ReturnOfFa posted...
Definitely interested to hear perspectives on Hogwarts Legacy, everyone I hear talk about it seems way too hyped on it. I was already burnt on the franchise in my teens, so I've hated the Harry Potter universe for a good 15 years at least - even if the game's good, I won't be excited.
I may not be the best judge of how good of a
Harry Potter
game it is, as I'm a casual fan of the series at best. But as someone who plays a lot of games, here's my two cents: it's average. That's the tl;dr. I'll go into detail below.
It's made well. Controls well enough. Character models and VO are solid. There's a fair amount of customization in the equipment and clothing your character can wear. I really like that they give you the option to palette-swap any article of clothing you equip, so if you find some better gear while exploring you can keep your fashion sense intact. Music is great. Flying on a broom is fun. Mounts are cool but I usually opt for the broom because the control scheme for mounts is different than the broom and I get confused lol
Hogwarts school is impressive. There's so much attention to detail and cool features and secrets in the school. It's abundantly clear the devs spent a lot of time nailing this down. Again, casual fan here, but imho the school is damn near perfect and my favorite part of the game.
The rest of the game world is... okay. Hogsmeade acts as a sorta hub where you can interact with a number of vendors and meet quest-givers etc. That place is fairly well fleshed-out. Some of the larger dungeons feel complete.
The game tries to pull a BotW with a multitude of puzzles dotting the landscape but these are largely uninspired and absurdly easy. Not that BotW's shrine puzzles were mindbending, but they at least had more than a few that made really good use of the tools at Link's disposal and took a bit of thinking to figure out. Hogwarts puzzles would only be difficult if you imposed the challenge on yourself to avoid using Revelio (this game's Arkham detetective mode). With Revelio, they basically boil down to locating the highlighted objects and moving them/destroying them/etc. They're a joke and the rewards are not that great for completing them.
Spell menu can be cumbersome. You can eventually unlock a couple dozen spells, but can only have 4 "active" spells at a time. You can create a hot swap menu using the directional pad, and essentially create a pool of 16 spells you can access with relative ease.
What I've run into here is that it can be difficult finding a consistent set of spells to employ. I've tried to configure one set for exploration, one set for conjuring, one set for beast capture and care, and one set for combat. This works to a point, but the combat opportunities present situations where you may need to switch things up, particularly when attempting to complete challenges. I've found the conjuring opportunities limited largely to your "safehouse", so I've scrapped that hotswap pool for a second combat pool.
To expand on the combat, enemy variety is sorely lacking. Off the top of my head I can think of maybe 6 or 7 enemy types (spiders, wolves (mongrels), goblins, dark wizards, dugbogs, trolls...) and those can be configured with "different" classes or whatever (archer goblin vs axe-wielding, big aggressive spider vs smaller spider that snipes at you, for example).
But these differences are largely on the surface. In the Arkham games, you might feel compelled to switch up your strategy when encountering a group of thugs with some armed with firearms and some outfitted with armor sprinkled in. That can go a long way to making combat encounters feel fresh and interesting, and that is largely absent in HL. Most enemy encounters can be powered through by spamming a couple powerful spells, and late-game when you have access to some of the more powerful spells the encounters become an absolute joke.
Not gonna remark much on the story because frankly as a casual fan I'm not all that invested. It's decent enough to hold my attention for the main story beats, but I find myself checking out on side quests and just not caring that much about what supporting characters' motivations are, outside of a select few. Just wanted to play as a wizard and zap shit with spells. And to that end, the game is serviceable. But I'd have a hard time recommending a game that I find to be simply serviceable, particularly at its current price point.
If you can nab the game cheap, there's a fair amount of fun to be had. But the game's weaker features (enemy and combat encounters, loot becoming increasingly useless as you unlock better spells and therefore sidelining the desire to explore or complete side content) become gratingly apparent the further into the game you get. Imho it's worth $15-20 just to play around in Hogwarts school and fuck around in the game world for a while. But I don't think I'd pay much more than that for what this game has to offer.