The wait is finally over and even those who didn’t pre-order the game will be given access to enter the halls of the Hogwarts castle! Avalanche Software and Portkey Games, a subsidiary of Warner Bros Games, are launching Hogwarts Legacy today, February 10th, and I am happy to say that they did a wonderful job giving wizarding world fans the game they’ve been waiting for since they first found themselves enchanted by the series. Let’s dig into the details, without spoilers as usual, of course.

Story

The goblin Ranrok has been leading a goblin rebellion against wizardkind and many fellow goblins are following his lead. However, it seems this good-reasoned mission has made quite the turn for the worst as the goblins found their first source of powerful magic. This isn’t any ordinary magic either, but rather ancient magic that is been lost and misunderstood for ages.

Only a few wizardkind can even see traces of the ancient magic, but those who can see it can also wield it. Hoping to keep it safe from those that would misuse it, the original group of ancient magic wielders known as “The Keepers” hid the main source away and locked it behind a series of trials. Only one who can see and wield the ancient magic may attempt the trials, and only those who pass the trials and understand the responsibility this kind of power requires may access it.

Now, as a special new student to Hogwarts - starting out in their 5th year no less - comes the witch or wizard that is destined to succeed in the trials. Luckily so, as Ranrok continues his search and grows more powerful by the day! Through a series of connections and luck, for being in the right place at the right time, this new student learns of his ability to connect with the ancient magic and finds themselves in the midst of Ranrok’s focus.

Spending their year wisely, the new student must learn spells and potions for both their current year and enough from the years they have missed, while also aiding Professor Fig in the adventure that is learning more about Ranrok and his plans in order to take down a power hungry goblin before he starts an all out war. Plus, their ability with ancient magic makes them the perfect subject for the trials that must be completed so that, if it comes down to it, they can use the powerful ancient magic to stop Ranrok once and for all.

I have to say, this is not the story that I expected from the game, but I really like the direction it took. I wasn’t looking forward to stopping the goblin rebellion, as I agree with their strive for betterment, but I can get behind taking down a tyrant who has been consumed by power. Not only that, but this type of story is much more fitting to the Wizarding World style in the first place as the entirety of the base series surrounds an evil wizard with corrupted power and evil intentions. Now, we have an evil goblin with ancient power and clouded good intentions that have been swayed and misguided. Not only does it make it more fitting for the series, but it also makes it more inclusive for those that didn’t want to be involved with the rebellion in the first place. In fact, there isn’t much mention of the rebellion at all aside from enough to clarify that it was, and still is, what many of the goblins believe they are doing.

Gameplay

This has to be one of the most loaded games I have played in a long time! There is so much to do in this game and a lot of places that you can go. If you have played any of Portkey’s Harry Potter games, such as Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, then you will be aware of their overall progress style. If not, then this is how you proceed through the main storyline in the game.

If the quest is in gold letters, then it is a main quest. However, some quests will require you to have learned a specific spell or gained a specific item. These specific spells or items can be unlocked by important side quests, or in this case extra tasks from various teachers at school. Once you complete the teacher’s side tasks, you must attend their next class and then speak with them at the end of it. This will let you gain the rewards from their class which will then let you start the main quest. This style of questing makes sense for the fact that they want you to be equipped with specific spells and abilities before reaching certain parts of the game. Plus, more spells and abilities mean more things you can do around Hogwarts and the grounds around it.

Along with questing to proceed forward, your character will be making various improvements throughout the process. Whether you are doing side or main missions, you will be earning experience. This will contribute to your level which will give you access to wearing better gear, more talent points to improve your various skills, and depending on how you earned that experience, a number of other things. Of course, you do have to unlock everything you do in this game.

Whether it is accessing the Talents table or entering your personal space in the Room of Requirement, all of these things are unlocked by proceeding through the main quest line. It may take some time, but it is worth unlocking everything as it lets you do so much more, and free-roaming because way better. Actually, I would say the least you should reach is unlock the broom and then buy one yourself because travel because so much less stressful when you can just fly everywhere. Quick tip, to prepare for the room of requirement (and your overall journey), make sure you buy necessary items like a table for a small, medium, and big pot, along with seeds for the various plants - and I don’t just mean Mallowseed, but Mandrakes as well.

