Hogwarts Legacy Review

Being able to wield a wand in the hallowed halls is enchanting, but what's beneath the spell is competent but unspectacular.

Hogwarts Legacy starts to feel like countless open-world games of the past decade once you’ve been playing it for more than 15 hours. In place of that, we have hundreds of things to collect and dark wizards and magical wildlife to battle, and like most open-world games it starts to feel repetitive and meaningless after a while. The story, which revolves around a goblin uprising, is thin and uninteresting, and interrogates nothing about the Dark Arts or the sources of conflict between wizard-kind and other magical denizens. Hogwarts Legacy has so much to work with: it is the product of millions of childhood dreams. When Hogwarts Legacy leans into its role as a wizarding wish-fulfilment simulator, it is – forgive me – enchanting. It is a shame that the game can’t escape this context, because tremendous effort has clearly gone into diversifying Potter’s magical world for a 2023 audience.

In almost every way, Hogwarts Legacy is the Harry Potter RPG many have always wanted.

However, if you’re as much of a loot hoarder as I am and were hoping to gather up all the treasures in the world and dump them in a closet like in Skyrim you’ll be painfully disappointed by Legacy’s abysmal inventory space, which only lets you hold a couple dozen items and aggravatingly fills up in no time at all. This means you’ll miss out on tons of items early on unless you go to your menu and decide which precious treasure to throw overboard every time you open a chest. I will say though, with the wizarding buffet of endless ways to waste your time, it’s a pretty glaring omission that Quidditch is nowhere to be found. None of it is particularly game-changing stuff, but it managed to capture my attention enough for me to spend a good chunk of time looking at my equipment. I was able to get through the main story in 32 hours, but even though I was in something of a hurry to complete it I found staying on task almost impossible. Because you can only have so many spells equipped at any time, the one part of combat that’s a bit of a drag is the somewhat clunky process for switching between, which takes some serious getting used to. What’s especially weird is that it’s not like there aren’t other enemy types to be found in Legacy – you’ll find giant, evil frogs and zombies roaming about, to name a few – it’s just that they’re scarcely used in any of the main dungeons or levels. It’s a huge and important part of the Hogwarts fantasy that Legacy just knocks out of the park. That’s a shame, since the Harry Potter universe is known for having all manner of beasts and villains to face off against, and yet here there’s practically no variety. It’s understandable since there’s so much packed into this beast of an adventure, but the PS5’s promises of the death of loading screens haven’t quite been lived up to here as it’s clearly struggling to keep up with the spellcraft and whimsy of the Wizarding World. But none of these has come close to fulfilling that fantasy of receiving a Hogwarts admission letter that opens the door to a secret world. Unexpectedly, I even found myself looking forward to hanging out with my professors, whether it was my main man Professor Fig, who serves as both something of a mentor and as a sidekick, or the wise-cracking charms teacher Professor Ronen, who made me love him mostly by making fun of me.