Hogwarts Legacy might have one of the most detailed game worlds I've ever experienced. Almost every part of the Wizarding World is included here, from the vast arsenal of spells, to the locations and creatures. I was in awe and instantly immersed with all it had to offer.

I'll go over a few of the issues I had, which were minor as I went through the story. While it's great that so many spells are included, being able to control all of those different spells is clunky. I went through about half of the game before I finally got a handle on what spells I wanted to stick with and in what button combinations. I thought the combat was great, though, once I got used to it.

Another issue is the open world objectives. As long as you don't do too many of them, it won't feel as repetitive. However, since the game requires you to be a certain high level to reach the credits, it gets boring to do the same stuff after a while.

My last issue is the lack of Quidditch. With how well everything else is crafted in the world, I would find it hard to believe that it was scrapped during development. I really just think they didn't plan to include it from the start since it's written into the narrative, which is unfortunate.

Overall, it's a great adventure and I can easily recommend it if you're a fan of this world.

Hogwarts Legacy Gotta say I have a good time overall, the Hogwarts castle is the star of the show, it is built with so much amount of love and to such meticulous details, it is a dream come true for a Harry Potter fan, and an also Hogsmead is also the great location they made u feel like u really are in the wizarding world and man o man them 1st 5-10 hours are a pure joy, I feel like a child, the gameplay is really great with lots of spell combination, it didn't get old to mix match different spells, and as far as side quest goes the main supporting cast teacher assignment and students overarching sidequest is great, the rest are pretty forgetable, Now the biggest offender and my main issue with the game is the main storyline and the open world itself, the main story is just serviceable at best, it had phenomenal missions with magical moments for sure not gonna spoil but overall storyline is just isn't it, and open world is just sadly ubisoft formula filled with collectothan and stuff which is really dissapointing to me. the final score would be an 8/10 for wizarding world fans and a 7/10 for nonfans.

Hogwarts Legacy: About as charming as a Harry Potter game could be, it's certain to satiate fans of the series and strong enough on its own to satisfy even those - myself included - who never got very into The Wizarding World. It's not perfect, but it's good. TL;DR at the end.

The setting is masterfully done thanks to a very talented art team: you're in the world of magic and there's simply no doubt about it. This game is overloaded with details, like lively and imaginative animations, that keep the charade up from start to finish. It's easily the strongest aspect of this game.
Not quite as strong, but still better than expected, is its plot. The introduction is enticing and deadly, the ending is explosive, theatrical, and emotional. The entire middle is... well, it's there. Certain characters you meet or learn about in the story are pretty interesting and probably deserved more focus, but unfortunately, a good portion of this game is just going through the open world motions. I cared way more about Sebastian's saga than whatever that boring, boorish Ranrok was up to.

The way you progress is pretty smart from a design perspective, with a book filled with various challenges that'll give you experience upon completion. This'll get you doing the chores you'd otherwise ignore for the chance at another talent point, which you'll definitely want if you're playing on Hard like I did. Before you get all four rows of spells and can fill them, the combat may infuriate you for a while, but in a pretty good way. Eventually, like all of these games of course, you'll be a Magic Elder God slinging death from your wand's tip and drowning in health potions you no longer come close to needing.
On your ascension to godhood, you'll zip around Hogwarts and the surrounding countryside via Floo Flames (the statue talks to you every time you travel and you'll wish painful death upon her; of course only after beating the game do I find a mod to shut her up) killing wolves, wizards, trolls, and goblins galore. There're side quests in addition to the challenges that'll help flesh out the world and have you meeting some real whacky kooksters. The conversations in this game reminded me of Horizon: Zero Dawn's system where you're basically just rushing to get through it because it's painfully robotic and fails to make you give a shit about what they're saying. Sure, you can ask for more details about the person or their quest, but that would mean talking to them for longer. Is it worth it? Never.

Honestly, and I feel silly typing this, I think one of the biggest issues with the game may be there's just too much here. The entire Room of Requirement probably didn't need to exist and stopping by always felt like a chore, and as the room expands to house more items and creatures, the chore got longer in duration as the game went on. Someone may love stuffing it with furniture and covering the walls with pictures, but I never felt inclined: the room had a purpose, get in and get out, it wasn't fun to hang out there.
An entire new section of map opens up at a certain point and by the time it does, you'll probably just sigh as you were happy having the old one figured out; now, with your max-upgraded broom, you can remove the fog of war over this new chunk in mere minutes. There are far too many “treasure vaults” with only a couple design variations and they almost always house junk to clutter your inventory. Garbage gear to sell later for pennies isn't “treasure”, everything under Legendary is a waste of time.
You will pick hundreds of monotonous locks and advancing the skill requires finding stupid statues only acquirable at night (you can shift the day/night cycle any time, but... why?). Merlin Trials are about as complex as a shape sorter and you have to watch their 'building' animation every time you complete one; these are tied to expanding your inventory so you're going to do them. After all, don't you want to carry more “treasure”?

