After a very long waiting period, Hogwarts Legacy was released a year ago and instantly became the best-selling game of 2023, with 22 million copies sold. Neither my girlfriend nor I are Potterheads, and she, in turn, is also not a gamer. Yet, she somehow got enticed to play this game, and so we bought it and played it on the steam deck these last 4½ months (January – April).

During our playthrough it became clear to me that for once, I'm not a part the targeted player-base of a huge open-world, "soulslike-ish" game, which is weird. Instead, i believe this game was aimed at people like my girlfriend, who have not previously played any single-player adventure games and as so, haven't gotten anything to compare their experience to.

Therefore it has for me been difficult to really put into words what kind of pretty, extremely repetitive, charming, cliché, ambitious, and soul-lacking game Hogwarts Legacy truly is. It tries so hard to give the player the "promised" sense of magic shown in the Harry Potter movies, yet somehow it fails to deliver on this in almost every way besides its admittedly gorgeous visuals.

Don't get my somewhat harsh introduction wrong; the gameplay is impressively fluid and flawless, even on the steam deck. That's not where the issues lie. No, the issue lies in the game's extremely boring and repetitive gameplay, which is cleverly hidden/not shown in any of the trailers, or game descriptions.
In other games, looting tombs, capturing beasts, or popping balloons—okay, not popping balloons—usually carry a modicum of variety and challenge. By this i mean how you in other games might explore different tombs, ruins, temples and caves, each with their own layout and challenge, or how you might fight monsters/enemies which requires you, the player, to adapt and develop unique strategies to take them on.
I get that for these AAAA games, it’s simply not possible to introduce an extreme degree of gameplay variety to everything you see, but usually, in other games, you will experience that one enemy or area where everything just works... Not in Hogwarts Legacy...

The game contains a whopping 112 tombs to explore, and not a single one takes more than 20 seconds to complete. Most of the time, the experience will go like this: "Go into tomb, go right, go left, loot chest, go back out again". Or what about capturing beasts?

There are also 12(13) beasts you can "Save" in this game, yet the gameplay for all of them is "Stun” then “force creature into bag".

Another example are the collection pages. Yes, this game contains 150 unique cards to obtain by spamming your left arrow button on your controller. You will get no indication where any of these cards can be found except for a faint bell sound whenever you are close to the location of one. Besides the collection pages, there are 140 "furniture" cards, 90 appearances cards, 75 trait cards, 42 wand handle cards... and so on.
All of these cards are required for a 100% completion run, yet only the 150 collection cards can be located through an in-game mechanic, meaning if you miss one or two, you will have a very hard time backtracking the huge world of Hogwarts Legacy to find the missing cards without looking them up on the internet, and even then, it will be a huge pain.

I guess my point is, that this game's gameplay is extremely centered around doing repetitive work to gather about about 1000 "different" items (I wish I was kidding) if you want to do a 100% run. Even if you don't want to do a 100% run, it sucks that so much gameplay potential is wasted on gathering useless cosmetics for hours on end.

Had they focused on a smaller world with more interesting gameplay of a higher variety, then i believe that the Hogwarts Legacy experience might have had the potential to be one of the greats.

Now you might think, "Yeah, yeah, I get that the side stuff is not very fun, but the combat must be good?". Well yes and no...

The combat is introduced with a nice quirk where you sometimes must use different colored/utility spells to deal damage to enemies. That is until you rather quickly find out that you can also just stop using all the utility spells and instead just do damage spells and throw stuff whenever you would have to use the utility spells.
In Hogwarts Legacy, you will fight a whopping 67 "unique enemies", until you figure out that there are, in truth, only 10, including bosses... So not only is the combat repetitive, but you will also fight hundreds of the same 7 (excluding bosses) enemy types again and again and again... And these enemy types don’t vary. All enemies (more or less) require the same strategy: do damage spells and dark souls roll to avoid getting hit. The sad truth of the matter is that once you have fought your first troll, spider, human, wolf, and goblin, you will have fought 90% of the different enemies in this game.

The narrative of Hogwarts Legacy is your standard, "seen-before" adventure where every average Joe can predict everything a mile away.
Oh, you thought this game was about being a student at Hogwarts? Hah, think again. In this story, you are the “normal teen” who is suddenly special (manifest destiny) and must uncover why they are special. The evil guy also wants to be special, and so you both race to find out why you are special, first. The villain’s motivation is just power grabbing, while your motivation is to save the world by defeating the villain.

In every dialogue you will be presented with the good/normal response and the evil/arrogant response. Sadly it never matters which response you choose, and moreoften than not you will actually gain more money, items, pets or other if you choose the bad option with no consequences to ever follow, whatsoever.

The main story, as I mentioned, doesn’t really shine. No, in truth, the side quests alongside your fellow students are where the excitement and surprises of this game are hidden. The 3 student side quests are stretched across the entirety of the game and are only possible to complete once you finish the last main mission. Without these stories, I’m not sure that even my girlfriend would’ve kept an interest in this game.

So, the visuals are definitely where this game shines. The number of unique animations on every piece of decoration is incredible. From empty armor stands fighting each other as you look away, to unique pet reactions as you feed and brush them, this is where the promised magic is delivered. These visuals alone have got me considering installing the game over on my PC just so that I might experience Hogwarts and the different common rooms in high resolution and frame rate. Hogwarts is incredibly made, and it is clear that the art department consists of very talented people, who’ve alle put their deep passion into this project. The rest of the world is also pretty, but that quickly fades when you realize that it contains nothing interactive of interest.

In my opinion, the visuals carry this game, and should this have been a lack, I wonder if this might have been yet another sales bomb, instead of the huge success it became.

In essence, Hogwarts Legacy’s true magic lies in its ability to visually captivate and engage those new to gaming or those deeply in love with the Harry Potter franchise. With its low complexity and simple gameplay, Hogwarts Legacy offers a doorway into the larger world of gaming for people not previously familiar with gaming as a hobby. However, for the rest of us, and probably you, reading this review, Hogwarts Legacy doesn’t deliver an exciting gaming experience with depth and complexity. Instead, at a 60-euro price, Hogwarts Legacy ends up serving as little more than a brief detour between one exciting game experience and the next.