the school of magic and learning than about the achievement, so I will give some tips that may help not spoil the gaming experience. There are a lot of activities in the game, from clearing camps with dark mages to collecting your own collection of animals, and they will gradually increase, so don’t try to cover everything at once.

While studying the game, you will understand how to solve this or that puzzle, open an enchanted door or a chest, so please do not immediately run to the Internet for a hint, give yourself and the game some time. This applies to collecting collectibles and notes. You will constantly run around the school and its surroundings and gradually collect the necessary things. If you found an interesting item and there is no interaction with it, just wait for the story quest and return to the old place.

All interesting places are recorded on the map, so you can easily find them. Be sure to sell unnecessary things to merchants, especially before story missions, which are usually long in time and do not allow you to run to the store and drop off excess baggage.

And most importantly, remember: Wingardium LeviOsa, not LeviosA.

Pros:
the magical world of magic feels real; atmosphere; music; graphics; DualSense capabilities.

Cons:
imperfection in details; as an individual game it does not stand out much and instead of other similar games.

Conclusion:

Hogwarts Legacy has several technical problems and shortcomings, but perfectly coped with the main thing – to convey the atmosphere of the same school of magic and sorcery, and at least for a few hours made you believe in a fairy tale. For many, this will be enough.