Hogwarts Legacy Game Review – Sleight of hand

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Hogwarts Legacy is developed by Avalanche Software, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The game has been embroiled in controversy due to Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s transphobic comments. Although she is not personally involved in its development, she will benefit from its success. To find out more, read our in-depth article on how Rowling’s comments have impacted the trans community. In this article, you’ll also find links to trans creators you can support, as well as charities you can donate to.

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It’s hard to find anyone outside the world of Harry Potter. For many, it was a property that grew with them, and both the book and film series remained in the zeitgeist for decades. So it’s confusing that it took so long to get a game that promises to fulfill the fantasy of becoming a wizard or witch within that universe; attend classes, learn spells, get into trouble and explore the grandeur of Hogwarts Castle. Hogwarts Legacy delivers on that promise, to some extent. His adaptation of this universe is arguably the most extensive yet, allowing you to truly explore Hogwarts and its surroundings like never before. But it’s also too rooted in the present (and sometimes the past) of open world game design, reducing much of what you do to repetitive checklist tasks in a world that’s disappointingly barren. 

The Hogwarts Legacy takes place in the late 1800s, although you might find it hard to tell by the way the characters talk or the clothes they wear, which look like they came straight out of films set in the early 20th century . You play as a prodigal witch or wizard of your own creation, this time battling a goblin uprising led by a particularly nasty one named Ranrok. This underpins a surprisingly sporadic and predictable narrative, with major pacing and progress occurring only every few hours as you complete the required quests around it, which are often barely related. There’s so little screen time for many of the main characters that you have a hard time figuring out their motivations, especially in the case of Ranrok, who only seems to say a line or two to a few subordinates before disappearing for a moment. a couple of hours. It robs him and the story of any sense of emotional tension, reducing it to nothing more than “talented good student takes out mighty goblin villain” at the end.

opportunity to acquire. While it’s meant to let you choose whether you want to use them, there’s nothing truly punishing about regularly using some of the worst spells known in this universe. Characters may mention their displeasure that you use them, but it never makes a tangible difference to the procedures, letting them exist as just another tool in your toolbox for when you need them.

As you keep getting more enchantments, you’re forced to assign them to alternate loadouts, up to a maximum of four once you’ve unlocked them all. The way you switch between these gears and in turn reassign which face buttons are assigned to which spell is incredibly cumbersome. Outside of combat, you’ll have to repeatedly dive into a menu and rearrange which spells are where, as you’ll quickly get more than you can hold at once. Switching between them as you fight also stifles the gripping pace of the fights, and you can easily end up fighting more against your memory of which spells are within which loadout than the threats around you. It ends up fueling the repetitive nature of combat because it becomes so much easier to stick to four basic spells that you never have to stray from, especially since they scale well with your level and upgrades, while the enemies don’t really change. significantly over the hours.

[Hogwarts Legacy is] too stuck in the present (and sometimes past) of open-world game design, reducing much of what you do to repetitive checklist tasks in a world that is disappointingly barren 

cutter in its construction, to the point where it’s almost impossible to tell one from the other when browsing. Nothing makes this more evident than when you fly across the countryside on a mount or a broomstick. While it’s surprisingly easy to make out Hogwarts and Hogsmeade from afar, everything else blends into an indistinguishable blur of bare woods and fields, rarely inviting me to explore during the fast travel between quests.

To be clear, there are things to do within this visually dreary open world, but they’re generally as uninteresting as their background. The world of Hogwarts Legacy is filled with a variety of mundane tasks to complete, which will be familiar to you if you’ve kept up with modern open world layouts. There are enemy fields to free, flora and fauna to collect or hunt, pages of your collector’s guide to discover, chest behind closed doors to rummage and much more. He intends to relieve the past time traveling to and from the missions of history, while offering monetary and team prizes, but it is so easy to neglect how frequent these prizes are delivered in many more interests main missions.

However, problems arise when Hogwarts Legacy forces you to participate in these lackluster side-activities in order to progress. Many story quests have both level and spell requirements, the former depending on your current numerical level and the latter depending on whether or not you have access to a specific spell. Experience is only rewarded for many of the activities scattered around the world and the various, if bland, side quests you can complete. Depending on how organically or otherwise you choose to explore the world of Hogwarts Legacy, you can find yourself (as I often have) forced to take a break from the main path and work through open-world quests just long enough to continue, before finding yourself again faced with the same obstacle.

The lure of better gear should make up for the monotony, but defeated enemies deliver it with such gentleness that you’ll find yourself rubbing against your restrictive inventory. You start out with 20 slots shared across five equipment categories, which can only be filled in one or two missions if you’re not in the habit of visiting a merchant to unload items or destroy them. Worse still is that the only way to alleviate this problem is to complete countless Trials of Merlin around the map, which are just one of a handful of quick little puzzles that repeat ad nauseum. Each milestone in this mission rewards you with four more slots, and the requirements for the next one increase as you progress, making it a chore if all you want to do is reduce how often you have to manage your inventory. . // There’s a sense of bloat that permeates many of Hogwarts Legacy’s mechanics, informing the design decisions that make it a loot-based family action game. There are so many systems that exist just to make you worry about maxing out your gear levels or upgrading gear to improve your stats, both of which are completely useless in the face of the small challenge the combat presents to keep up with you. The Room of Requirement, a kind of small hub, is a space that allows you to reveal unidentified equipment, similar to Diablo or Destiny, create potions and grow a violent flora that has long times you have to wait before you can claim them, and a massive space for all your collected beasts that can be farmed for vital resources to upgrade your gear. Other than the occasional visit to complete a quest or create a single potion, I felt no reason to return to this space for the many purposes it was designed to serve. Even unnamed gear became mostly irrelevant, as better gear (often in the same rarity class) would drop before I felt compelled to make the trip. These are some of the many systems that Hogwarts Legacy forces you to engage with, often forcibly via quest lines, and many of them don’t blend into the structure of the rest of the game, making them superfluous and a waste of time. .

Time is something that Hogwarts Legacy and its repetitive quests, boring open world and monotonous combat often lack respect for, from its slow opening to its insistence on introducing new juggling systems just for the hell of it. It’s a little embarrassing that these parts can’t be fused together in the same way that their presentation and respect for their universe can, because Hogwarts Castle remains like a delightful puzzle box to explore from the moment you put foot inside its doors. . until the last day of the mandate. There are equally fascinating moments during some of the main quests, especially those that balance puzzle solving and combat in ways that challenge your understanding of the spells you have in engaging ways. But these moments are so scattered among far less interesting filler content that some of Harry Potter’s most devoted fans are likely to justify watching the entire journey.