2.5/5 ★ – SilverScroll's review of Hogwarts Legacy.

Hogwarts Legacy is litteraly THE game of all time, a game which, after the initial wonder of exploring hogwarts and hogsmede faded, failed to keep me invested in any of its core systems, from it's at best boring story to its ubisoft style open world full of pointless side activities. Its first problem is the fact that it fails to make you feel like a student in hogwarts, as you cannot sleep and you only attend classes when required to or when learning new spells. I feel like this game would've benefited greatly from a gameplay loop like the persona games but I understand why they didnt do this. Even so, the game spends too much time focusing on the 'ancient magic' your character can wield and trying to stop a goblin named ranrok, whose entire villain backstory is that a wizard was a dick to him once, this is only explained about halfway through the game meaning that for the first half of the story your just expected to want to stop him, he is probably the worst villain in a video game I have played since Ghostwire Tokyo. Hogwarts legacys characters also contribute to the lackluster storytelling, with all of them being really uninteresting and boring with the exception of one or two, and some characters being introduced only to never be seen again, your fellow students make some appearances in the story, but all of their development is left to the side missions meaning that most if not all of them feel bland and boring. I enjoyed the games combat for the majority of my playthrough, with its intricate and flashy spell combos proving fun for a good chunk of the game, but by the end it feels boring and repetitive and as a result of this and its mind numbingly boring open world design, I put the game down after I completed the main story. The rpg elements of hogwarts legacy also feel really out of place and the game would honestly be better off if they didnt have them at all and was just purely an open world action adventure game. Hogwarts and hogsmede are the exception to this boring open world as they are both marvelously designed spaces and are an absolute joy to navigate if you are a fan of the books or movies. What at first seems Labyrinthine and impossible to navigate soon becomes familiar in the best possible way. Hogwarts Legacy is also one of the best looking games I have ever played, with the castle in particular looking stunning both inside and out and it's open world and different seasons are a unique and different way of providing the player with different environments to explore. HLs music is also really good, with it all fitting the setting and theme of the movies very well, one particular highlight is the room of requirement theme. The game isnt poorly made or bad, like saints row for example (its miles better than saints row) which is why I havent rated it lower, but its story and open world design in particular are so mediocre and boring that it failed to keep me interested in all of my 22 hour playthrough, nothing at all is worth mentioning in its story and it's open world design has been done to death in a million other games before. Ultimately, this games biggest sin is that it fails to capture that same unexplainable magic that the movies have, and if it wasnt for its Harry Potter setting I believe that it would not have received the overwhelmingly positive reviews it has by mainline critics, it's not 9/10 ign but it's not 1/10 wired either, and if you have decided to skip this game due to the boycott, the only things of note you are missing out on are some incredible visuals and a marvellous rendition of hogwarts and hogsmede.