Hogwarts Legacy

Type: Game

Score: 7/10

Date modified: Dec 18, 2025

This game went free on Epic Games recently so I thought I should finally try it out. It's certainly a good game and as someone who has watched and read an embarrassing amount of Harry Potter content, a giant game like was already guaranteed a passing grade of 5. I know this isn't the first time there has been a Harry Potter game but this certainly is the first time they had $150,000,000 to work with. Anyways as far as recreating the Harry Potter world they passed with flying colours. Obviously the world isn't quite the size that Rowling wrote because games like this take a shitload of money but for at least Hogwarts the school it feels even grander than in the books and movies. It's a great feeling playing a game like this and being able to walk through just about any door and inside finding a unique place which nearly always has something to see and read. It helps that the game looks so good and yet runs so well. To compare it to the other large 3D games I've been playing recently, this game looks a fair bit better than Elden Ring and E33 and yet runs a lot better than both. Maybe Elden Ring I can understand, it is a pretty massive game but frankly I should find it at least a little impressive how much better this game runs than E33. I have to assume that a good amount of work went into this game running so well and I applaud them for putting in that effort.

Continuing my praises for a little while longer, they really made this magic school feel like one. The way books fly about in the library, armour stands move by themselves and instruments play themselves are all small details but went a long way in immersing me. I liked how, especially in the first few hours there felt like there were mysteries at every corner of this place. Like what's up with those mirrors? Oh, you use Lumos to see a clue of where to look. That's cool stuff that feels natural and makes the game feel less monotonous. Another part that immersed me was how good a lot of these characters were, smallchat, especially with my goat Natsai often got a chuckle out of me and also sounds exactly how I imagine magic teenagers to speak minus the cursing. The writing in this game was generally really good and so was the voice acting. To be honest near the start I was a little let down by my own character's voice acting but either the guy got better or I just got used to it because I ended up quite liking it. The writing in this game was very obviously British too and that is something I enjoy a lot more than American which is just about every game. I also really liked how good the game and general combat felt. I'd have liked if they upped the ante a little sometimes because even on the hardest difficultly I still felt like they could've pushed the system further. I'd also have liked some more non-human combat but it's whatever I guess. The music and sound design of this game is also really good, obviously it's nothing new for the Harry Potter series but the music sounds good as usual and the sounds are always satisfying to listen to. In my notes I wrote that it sounded "Wizard101 pilled", whatever that means.

Now time to get into what I didn't like. The tutorial for this game is pretty bad, it's not popups galore like Elden Ring's tutorial but it's still not exactly great and it also lasts quite a long while which is a bit of a pain. This game can get slow at points and the gameplay loop of quests and pressing R 500 times to get EXP can quickly get old especially when you're like me and can never not find all the pages once you hear that little jingle. I'd have loved a more mage-esque way of earning EXP like you research spells or something. The quests were pretty underwhelming in general too, I know I complained about Elden Ring's quests being insane and impossible to follow but quests in this game are almost too easy to follow. This is a far more linear game than Elden Ring but even still I'd have liked if not all the quests had an exact quest marker and made me engage a little and put in some work. Arthur Plummly's treasure map quest (great voice by the way) was probably my favourite in the early game for that reason. It felt like I had to do a little work to figure out where to go and it was pretty cool. My only qualms are that the purple circle thing seems to show up before you are even close so it gives it away and my quest bugged and my guy decided he found the painting while being a floor beneath it which was a little bizarre. I quite liked the other quests that make you figure out which spell to use to solve whatever's going on (though it's usually pretty obvious). I found it a little strange how I was stealing so much shit in this game, like why could my guy just go around robbing chests for every coin they had. I'd had also quite liked it if there was a wider variety of spells. According to Google there are 30-34 spells and to be honest after having played Skyrim mods with more than that I'd liked to have seen more and to be honest some more gimmicky combat spells that only work in specific situations would've been fun and spiced up gameplay for me. Some healing spells could've been cool too because I don't love needing healing potions, especially when they need to be purchased or made. I guess it's not too terrible for a game as easy as this as it would be for a game like Elden Ring but it's still a bit of a pain. Lastly it was very weird that Natsai (despite being my goat), became my best friend only about an hour after meeting her. I don't know if this would've happened with Sebastian too but it was a little odd, maybe I just have bad social skills and this is how though quickly most people become good friends. I'm not entirely sure.

Edit: Alright I started a new playthrough and I have a little more to say, firstly there is a fair bit of repeated dialogue so it'd be cool if they had either recorded more or just not play it after I heard it the first time as to be honest I'd rather hear nothing than "there's such a thing as trying too hard" over and over. I also think this game is trying to hard to keep me safe, let me jump off shit and break my legs please, let me jump across railings. It could've made exploration more interesting if my guy could do parkour. The jingle that plays when I find field guide pages is making me go a little insane and so is when they really should fully appear but they just decide not to so I have to cast revelio again. There were also a few cutscenes that just inexplicably didn't follow the volume settings I had chosen and instead bravely decided to just max it out for no reason. I skipped most cutscenes on the second time so I don't know how common it was. I'd also forgotten to mention how metal some of the ancient magic kills are, like I fully mashed a poacher into the dirt shit's crazy.

Edit 2: I just read a fuckass Reddit post about how someone doesn't like the options for responding to dialogue but to be honest I thought they were really good and the "mean" options were always really funny even if it doesn't really matter what you select.