When it comes to preparing for your journey, that is where your gear comes in. Gear has its own inventory and is separated by a color code so you can tell how valuable each item is. If you come across items you need to identify or you want to improve your current gear, that can be done in your Room of Requirement. The gear you wear will affect your defense and offense score, which judges how well you can take a hit and how well you can dish out a spell. You can even put traits on them if you have the material to do so. The gear you wear can make you look incredibly silly, which is fun and I recommend doing so during side quests, but if you are like me and enjoy a clean look in the cutscenes for a more immersive experience with the story, you can simply hide the gear you are wearing and even wear gear you have collected before so you can look however you want no matter what you are actually wearing.

As for the upgrades to your clothes, they require specific materials from different animals. Luckily, you have your own animal sanctuary where you can keep a number of different creatures! Not only is this absolutely adorable, but you are keeping the creatures in here safe from the active poachers that are roaming the grounds. By visiting this place and both petting and feeding the creatures you have in there, you will be given some of the material that animal provides for gear alterations. If you find yourself full-on gear, you can simply destroy it or head to Hogsmeade and sell it. For what it is worth, blue and green items don’t sell for enough to be worth the trouble of holding on to in a time of need.

When you are running around Hogwarts, either getting to class or for fun, you will find a large number of different interactions you can do within, as well as outside, the castle walls. There are field lore pages to find, secret pages to uncover with specific actions to take or puzzles to solve in certain areas, side quests from fellow students to accomplish, and so much more. They have put in so many different things and they all give you something for your effort. There is the butterfly mirror location puzzle, the door inscription puzzles, hidden areas to discover, Merlin trials to solve, and even more. As you go around, you can find these things by casting Revelio, which you will likely be doing a lot since it shows you so many different things. All of the different things you can do will be shown to you through either the main quest line or by interacting with a student who gives you a side quest to figure it out.

They included an amazing fast travel system with the floo powder concept. You can unlock floo powder locations by reaching a specific place stone that holds the green flame in various parts of the world. The castle alone has a bunch of them, but the world around the school also holds a lot of them as well. You will eventually approach just about every one of them through the missions, but once you get the broom you might find that you have to make an actual effort to pick up the ones you pass since you can just fly over them most of the time.

Last, let’s go over the combat in this game. As you learn spells, you will see that they are categorized with a color code system, similar to your gear. Light green spells are for animals and the Room of Requirement, light blue spells are interaction spells, yellow and purple spells are support attack spells, red spells are attack spells, and green spells are your curse spells. You can use your talents to give you more rows of spell pre-sets and I recommend getting that set up quickly because fast switching between spells is a must in combat. All of your spells have a cooldown, so you can’t just spam the good ones over and over, but if you can simply scroll to the next row then you can keep the barrage going with more attack options.

They introduce you to a dueling club pretty early on in the game. This is where you will get your first taste of proper combat in the game and there is even a dummy training session that will show you some combination attack options. From there, your own gears should be able to start turning to come up with different combinations you can do with your large variety of spells. Keep in mind, your base attack is pretty handy, but the first few hits do very little damage and it is only the last base hit from the base hit combination that actually does enough damage to be more than filler. The good news is, there are talents to make your base attack more worthwhile, like using it will help fill up your ancient magic meter.

As your ancient magic meter fills up, you will start seeing that you have access to more than just your spell list. If there is something that can be thrown at the enemy you are fighting, a button will pop up to let you know that you can do a special attack on them. If you let the meter fill up enough, a button will pop up over the enemy to indicate that you can do a highly damaging, if not a finishing attack on them.

Even with all of these attack options and wild combinations, you will also find the need for dodge rolling and casting Protego to protect yourself. You’ll get an indicator that you are about to be attacked, even if you’re back is turned to the attacking enemy. If the indicator around your character is red, you need to dodge that attack, but if the indicator is yellow, then you can simply cast Protego. Plus, if you hold a successful Protego block then you will cast Stupify on whichever enemy you are currently targeting.

