Hogwart’s Legacy PS5 Review 6/10 "...It's fine" 🧙‍♂️

Let’s get one thing right clear right off the bat: I didn’t buy Hogwarts Legacy. I wouldn’t be seen dead giving any money to J.K. Rowling after the shit she’s come out with over the last few years and, as someone who doesn’t care in the slightest about Harry Potter, would have been a very easy game to skip. 

But, for professional reasons, I was obligated to play the game prior to release and was sent a code by WB Games in order to do so. So here’s what I thought after coming to this game with zero excitement and a powerfully icky feeling at loading it up for the first time.

….It’s fine

If you’ve played any open-world game over the last decade or so you’ll know where you stand with Hogwarts Legacy. You’re theoretically taking a teenage Hogwarts student through their magical education, though in practice any pretence at attending classes is soon sidelined in favour of quest lines sending you across the open world and into instanced caves and castle-themed dungeons to solve very easy physics puzzles and defeat a big monster at the end.

There’s a notable tension between the game’s obvious ambition to be a Hogwarts simulator and the Ubisoftish design template that underlies everything. For example, you enter the school in its fifth year, with teachers worried about whether you’ll be able to catch up with the other students. In another game, the nitty-gritty of mastering magic might be a core focus as you internalise what magic even is.

Not here though: your hero almost instantly becomes the most powerful creature in the world. You master every spell instantaneously, grasp mystic philosophy it takes other kids years to understand, and casually disintegrate anyone that dares step up to you. 

By the mid-way point, you’ll be cartwheeling around the world dispatching hordes of enemies with a flick of your wand, teleporting across the battlefield in a flash of blinding white light, and bouncing hapless dark wizards repeatedly off the floor as you pulverise their bones to dust with your ‘ancient magic’.

Your fellow students must be absolutely terrified of you. What must they make of the pupil who strides into class in a full suit of armour after spending their night atop a winged skeleton horse vaporizing dozens of people, learns what took them five years to grasp in two minutes, and then strolls back out to continue racking up their body count? The fact that you don’t sleep in a bed and just curl up on the floor like a dog whenever you want to kill time certainly can’t help your reputation.

But though it might stretch Harry Potter lore to have your hero flinging around Unforgivable Curses like they’re going out of style we can’t deny that the combat is pretty fun. There’s a decent dab of Rocksteady’sArkham games here, with you being able to defend and counter with a generously-timed button press and many enemies needing a specific type of spell to break their shield. Early on you’re encouraged to juggle enemies in mid-air with various spells and there’s even a combo meter tucked away in the corner of the screen (sadly you won’t get  Devil May Cry “SSStylish” awards…)

As for the rest of the game? Well, environmental design (particularly within Hogwarts itself) is impressive, though there are frequent flickering lighting issues in classrooms and some very noticeable pop-in when flying around the overworld. Character models, particularly the game’s lip-sync dialogue are also very patchy, with mouth movements bearing no resemblance to what they’re actually saying. Beyond that, there’s also a slightly disappointing loading issue on PlayStation 5 where castle doors will refuse to open as the game loads up to the next area. I thought we were supposed to be past this kind of thing!

The game also suffers from an overload of interlocking systems, most of which don’t quite get the attention they deserve. Somewhat inevitably there’s crafting and ingredient collection, creature hunting (the game optimistically insists you’re “rescuing” them from poachers rather than spiriting them away from their homes), various plants you can grow for their magical abilities, and an overload of samey gear you’ll continually be shuffling around in the menu.

Then there’s what feels like the vestiges of discarded ideas. You’re given a dizzying amount of wand customisation options, with the game asking you whether you want it to be “swishy” or “surprisingly swishy” and letting you choose from thirty different types of wood. None of this has any impact whatsoever on gameplay. Nor does your Hogwarts house selection, which feels like a missed opportunity as, say, going Slytherin really feels like it should steer you towards the Dark Arts.

Then again, this is probably about as good a Harry Potter game as you could make given the unpromising subject matter, though isn’t worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as open-world masterpieces like Breath of the Wild, The Witcher III, or Elden Ring.