Overall, though, it's hard to deny that this game is a real triumph for the Harry Potter franchise. I shit-talked a lot of it, but really, the game is quite solid. The pleasant mood of the world is infectious. Snobbish students with quests telling you “I'd go myself, but I don't want to,” will have you laugh and hearing Sebastian say “Very well,” when you propose goblin slaughter rocks. Big props to them for letting you learn Unforgivable curses. The combat's learning curve is a pretty good one before the inevitable “Now I am become Death” point. There's a student offering lore quizzes for the military-grade Harry Potter nerds. Professor Fig is instantly a ride-or-die homie.

I didn't really care about wizards and witches and this game entertained me for ~40 hours, so I can only imagine fans of Harry Potter liking it even more. This thing made over a billion dollars, so we're getting sequels, and I'm looking forward to them. It's not the best, but it's better than what I would have imagined a Harry Potter game could be and the groundwork is now there for improving in the future. I recommend it.

TL;DR Play it, it's pretty good.

A new fifth year student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry finds out they have powers beyond the ordinary and must use them to save wizardkind.

I wanted to rate this higher, but I know this was down to being a huge Harry Potter fan rather than the quality of the game. If you took away the nostalgia, this was actually pretty mediocre. Set in a beautiful and polished map, the RPG elements are lacking, the most annoying being that the choices you can make have little to no impact on the story. Some don’t particularly make sense in terms of the morality of the main character.

One of my biggest gripes was said main character. I understand that being able to change the name and look of the character was to allow players to insert themselves at Hogwarts. The result, however, was a hollow hero with no growth or discernible personality that I could not really care about, not helped by the terrible voice acting that made me skip through dialogue.

The story itself is also very lacklustre. Understandably, it’s very difficult to write a brand new story in a lore with such loyal and ferocious fans, but I was more invested in some of the side missions than the main, which had some wonderful creative elements but overall was a cookie cutter of lots of hero stories.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing Hogwarts Legacy. I am looking forward to see what else Avalanche has in store.

While sitting here and writing this review, I'm having a hard time articulating why I enjoyed playing through this game eventhough most of its components fell short for me.

The combat is serviceable, if somewhat messy at times due to the amount of spells you unlock and the few buttons you have available to map them on to and opponents frequently ambush you from off-camera.

The open world activities sprinkled in through the map, of which there are entirely too many, are mostly uninteresting. Overall, I think my main gripe against this game is that there is too much fluff. The main story is enjoyable enough, as are the relationship quests you take on to get to know your fellow students better. But there is so much meaningless filler that I decided pretty early on to ignore most of it, and the experience got a whole lot better after that.

Although it seems like my opinions on this game are pretty sour, I did enjoy the parts that were good about it. It just felt like it had a little too much filler tacked on.

This game is made for certain people, its target audience is people who love Harry Potter universe a lot and want to explore the castle and all around it. And if you don't... Well, I'm not a HARDCORE fan of Harry Potter, I saw 5 movies, read all the books meanwhile and also saw every Fantastic Beasts film. But I've never joined any HP club or argued with anyone about this universe - it was fun and interesting to read the books when I was a child, but that's it. And after all these talkings about Hogwarts Legacy I thought this will be a story-driver game with some advanced magic. But it's not. The main plot is so weak and there are very few missions related to it. You can put it in a sentence: "You are the chosen one and you need to complete 4 challenges to prove that you can fix things the previous chosen one did and save the ancient power from evil goblin". That's it. Sidequests are universe-related and they tell you about dark spells, fantastic beasts and other magic communities, but the whole way the devs try to tell you the sidestories are just lame and boring. Sebastian story might be the only one worth watching, but it's still really slow and full of odd dialogues and whining about everything. And the battle system is not good enough, you just spam enemies with basic spell or red spells most of the time to avoid switching spell sets and still make maximum damage, though "maximum" is still really low. In the end, if you're crazy about HP universe you may want to go for it, otherwise - well, I'd recommend you to go for something else.