It took me around one hundred and fifteen hours to finish the game. When I considered myself done, I had technically completed just over 90% of the challenges. My rank was 37. I had finished all the main and side quests. My clothing was comprised of legendary and fully upgraded items. My broom was fully upgraded, and my room of requirement was fully populated with every type of plant, potion, station, and animal.

At my character’s level 37, I could two-shot most Trolls if the first hit was Petrificus Totalus. I fully upgraded the binding spell along with the stealth Disillusionment charm as fast as the game would allow. The sneak attack that is possible when the two spells are used in conjunction was invaluable throughout the entire game. I used the combo for clearing bandit camps, spider’s nests, and troll lairs galore. The strategy works best once you are able to run while under Disillusionment.

Overall Hogwarts Legacy was a fantastic adventure game. If you are a Harry Potter fan in general, then roaming the castle in all its 4K glory on a high-end PC or console is an epic experience all on its own. Even if you don’t play the rest of the game, it is worth the cost to be able to dig into every nook and cranny of the famous castle and its grounds.

Taken as a whole, the game’s main story was interesting and easy to follow. The plot twists weren’t unexpected, but at least they made sense in the story’s context. The characters were fairly well developed. There were lots of enemy form factors to master, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

I was surprised by the number of mini games like broom racing, bowling with a magical twist, puzzles (Merlin Trials), shape matching, some simple math problems. The list goes on and on. The game is also a collector’s paradise, clothing, wands, brooms, animals and plants, potions, money, upgrades, and more are found all over the place.

The story lines in most of the side-quests aligned with the main branch in the end. There weren’t any major plot holes or open-ended story lines left dangling once I’d finished all the quests. If you are considering playing the game all the way though, you should be aware that the difficulty increases significantly once you travel to the southern portion of the map.

The scenery was beautiful. The mountains, streams, towns, buildings and various environments were all well-crafted, kept in decent scale to each other, and the color palette was realistic. The NPCs had varying snippets and there were enough of them to make the world feel populated.

The shops and shopkeepers were interesting. The currency system was easy to understand, and it didn’t take much effort to earn enough to be successful. A tip for those just getting started, capturing and selling animals to Brood and Peck in Hogsmeade is one of the fastest ways I found to amass a fortune.

The broom racing was fun, easy to do as a form of transportation, but difficult to master for racing. The combat was well designed. It offered a lot of strategic options once I got used to the complicated control scheme. There are some great power moves that feel exhilarating to pull off in a fight. The difficulty settings can be changed on the fly and affect more than just the number of enemies.

Anytime you spend more than a hundred hours with a game there are bound to be some gripes. Hogwarts Legacy had relatively few from my point of view. Most of them were minor things like quest glitches that eventually got fixed. There are a few quality-of-life issues. My biggest complaints are against the lock picking and load-out controls. Neither was a big enough problem to “break” the game.

Opening locked rooms and chests was boring, I tried not to sigh every time I had to do it. The process seemed like something that got added during a committee meeting rather than being carefully planned. More of a “RPGs always have lock picking.” rather than, “How do locks work in the magic world we are making?” situation. I cast a spell to open the lock. Then I have to manually open it? If I have to align the lock’s mechanisms, then what did the spell do? I think they should have added a skill tree item to allow skipping the mini game.

The load-out management for controlling which spells are equipped can be irritating. There aren’t enough slots to create a build for each type of mission you encounter. This means that you are stuck constantly breaking immersion to enter the menu system and change out the spells for a given task. If they would have added a shift button to the system and given you four more groups for spells, it would have been almost perfect in my opinion.

In the early days, the game was a mess as far as performance was concerned. I was experiencing tearing, dropped frames, and general poor performance trying to run 1080P/120/High on a 3080Ti and Ryzen 7. Patches to video drivers, the game itself, and Windows 11 eventually got everything running reliably and smooth with top notch visuals.

I used NVIDIA’s hardware scaling to get the best balance between FPS and appearance on the desktop and laptop gaming systems. On the Steam Deck and Ally, i let the respective devices configure themselves except for mapping a few buttons. Speaking of mapping, putting Revelio and dodging on the back paddles saved my hands from a lot of wear and tear.

I played most of the game on that PC with a 3080 Ti, 32 GB RAM, and a liquid cooled AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. I have also played the game on a higher-end PC with a 4090 and Intel i-7 12700k, an i-7 3070 laptop, as well as, on a Steam Deck, and ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme. No matter the hardware, I was able to tune the game to look and play fantastically after the first round of patches had dropped.

As for control options I tried a keyboard and mouse, the Steam Deck and Ally’s built-in controllers, and a Gen 2 Xbox Elite controller. I preferred controllers to the keyboard and mouse for this title. The combat’s lock-on targeting, and the flight controls felt better on the sticks than they did on the WASD keys.

I had a good time playing the game and stuck with it all the way to the end. You don’t have to be a Harry Potter fan to enjoy Hogwarts Legacy, but it probably helps if you are. You don’t have to be an accomplished RPG gamer to play either, but it probably helps if you are. I’ve recommended it to friends and family and the feedback from those that have played has been positive for the most part. I think Portkey Games deserves the accolades and awards it has received from the industry for this title.