Overview

Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world action adventure fantasy that was released on steam, on February 10, 2023.
The game was developed by Avalanche Software, and published Warner Bros. Games.

Grpahics

Hogwarts Legacy was created on Unreal Engine 4, a widely known engine used in various games by different developers. The game offers a very detail array of graphical setting. While you can set a preset that allows the game to choose the settings for you, you have so many options for graphic settings that it would too much to add here but I will list the most important. You change options between, Effects, Material, Sky, Foliage, Shadow, Texture, View distance and Population Quality. While also have settings like Anti Aliasing, Upscaling options such as FSR 2.1, DLSS 3.1, and XESS 1.1, and raytracing options with supported gpu's of course.

Hogwarts Legacy does, at the minimum, require a good gaming pc to run the game. With the minimum system requirements being a Intel Core i5-6500/AMD Ryzen 5 1400, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 4GB/AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB, 16GB RAM, while also preferring this game be installed on a SSD instead of a HDD. Meeting the minimum allows you to play the game at 720p/30fps on low quality settings. So its highly recommended to have a pc quite above these specs just to have a decent experience.

Hogwarts Legacy is a graphically impressive game. The wizarding world looks amazing, every part of the expansive map looks incredibly well detailed. The map is located in the scottish highlands, so the map is mainly consisted of lush temperate forest, towering mountains that surround most of the map, and a beautiful coastline to the south. Lots of villages, caves, ruins, and buildings dot the map, the interiors are well detailed. One of the best looking structures are Hogwarts Castle, a massive castle that serves as the main location and houses the wizarding school.

Sound

Hogwarts Legacy does an amazing job with its soundtrack. While its mainly consistent of background, and ambient audio there is never really a dull moment in the game of it. I found myself really enjoying the charming, upbeat music that plays when your running across the halls of hogwarts castle, and the village of Hogsmeade. Calm musical score when in other villages, and just exploring, and eriee ambience when in abandon places or caves. The music in the game always keep me immersed in the world.

Addictiveness

At first glance you might think, “oh another AAA open world game”, likely assuming the world is gonna be vast but empty, and the likelihood you would only play for the story once and that's its. Honestly the game is surprisingly replayable. While also offering more than enough to keep you interested in game for hours. The game does give the incentive for you to atleast try to side quest, classes, and even explore the map. You might be missing some good loot and even spells that can help you later down the line. Especially if you're a completionist, getting 100% in the game is bound to take an extremely long time.

One great thing about Hogwarts Legacy is that you're gameplay will not be same the second time around. You can change how you follow the game's main story. You can do stuff in a different order, or maybe even change the combat style based on what spells and talents you want.

Story

I found Hogwarts Legacy story to be rather nice. You have some control over the story with the dialogue you choose. Though this will just change how you combat an area in the game, and has no real change into the stories outcome. I will mention the story has 3 endings, the 2 endings can be triggered based on the choice you make at the very end of the game. One of the endings is a special one only accessible if the player reaches level 34 in the game.

Spoilers!

Hogwarts Legacy takes place in the 1800s. The story has you start as a fifth year Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry after a receiving a letter from Professor Weasley. Your player is being escorted to Hogwarts by your mentor, Professor Fig. While in route to Hogwarts and investigating a strange artefact in their possession, you are attacked by a dragon. In a effort to escape you open the artefact and use a portkey that was inside, teleporting you to Gringotts Wizarding Bank. While there they encounter an old vault, and learn thatb the portkey can used to open it. This is when you learn you have the power to see traces of ancient magic. You are confronted by a evil goblin named Ranrok. You escape him, and are finally at Hogwarts where your adventures in the wizarding world begins.

Depth

Hogwarts Legacy is a large ope-world game sprawling with content such as side quest, caves and ruins to explore allowing to collect loot that might be useful in your adventures, minigames, and side-activities. You can befriend some other students in the game that will open up relationship quest which reveal more about the students, their backgrounds, motivations, and growth in Hogwarts.

You have the option quest to do assignments for your professors. These assignments are way for obtaining new spells that are required to learn to progress in some parts of the main story. These spells can help you combat, but more importantly, help you solve every puzzle in the game.

The combat is pretty good. Like I said earlier, you can learn different spells from assignments and relationship quest that help you handle all sorts of enemies you encounter. Their is a feature called talents which are broken down into 5 categories for you choose and upgrade. These talents are Spells, Dark Arts, Core, Stealth, and Room of Requirement. You can progress through all the talents how ever you feel like you. This allows you play Hogwarts Legacy using particular wizarding play styles based on what talent you upgrade the most. Another aspect of the game that helps with combat is use of potions, and tools. Crafting them can allow you enhance your combating skills and allow to take out enemies with ease or allow to survive some really dangerous encounters.

Difficulty

Hogwarts Legacy has four different difficulty settings, which allows you to play the game based on your skill level and preference of balance between gameplay and story.

These difficulty settings are

Story, which allows to focus mainly on the games story without much of a challenge

Easy, which adds a bit more of challenge gameplay wise

Normal, adds a balanced experience. Not too hard and not too easy. This is the setting I played the game on.

Hard, of course by the name it gives you a real challenge. Its required to learn as much as possible about the game its combat mechanics.

As mentioned before, I played the game on normal. As far as I can say about the difficulty it doesn't make the combat all too challenging. The combat controls themselves are bit underwhelming. Minimum button presses make up the majority of the combat. Starting the game for the first time will require you to learn the combat which can be a bit challenging, but you get the hang of it pretty quick.

I large part of this game's difficulty will come from the puzzles throughout the game. Starting out, you will struggle to figure a good chunk of the puzzles. A lot of them will require to progress through the game to unlock spells required to solve them. I had to look up guilds to solve a lot of the puzzles myself. They do give some decent rewards though.

Overall

Hogwarts Legacy was surprising a good game to me. It did peak my interest when it released. I have never played a game from the Harry Potter universe. The game was a bit different from the usual games I played, and I decided to pick it up and play. While the game does lack in some areas, it never felt dull to me.