Living the dream – Hogwarts Legacy Review (PS5)

Hogwarts Legacy Review – We were teased with Hogwarts Legacy for many months before it was officially released. It intrigued all kinds of people when it was first announced, especially to Harry Potter movies and books’ fans. My wife, who’s not a gamer in a sense but a Harry Potter fan, was so eager to play this game when she first heard about it.

I watch and like all the Harry Potter movies, but I’m not really a hardcore fan like my wife (she even has the magic wand and a Gryffindor cape). Surprisingly, I’m enjoying Hogwarts Legacy as much as my wife is. So, whether you are a Harry Potter fan or not, you’ll definitely enjoy the game. But if you are a fan, you’ll enjoy it even more.

In Hogwarts Legacy, you play as a fifth-year student at Hogwarts. You’ll experience attending classes, having social conversations with your classmates, being sorted into one of the houses, learning magic spells, concocting potions, and more.

If you’ve watched the movies, you’ll understand how cool it is to explore Hogwarts at your leisure, visiting places like the Room of Requirement and the classroom of Defence Against the Dark Arts, and more. In fact, the game offers even more areas to explore than the movies ever did. Playing Hogwarts Legacy feels like being thrown into your dream playground.

The game offers character creation at the beginning, where you can personalise your appearance. This helps to immerse you in the game because you see your character in third person during exploration and cutscenes. You can pick dialogue choices during conversations, though don’t expect branching storylines or side quests.

All dialogues are voice-acted and okay, but the game could benefit from a visual overhaul, especially in facial animation. It’s probably an unfair comparison, but having just finished playing God of War: Ragnarok, I can see the difference in visual fidelity and polygons. This is not to say that Hogwarts Legacy looks bad; the game actually looks great in terms of graphics and art style.

Considering the amount of detail rendered on screen (as it is kind of an open-world game), the game holds up pretty well. There are plenty of details inside Hogwarts castle, and both indoor (like dungeons) and outdoor areas to cover. You’ll see and visit many areas designed in different tones.

The first few hours focus on tutorials to get familiar with the game, especially the battle system. You’ll juggle between basic attacks, dodging, parrying/blocking at the right time, and later on, comboing spells to unleash devastating attacks. For example, you can make enemies fly or levitate, which you can later punish with a mix of fire spells like Incendio and others. Spells can be quick-slotted as shortcuts to mimic your controller’s buttons and can later be expanded.

The game opens up more later on and becomes more interesting as you play along, upgrade your equipment, gain more spells and level up your talents (skill points). The equipment system is pretty basic (getting better gear will give you more defense, for example), but you can change your appearance to whatever you like, assuming you’ve had it before – which they call a Transmog system. It’s pretty nifty because there are times in other games where you get nice-looking armor but it looks so bad that you don’t feel like wearing it.

Combat can get quite frantic because the game normally throws a few enemies at you at once. You’ll be busy utilizing the environment objects, dodging attacks, and later on, picking the right spells for the right enemies. The game helps by giving tips about enemies that you have encountered, though you can ignore most of them and just blast them away to pieces.

The combat is pretty fluid, and because this is Harry Potter’s style, you can’t just rapidly spam the buttons as casting spells takes a bit of time, so you have to time them properly. Or I should say, cast spells and basic attacks more gracefully. While there are tons of enemies, they do lack variety, and more often than not, you’ll be encountering the same enemies over and over again (sometimes with a slight variation).

Hogwarts Legacy Review Conclusion

Hogwarts Legacy is a vast game. It incorporates many elements of open-world modern games, like the skill system (talents), gear upgrades, attack combos with different spells and elements, perfect blocking/parrying bonus, dialogue options, character creation, puzzles, collectibles, tons of side quests, and many more. There might be some things that could be improved, like more variety of enemies, fewer but more memorable side quests, deeper character progression, and a better storyline, but it doesn’t make the game bad in any way.

Hogwarts Legacy can truly capture the magic within the Harry Potter universe and allows you to explore and experience it first-hand with your controller (or mouse/keyboard). The game is like a dream comes true for many Harry Potter fans (like my wife) but even if you are not a hardcore fan (like myself), you’ll still be enjoying this open-world, Harry Potter RPG game for many weeks to come.

Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC right now. It will also be available on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch later this year.

Disclosure: Hogwarts Legacy review licence was supplied for reviewing