Audio and Visuals

All of the music, sound effects, ambiance, and variety of noises you will hear throughout the game all sound and feel like they came straight out of the book series itself. They did a wonderous job bringing the Hogwarts reality to life with the audio design of this game. From mystical creatures making strange noises outside to instruments playing themselves inside the castle at all hours of the day, there is something magical to hear everywhere you go. There does seem to be a small glitch sound to the main character’s voice every so often where it will get a sort of electronic tone behind the voice, like a mechanical echo, but other than the rare moments this happened, the voice work was just as spot on as the audio design itself.

The aesthetics of this game is a love-hate relationship in my experience. With fellow GameTyrant members playing on the PlayStation 5, I got to see a comparison to the latest PlayStation hardware running the game against how my PC with higher-than-the-Steam-recommended hardware is running the game. On the PS5, you can truly see the awe-inspiring world that they have created and the beauty within the magical designs of the world. On the PC, I can see what they were going for and it still looks quite amazing, but I was disappointed to experience complications with the visuals. Even with my settings lowered to Medium quality, I occasionally experienced frame rate drops and visual glitching from the environment. I did figure out it had a lot to do with the various characters on the screen and lowered the population meter in the settings to low, which helped quite a bit, but I would argue that I shouldn’t have had any issues given my graphics card is a whole generation above the recommended GTX 1080TI.

Even so, they truly created the wizarding world with a nearly accurate depiction of the castle and the areas around it. Everywhere you went in this game was fully fleshed out and full of its own little magical wonders. I never got tired of looking over the magical world they have presented and I’m not sure I ever will.

Replayability

This is not a short game by any means. Even if you try to just do the main quest line, you will have to put some time into this game. That said, they do have some specific quests for specific reasons, such as the house the player is in. So, if you want to see absolutely everything, you will need to go through the game more than once in a different house, but other than that you will have a long ride the first time you play through the game. It definitely has replayability, even if that means just trying to fully complete the one game file!

What It Could Have Done Better

As I mentioned before, there were a lot of issues with the visuals and graphics on the PC version of the game. On Steam, the recommended hardware is a GTX-1080 TI graphics card, but I would be concerned for those trying to play this game with one of those. Perhaps, with all the settings on low it will run fine, but a computer with hardware that meets or is better than the recommended hard should be able to run the game on max settings without a problem. That is the whole point of this section on the Steam page.

There is a lot of auto-setting in the game as well. For instance, if you are following the track line for a main or even just a current quest but come across another character that has a side quest to give out, simply talking to them to get the new quest added to your list of quests to do will replace the one you are doing. Without any prompts to ask to change to the new quest, the track line will update to do whatever the new quest is. Gear is the same way when you hide it. Updating your gear to new items you have collected will make it show once more. In both of these instances, after you get set up you will have to go back and put things back how they were. I shouldn’t have to do this with anything really. Picking up a new quest, especially a side quest, shouldn’t take priority, much less replace my current quest. Putting on new gear shouldn’t override the fact that I set it to hide that gear type or show my character wearing a specific thing. If I went out of my way to set things up one way, the game shouldn’t be auto-setting it up with other things without prompting the player first.

Verdict

Hogwarts Legacy delivered the exact wizarding world experience fans have been dreaming of! This game turned out to be everything I hoped for and more. From a story that turned out to have a goal I could get behind to smooth, easy to understand yet hard to master combat and all the way to a magical world that allows me to explore on foot, flying on a broom, or even on the back of a Hippogriff (or other creature I’ve unlocked), I am thoroughly blown away by the experience. There is so much to this magical world they have created and it is sure to keep many wizarding fans occupied for days, if not weeks and months, to come!

As for a quick disclaimer regarding the controversy, all of the dialogue in this game has been incredibly respectful with terms like “gentleperson” being used instead of gender-specific ones. They even have a trans-person in the game that plays a somewhat prominent role and is considered the character that if she trusts you, others will trust you too. There is a lot of clear evidence that the developers are not in favor of the negativity and are simply creating the wizarding world fans have been waiting to explore.

Hogwarts Legacy is available now for PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, then on April 4th for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and then on July 25th for Nintendo Switch.