Rating of
3.5/5
A Magical Sandbox with More Box than Magic
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/29/25
“Hogwarts Legacy” is the first non-mobile trash game to be released under Warner Bros.’ Portkey Games imprint. Warner Bros. did not actively work on the game’s development, however, which is mostly attributed to Avalanche Software – a developer largely known for Licensed Swill based on Disney IPs – however, the end credits reveal that Avalanche was far from alone in working on the biggest and most ambitious game set in the Wizarding World, with half-a-dozen or more other studios contributing via outsourcing. One would think that a game with so many cooks in the kitchen would come out feeling like something designed by committee… and one would be within the general vicinity of ‘correct’ in that statement. However, in spite of its overcooked, undertalented, and controversial pedigree, the end result is a competent Sandbox game that has moments where it truly shines, but is, for the most part, merely serviceable.
Presentation
“Hogwarts Legacy” is built in the Unreal Engine 4, and definitely looks and feels like a game built in the Unreal Engine 4, for whatever that’s worth. The environs of the Wizarding World are occasionally quite evocative, and clearly draw visual inspiration from Warner Bros. movie series based on the ‘Harry Potter’ novels. However, for every clever or unique environment that truly smacks of something specifically designed to titillate Wizarding World fans, there are a dozen copy-pasted caves, tombs, or other drab environments with so little personality they could have been lifted from any generic Fantasy game, or even the Unreal Engine asset store. In general, it feels like there are only about a dozen well-designed areas outside of the massive Hogwarts castle and Village of Hogsmeade, while the rest of the game world is bland and generic slop applied in vast quantities in order to simply fill up empty space.
Character designs are fairly bland and generic as well. While there are a fairly large number of important characters around whom both the main storyline and a variety of side-stories revolve, the students of Hogwarts generally share a handful of faces and hairstyles that are copy-pasted infinitely. During the course of character creation, I found it practically impossible to make a male student who resembled myself at age 15 without ending up with a kid who looked like the result of an unnatural union between Daniel Radcliffe and Eddie Redmayne. For a game that was lauded for how badly it rustled the Jimmies of the Woke Mob, there’s actually far too much focus on ethnic diversity in character creation to the point of making everyone of each ethnic group look painfully alike. It’s also odd that there are so many ethnic minority characters in Scotland during a time when it was 90% Scottish and 10% Anglo-Saxon.
Audio fares about as well as the visuals, likewise drawing HEAVY inspiration from the Warner Bros. movies based on J.K. Rowling’s novels. Specifically, the main ‘Harry Potter’ “jingle” (you’ll know it when you hear it) plays quite frequently as a substitute for the iconic ‘Legend of Zelda’ chimes when finding a secret or snagging a collectable. Unfortunately, the first few hours of the game consist almost entirely of finding secrets and collectables, so the ‘Harry Potter’ jingle gets overused to the point of annoyance. Other than he jingle, though, the soundtrack is mostly forgettable, and I can’t say I would hum a few bars of ANY of the game’s score.
The game is fully voiced, however, in order to save both storage space and actor budgets, the various developers opted to use some sort of auto-tune voice pitching to change the main character’s voice instead of having several distinct voices for our hero/heroine. The result is fairly painful to listen to in most cases. Outside of that obvious snafu, the voiceacting is mostly well-done and competent, while simultaneously lacking in any Big Names to bloat the casting budget out of hand.
Technically, “Hogwarts Legacy” is VERY solid for a “AAA” Sandbox game of its pedigree. I only experienced a single crash during my time with the game, and only a handful of glitches, which consisted entirely of treasure chests not allowing me to open them until I saved the game, returned to the title screen, then reloaded my save. Indeed, the only real technical complaint I have about “Hogwarts Legacy” is the fact that it spends an incredibly long time ‘preparing shaders’ each time it’s launched. Load times within the game are incredibly speedy, and the open world streams seamlessly… but that initial startup time is a real downer.
Story
“Hogwarts Legacy” primarily got onto people’s radars in 2022-2023 due to the fact that the creator of the game’s world – who actually contributed nothing to the game’s story – is one J.K. Rowling, a Radical Feminist and self-proclaimed TERF (that is, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist). So the Woke Mob decided that she and all of her projects need to be Canceled, and started attempting to boycott the game even before it was released. That boycott utterly failed, and scads of people who otherwise never would have purchased a Licensed game based on the Wizarding World – myself included – decided to lay out some cash just to spite them.
As just mentioned, J.K. Rowling had nothing to do with the story in “Hogwarts Legacy,” with lead writing credit going instead to Moira Squire, a female TV writer who previously worked on shows like “House” and “Criminal Minds.” Squire’s intent with the story in “Hogwarts Legacy” was to set it in a different enough time period that the player would be free to forge their own narrative without bumping into or conflicting with existing characters and lore from either the ‘Harry Potter’ sequence or the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ sequence.
