3.5/5 ★ – SaintzGB's review of Hogwarts Legacy.

I'd been waiting for a new Harry Potter game for so long, so when I got my hands on this I had a great time. Attention to detail is great, it really feels like the devs all adored the series too. You could feel the love that was poured into this. I had lots of fun seeing things that the books mentioned and reliving childhood memories of reading through the series in great depth. I like that you got a variety of missions for each houses. They could have let you choose your house and left it at that, but instead they actually made it so that each house has a few of its own individual missions that lead up to finding the map room. Having individual classes was cool too, but I think they should have done it like Bully: give us 5 lessons for each class, each time you attend you get an unlockable item or skill. The map is way bigger than I expected honestly, I thought it would be Hogwarts and Hogsmeade and that's it, but it just kept going. Loved that. I like how they really bulked out Hogwarts and Hogsmeade Valley too with lots of unlockables, puzzles and rooms to explore. Although there may be a bit too many collectibles for my liking. The villains are kind of worthless. They hardly actually do anything to you. You hear whispers of 'oooh look how evil they are, they did this!' But you never really experience it much for yourself. Feels like they are in the shadows but never come to the light until the final sequence. Also the fact that you have one of them turn into a dragon as a boss fight is so stupid. The ancient magic stuff is cool but i dont really see how it makes us so much better than anyone else in combat beyond being able to fling rocks at people. The child characters are okay, but I never felt like my choices did that much to the story. I didn't care about Sebastian or his story much as he was kind of edgy, but I did like Natty and Poppy. The adults are fairly interesting but let's be real it's not really about them in anything about Harry Potter. I wish we had a little more customisation at the beginning for your character, and maybe a little more depth to the clothing customisation, however the level of customisation of the Room of Requirement was great and definitely a welcome addition. Lots of furniture items, decorations etc, brilliant idea to use the room in this way. It was neat to have several types of mounts, but why would you use the hippogriff over the broom, when the hippogriff controls awfully, is pretty slow and needs more space to use and the Graphorn is unlocked so late that you don't get much chance to use it, even then it's still not great. Overall, a fun experience, give it a go.