Hogwarts Legacy in the test: magical adventure, not only for fans of “Harry Potter”

The last “Harry Potter” film was released in 2011, but that was far from heralding the end of the magical world. To this day, fans hold on to the story of the little boy, who attends a famous magic school and thus escapes the dreary everyday life with his nasty relatives.

Quite a few were hoping for the letter that every witch and wizard receives on their 11th birthday, inviting them to attend Hogwarts School of Magic. Warner Bros. Games is now fulfilling this hope with Hogwarts Legacy after more than ten years. But as is well known, good things take time. After all, the role-playing game not only connects the film and book worlds. Here and there, through potions and spells, there are also references to the old games for Sony’s PS2 and Nintendo’s Gamecube.

Open world with many tasks for completists

Now one could not wrongly come up with the idea that Hogwarts Legacy is primarily aimed at Harry Potter fans who have known the most popular Hogwarts house since childhood – after all, it is always their own – but already at the beginning of the game it becomes clear that this is not the case. While every nook and cranny of the open world holds smaller and larger clues to the magical world only witches and wizards know, the fun doesn’t stop there for those who are simply looking for adventure the way.

The introduction provides fans who are less familiar with video games with an introduction to learn the first steps on the controller. If you are not a fan, you will get to know the magic world step by step together with your character. But this is where the first catch of Hogwarts Legacy comes in: you can’t skip the introductory sequence, even if you’ve already played through Hogwarts Legacy.

Once you’ve finally gotten through the introduction and are assigned to one of the Hogwarts houses, you collect your first of all the manual pages, which not only give you further insight into the wizarding world and have nice details for fans, but also represent quickly collected experience points. These pages are scattered throughout the open world and for those who want to finish the game with all the side quests, this may be a thorn in their side.

Because even if you can complete the main story of Hogwarts Legacy in under 30 hours, the world offers an incredible number of enemy camps, side quests and challenges that can easily stretch the playing time fourfold or more. And whether on a broomstick, flying animals or on foot: It’s fun to travel through the magical world because there is something to explore at every nook and corner.

Hogwarts legacy

This is what Hogwarts Legacy looks like.

From the mysteries at Hogwarts to the Merlin Trials hidden throughout the world, there’s plenty to do in single player. Even capturing and breeding beasts like the rare Graphorn is possible.

What remains without pink and red fan glasses?

But now off with the pink-red glasses of the fans: With all the enthusiasm, Hogwarts Legacy also has some rough edges that will hopefully be fixed with patches. Hogwarts Legacy on Xbox Series X or PS5 is certainly a visually very beautiful game. However, various PC players only notice a little of this, because Hogwarts Legacy stands out here with partly poorly developed performance.

If you go to Hogwarts, there can be drops in the frame rate, the ray tracing for reflections ensures that in some dark rooms you see confusing reflections that shouldn’t be there and even we didn’t have any with the RX 6900 XT from AMD Top graphics, although the utilization of the graphics card was well over 90 percent.

No story like “Harry Potter”

Fans expecting a story to rival those of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley might be a little disappointed on this point at least. You are the protagonist who is an achiever at everything and if you fail you just try again. Not even the teachers can hold a candle to you with your special skills. But at least the game is very much based on the existing lore. Apparently people who have an idea of ​​the “Harry Potter” world worked on the story.

If you know the books or at least the films, you can enjoy NPCs whose names always refer to well-known characters. In addition, there seem to have been templates for some professors and students. Professor Weasley is a bit reminiscent of the strict but fair Professor McGonagall. Professor Sharp might be a version of Severus Snape that never joined Voldemort, while Ominis Gaunt’s family background is very reminiscent of Sirius Black. But new figures have also been created with great attention to detail. So everyone has their little family problems and they share them with you as a friend, just like they would at any other school.

Nobody needs morals

But precisely in this context there is something that could be described as a double-edged sword. For the first time in a Harry Potter game, you can use the unforgivable curses. Of course, the “Avada Kedavra”, the death curse, is one of the strongest spells in Hogwarts Legacy. This is no different within the films and books about “Harry Potter”. But while wizards and witches are automatically considered villains in both film and book when they use this forbidden curse, nobody cares in Hogwarts Legacy.

You can use “Avada Kedavra” or other spells that were previously reserved for Voldemort’s followers, even in the presence of teachers or classmates, and you only get a spell here and there that you are probably not averse to the Dark Arts. The forbidden spells can really only be used on the opponents and not on shopkeepers, students or teachers who didn’t give you the grade you were hoping for.

The fact that it is actually forbidden for students to roam the castle at night is mentioned only a few times, among other things in Mr. Moon’s quest, while he sends you in search of Demiguise statues. When you’ve finished, you can walk past teachers without batting an eyelid, break into their premises, steal from them and nothing will happen to you. This also offers the advantage that you can explore the castle in peace without having to pay attention to the volume or the time of day.

Orientated to casual gamers

We played mostly with keyboard and mouse and it’s quite clear that Hogwarts Legacy is designed more for controllers, because flying and picking locks with a controller is much easier, among other things. Hogwarts Legacy largely dispenses with complicated talent trees, instead there are only a few talents that you should definitely equip. But beware: you cannot undo the selection of your talents.

You can also safely ignore the statistics of your equipment on the “Normal” difficulty level. Wearing the latest equipment is enough if you see a green arrow pointing up. If necessary, you can improve your equipment.

There is no real level scaling on enemies. So if you have reached the maximum level 40 after a certain playing time, your opponents will drop like flies. You can counteract this by increasing the difficulty level to “Hard” while playing.

If you find it difficult to get started with the role-playing game, we will give you tips and tricks to start a successful school year in Hogwarts Legacy.

Hogwarts legacy

editorial rating 8.6 reader ratings

3 reviews

NETZWELT may receive a commission from the retailer for links on this site. More info.

Hogwarts Legacy: The Best Alternatives

Don’t you agree? Are you looking for suitable alternatives? Below you will find the best Hogwarts Legacy alternatives.

We also recommend that you take a look at our video game leaderboards. You can find comparable products, for example, in the “Best PC games: You should have tried these games” list.