Thus, “Hogwarts Legacy” is set in the 1890s, exactly 100 years prior to the story revolving around The Boy Who Lived. The tale opens with our custom self-insert protagonist on their way to their first day at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, only with the unorthodox quirk of starting school as a Fifth Year student. Little information is given about our character’s past other than the fact that they were found to have a rather unique magical signature, and have been mentored by a professor named Eleazar Fig in order to get up to speed with other Fifth Years.
However, upon boarding the coach to Hogwarts with Professor Fig and an official from the Ministry of Magic, things quickly take a turn for the worse, as a dragon attacks, killing the Ministry official and sending Fig and his young protégé on the first step in a wild goose chase. It seems that our protagonist’s unique magic takes the form of the ability to see and manipulate traces of a mysterious ‘ancient magic,’ which leads our hero and their mentor into the depths of Gringott’s Wizarding Bank, where they are assaulted by the story’s ultimate antagonist, a genocidal goblin named Ranrok, who is in the midst of leading a goblin uprising against wizardkind, and who seems to have a connection to ancient magic of his own.
After a daring escape, our hero and Professor Fig arrive fashionably late at Hogwarts, just in time for the traditional Sorting Ceremony, where the Sorting Hat gives the player a highly truncated quiz to determine which of the four Houses they’ll be joining (though the player does ultimately get to choose, which kind of ruins the fantasy). After a quick introduction to a slew of supporting characters, our student heads to their House dormitory and prepares for the first day as a Hogwarts student.
If I have one major complaint about “Hogwarts Legacy” from a narrative perspective, it’s that it really doesn’t do a very good job of representing what it should feel like to be a Fifth Year wizarding student trying to catch up on course work. The player is only required to attend a handful of classes ONCE EACH during their entire school year, and is otherwise free to pursue extracurricular activities, which mostly involve wandering around a big, empty, fairly boring open world filled with generic puzzles, copy-pasted locations, and nothing that really makes the game world feel alive and genuine.
If I have two major complaints about “Hogwarts Legacy” from a narrative perspective, the other one would be the fact that the game is far from the Anti-Woke crusader a lot of us hoped it would be. Aside from the fact that J.K. Rowling gets residuals from anything involving the Wizarding World, this game does indeed feel pretty Woke. There is an insane amount of forced diversity in the Hogwarts staff and student body. There are two Asian staff, two Indian professors, an African professor, two African magic store operators, and the owner of the Three Broomsticks Tavern is a trans-witch, just to name a few. No, I am not kidding about any of that. This is a game set in the 1890s… I could see the occasional foreign visiting professor coming in to teach their regional/cultural magical specialties… but the way the game handles diversity is over the top to the point of unbelievability. Yes, I can imagine a world in which I can fly on a broom and cast spells with a wand. I can’t imagine a world in which there is more than one Black person in Scotland in the late 1800s!
Outside of the main storyline revolving around our hero, ancient magic, Professor Fig, and Ranrok the goblin, “Hogwarts Legacy” features a handful of so-called ‘relationship quests,’ which allow our self-insert character to become friends with a handful of other students. These quests are mostly well done, but the students involved aren’t exactly the most likeable lot. There’s a Slytherin student named Sebastian Sallow who is obsessed with finding a cure for a curse that is afflicting his twin sister, and will delve into the darkest of Dark Arts if he thinks it will lead to a solution. There’s a Griffindor student named… something African, but everyone calls her Natty, who is obsessed with defeating certain local Dark Wizards as some way of making amends for the premature death of her father. Then there’s a Hufflepuff student named Poppy Sweeting who loves magical beasts and is determined to put a stop to the poaching of such. Of course, Ravenclaw gets left out, because everyone forgets about us. Out of these three major story arcs, I found Poppy to be the most likable and best developed. Sebastian’s story goes to some incredibly dark places, and is well written, but doesn’t really give the player enough agency. Natty’s story is – like her and her mother the professor – just kind of ‘there’ for diversity points, as she is incredibly annoying and her arc is kind of flat and bland. Sadly, there’s no real benefit to befriending most of these characters – with the exception of Sebastian, who will teach the three Unforgivable Curses, which really aren’t that unforgivable and very good for end-game combat. For the most part, the only time the game even acknowledges that the player has done things off the beaten path is during a few follow-up counseling sessions with Professor Weasley, in which she’ll comment on everything the player has been up to, but that’s it.
In general, I felt like “Hogwarts Legacy” was also incredibly short for an Ubisoft-style Sandbox game, clocking it at around 60 hours for a very thorough blind playthrough. Of course, the game does seem to want players to go through it 4 times for each of the different Houses, if the achievement list is any indication, but I really can’t see replaying this one. The story isn’t particularly deep, the world isn’t particularly immersive, and the side-stories aren’t particularly plentiful. As far as I’m concerned, this is very much a one-and-done experience.
Gameplay
“Hogwarts Legacy” is very much an Ubisoft-style Sandbox game that wears its inspiration on its sleeve. Unfortunately, Hogwarts students are not exactly stealthy assassins with deep skill-sets, so the gameplay mechanics are fairly limited.
