What’s Hogwarts Legacy about?

Hogwarts Legacy is set in the world of harry potter at the Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry but set around a different timeline and story as you start at Hogwarts as a student entering the school as a fifth year student. Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world action RPG set in the world created by the writer J. K. Rowling from the famous harry potter books. However in this game, there is no character or reference to harry potter as you take on the role of a new student as you take on quests and trials as you enter late in the school term as a 5th year having to catch up on your studies and have professors give you extra assignments and investigate the main story unfolding the further you play.

On your journey you will encounter monsters like trolls and spiders and even fellow wizards and witches that you may need to fight to progress and unlock puzzles and learn new spells and potions that you need to also progress through the story. You will also get to take to the air on a broom were you can do some events and get around the Hogwarts grounds. Unfortunately Quidditch is not included. You get to make new friends with fellow students and get to explore Hogsmeade from the harry potter stories.

How does the game look Visually?

Visually, Hogwarts Legacy is pretty impressive with Raytraced shadows and ambient occlusion and reflection support but are disabled as default under a global quality preset. I did turn these ray tracing settings on during my gameplay session but also turned frames per second to 120 which did cause some jittering and other performance issues but later turned it back to 60 frames per second. However i think this was just a limitation of my RTX 3080 graphics card.

Nvidia DLSS options are present also that allow you to choose from several presets, TAA and AMD FSR Supported also.

Ray traced reflections are pretty evident once turned on showing reflections throughout the game, in puddles, reflective surfaces like shiny floors. The graphics in the title do depend on the graphics card you have but do not disappoint.

While my rig has only 16GB RAM and my card is a RTX 3080, and my drive is a HDD i played from, the loading was a little slow due to this and did impact scene changes on occasion, but this was just down to these factors. You can catch the fiirst 5 hours of gameplay below on our Youtube Channel.

How’s the Gameplay?

There is lots to do in Hogwarts Legacy. You start off learning some basic spells and learning to duel with other students before your missions can take you outside the school walls were you get to face deadlier foes letting you earn more XP. You can use this XP to level up and learn new forms of magic and potions to unlock. You get to learn how to transfigure objects to create workstations or growing areas to grow herbs and plants for potion making and learn more advanced potions and magic by attending classes daily were you do actually learn new things to help you along your story.

You use talent points like a skill tree to gain new skills as you progress through the game and these can vary depending on which talent category you choose to upgrade. In these categories, you would have small individual skill trees you can unlock like below.

You can also unlock items by completing challenges and puzzles around the grounds like the Merlin puzzles that can unlock more powerful items or upgraded gear that you can wear. This gear can offer higher or lower values so you must choose your gear wisely to make sure you have the highest gear score similar to looter shooters. There are other ways you can earn gear and items and skills from talking to other students or taking on side quests and tasks set out by professors throughout the game.

How’s the Combat and Controls?

The controls in Hogwarts Legacy start off pretty basic but does get more complicated the further you get into the story with extra spells and combat combos that you need to learn to be efficient. You can switch between spells using trigger buttons or just set them to a new slot if you use them often. You learn to do combat in the dark arts classes and can then go to unofficial duels run by other students also.

You can use all of the most popular spells that you know from the Harry Potter series and some completely new ones that help you duel. You can use spells to levitate them while you deal that crushing spell combos while fighting multiple enemies at once with fully parry support with Protego and more.

Conclusion

I Have really enjoyed playing Hogwarts Legacy and while i do think it should have had some form of multiplayer, it has been a enjoyable game. The game looks and plays amazingly well and the quests were fun for the most part and i really enjoyed the story. The progression system was a nice touch and didn’t feel too repetitive and the gear system was great. Fans of the harry potter stories will enjoy the authentic Hogwarts layout and surroundings. Hogwarts Legacy is definitely a great game and a true fan service and i recommend checking it out if you haven’t yet.