Hogwarts Legacy is a very solid theme park experience for fans of the franchise and can be recommended just for that. Being familiar with the books and movies, I have enjoyed how many iconic moments can be experienced in this video game. As a AAA open world game however, Hogwarts Legacy stands out in very few areas.

Most of the main story of the game serves as a tutorial for the game play loop. This makes with the setting perfectly as the player is attending Hogwarts as a 5 year student and therefore needs to catch up on how things work fast. Luckily, they are the most gifted wizard that ever lived, so they are able to master the entire curriculum in under a year of the story taking place. The tutorials are well integrated with the story and solve a problem many open world games face - the game play of the first 6 hours being identical to the rest of the 20+ hours. The problem is solved by slowly adding new spells and mechanics.

What the game does best is the combat system making you feel like an actual wizard casting spells which all make sense (except Avada Kedavra and transfiguration maybe). It's doesn't get boring until you finish the main story because you are able to express yourself in how you deal with enemies. The spells also function equally well with exploration, allowing for puzzle solving challenges.

While exploring there are really only 2 - 3 rewards that could be useful, and most of the exploration can be ignored, meaning grind is not necessary. Simply collecting field guide pages in Hogwarts and clearing a couple of side quests will be enough to hit the recommended level to finish the main story quests. This is very welcome as some open world games (Even games like TW3) can force you to level up before progressing which is not ideal.

The rest of the game resembled Genshin Impact for me. Without spoiling too much, you gain access to certain activities that resemble a farming simulator. These are quite optional and offer generous rewards, meaning it's not as tedious and useless as GI.

The main issue with this title is that it has a lot of mechanics that don't go very deep. Things like the gear system, the skill tree, the lock picking, the broom flying challenges and dialog options are very weak in this game. This might also be said for the open world. This game didn't need an open world, but all modern AAA games have to be open world, so here we are. What the open world does is essentially it forces you to fly from one random village to another random village to a dungeon. A lot of this pads out the game time while also compromising the immersion.

The open world is not immersive. It's a nice theme park made for you, but it feels more fake than anything. Hogwarts is basically surrounded by goblins and poachers and nobody in the wizarding world cares at all, so it's up to 3 brave students to go out there and clean everything up. If all students are as strong as the game shows them, they could easily go out and clean out all of the threats, but they don't for some reason.

The story is bad. It doesn't make it personal to your character, it doesn't allow you to influence it how you want, it doesn't make sense at times and the biggest issue with it is that it doesn't feel realistic at all in terms of how this world would work. They had a chance to make the Wizarding world better for example fixing the Slitherin house or explaining why people don't just blast each other with Avada Kedavra from the start instead of shooting 20 times from your wand, but they didn't do that.

Rating this game for it's franchise theme park experience - it's a good one. If you remove the HP franchise from this title, it's a very serviceable AAA open world game. Just go play Skyrim or AC

Hogwarts Legacy is a very solid theme park experience for fans of the franchise and can be recommended just for that. Being familiar with the books and movies, I have enjoyed how many iconic moments can be experienced in this video game. As a AAA open world game however, Hogwarts Legacy stands out in very few areas. Most of the main story of the game serves as a tutorial for the game play loop. This makes with the setting perfectly as the player is attending Hogwarts as a 5 year student and therefore needs to catch up on how things work fast. Luckily, they are the most gifted wizard that ever lived, so they are able to master the entire curriculum in under a year of the story taking place. The tutorials are well integrated with the story and solve a problem many open world games face - the game play of the first 6 hours being identical to the rest of the 20+ hours. The problem is solved by slowly adding new spells and mechanics. What the game does best is the combat system making you feel like an actual wizard casting spells which all make sense (except Avada Kedavra and transfiguration maybe). It's doesn't get boring until you finish the main story because you are able to express yourself in how you deal with enemies. The spells also function equally well with exploration, allowing for puzzle solving challenges. While exploring there are really only 2 - 3 rewards that could be useful, and most of the exploration can be ignored, meaning grind is not necessary. Simply collecting field guide pages in Hogwarts and clearing a couple of side quests will be enough to hit the recommended level to finish the main story quests. This is very welcome as some open world games (Even games like TW3) can force you to level up before progressing which is not ideal. The rest of the game resembled Genshin Impact for me. Without spoiling too much, you gain access to certain activities that resemble a farming simulator. These are quite optional and offer generous rewards, meaning it's not as tedious and useless as GI. The main issue with this title is that it has a lot of mechanics that don't go very deep. Things like the gear system, the skill tree, the lock picking, the broom flying challenges and dialog options are very weak in this game. This might also be said for the open world. This game didn't need an open world, but all modern AAA games have to be open world, so here we are. What the open world does is essentially it forces you to fly from one random village to another random village to a dungeon. A lot of this pads out the game time while also compromising the immersion. The open world is not immersive. It's a nice theme park made for you, but it feels more fake than anything. Hogwarts is basically surrounded by goblins and poachers and nobody in the wizarding world cares at all, so it's up to 3 brave students to go out there and clean everything up. If all students are as strong as the game shows them, they could easily go out and clean out all of the threats, but they don't for some reason. The story is bad. It doesn't make it personal to your character, it doesn't allow you to influence it how you want, it doesn't make sense at times and the biggest issue with it is that it doesn't feel realistic at all in terms of how this world would work. They had a chance to make the Wizarding world better for example fixing the Slitherin house or explaining why people don't just blast each other with Avada Kedavra from the start instead of shooting 20 times from your wand, but they didn't do that. Rating this game for it's franchise theme park experience - it's a good one. If you remove the HP franchise from this title, it's a very serviceable AAA open world game. Just go play Skyrim or AC