Central to every Wizarding World character is their wand, and players will be free to select a custom one near the beginning of the game. However, none of the different wand materials make a bit of mechanical difference, and the wand’s ultimate cosmetic appearance is totally arbitrary (it can even be spruced up throughout the game by attaching a different handle). Wands are used to cast spells, and our noob wizard doesn’t know much of any to start with, other than what’s termed as a ‘basic cast,’ which is just flinging a bit of energy from the wand as a weak projectile. Learning spells typically involves attending class, during which the player will need to complete a simple QuickTime Event to learn the spell, then never perform the proper wand movements again, as casting spells during actual gameplay just involves holding down the basic cast button and tapping the controller face button assigned to a given spell. These spells can all be manually assigned by the player, and there are far more than 4 of them in the game, so it’s possible to unlock additional spell groups and switch between them by tapping directional keys on the d-pad, giving the player 16 spell slots once fully upgraded. However, spells all operate on various cooldowns, so the player doesn’t have a choice in cycling through pretty much everything in their repertoire.
In general, I found the magical combat to be incredibly clunky. While there is a lock-on feature, it’s cumbersome to use. Without the lock-on feature, I felt like I could rarely hit the enemy I was trying to hit, but rather whatever the game’s auto aim decided I was trying to hit. This poor design with even the basics of ranged magical combat becomes even more aggravating once enemies start popping up protego shield bubbles that can only be popped by using a spell from a specific color group, then having the auto-aim decide to send your red-coded confringo spell toward the purple-shielded enemy standing next the red-shielded one, and sending your follow-up purple-coded depulso at the red-shielded enemy you initially were aiming at.
Aside from casting their own spells during combat, the player will also need to be aware of incoming attacks and either block or avoid them. Each incoming attack has a color-coded icon that appears on the player character’s head – yellow for blockable attacks, red for dodgeable attacks – and the player needs to respond with the appropriate action to avoid getting biffed. Blocking pops-up a temporary protego barrier, and holding the block button allows for a counter attack with stupefy to stun… whatever auto-aim decides to choose for a few seconds. Unfortunately, the counter animation is so long that during large-scale battles with numerous enemies, the attacks come so quickly that countering the first guarantees getting biffed by the second. Dodging feels fairly lame, though the upgraded dodge significantly improves the range and allows for some useful repositioning.
“Hogwarts Legacy” also thinks of itself as some sort of Action/RPG, which it really isn’t. Yes, the player gains stats as their character levels up. Each level grants a talent point (up to 40 at the cap), which allows the player to choose from a variety of skill trees. The player even gets ‘Diablo’-style color-coded random loot of varying rarities, which can be upgraded by expending magical beast materials (and in true ‘Diablo’ style, everything that isn’t Legendary is useless). However, none of these mechanics really make the player much ‘stronger,’ as enemies all level scale during important quests, while the open world – much like recent ‘Assassins Creed’ games – is divided into level-suggested regions… but isn’t particularly verbose about it. Yes, when the player re-visits an early-game area, they will curb-stomp the low-level enemies there, but for the most part, leveling and unlocking upgrades feels like a flat progression curve, with only the Unforgivable Curses giving the player the opportunity to mix things up a bit and gain an advantage. It is a MARKED improvement to run into a fight with two trolls and some goblins, imperio one troll to make it fight for you, crucio the other troll to make it writhe in agony, then avada kedavra one of the nastier goblins (with the mastery perk) to kill all three of them instantly instead of playing Tard-Souls-telegraph-dodge-block with the trolls for 10 minutes.
Outside of the rather ham-fisted combat and narrative-driven questing, the player is free to explore a rather large world-Sandbox situated in north Scotland in the valley surrounding Hogwarts castle. Unfortunately, the main activities for the player to actually do in this Sandbox are highly repetitive and mostly quite boring. There are gobs of Merlin Trails, which are simplistic puzzles that involve using one of the spells the player may-or-may-not have learned before stumbling upon a given Merlin Trial. There are a handful of broom races, which must be played sequentially. There are a butt-load of treasure caves, which mostly consist of ancient wizard tombs, so apparently grave-robbing is an acceptable extracurricular at Hogwarts. Then there’s a limited number of stargazing tables, hedge mazes, and ancient magic hotspots to go along with the seemingly-limitless number of ‘bandit camps’ inhabited by either poachers or Dark Wizards who are members of a gang known as the Ashwinders (named after an in-world snake), who are indistinguishable from the Death Eaters that would arise a century later. As such, the world, in spite of having a butt-load of icons hemorrhaged across the map, feels quite empty. Moreover, the saminess and simplicity of all of these open-world activities all-but guarantees that none of them make a lasting impression.
Overall
“Hogwarts Legacy” feels like a product of its time: A Licensed game trying to cash-in on a once-popular franchise, while also endeavoring to make itself as inoffensive as possible so as not to ruffle the audience’s feathers. As a result, the Wizarding World doesn’t really feel all that magical, but is rather a copy-paste of older, better Sandbox titles. Still, it’s not overly long and lugubrious, and it does give tantalizing glimpses of how much fun the Wizarding World could be if it wasn’t designed by committee with contributions coming from half-a-dozen different outsourcing studios.
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
