Enter the magical world of Hogwarts Legacy, an open-world action role-playing video game set in the 1800s wizarding world. Explore the iconic castle, learn powerful spells, and uncover the secrets of the ancient magic that lies within. Experience the thrill of a magical adventure as you battle dark forces, make powerful allies, and uncover the truth behind the shadows as you investigate the mysterious rumors about a goblin rebellion that may put Hogwarts at risk.

Plot

Your journey begins in the late 1800s, so even though you may recognize the common rooms and classes, the professors and characters you will meet won't be familiar (you will still remember a few faces, though). You will start Hogwarts late as a fifth-year student and be sorted into one of the four famous Hogwarts houses, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin.

While attending many different classes and learning a lot, your magical skills will be tested as you discover a dark mystery by working with the enigmatic yet powerful Professor Fig to find out if a mounting goblin rebellion is about to start.

Gameplay

Explore: Hogwarts Legacy's world is vibrant and dense, so enjoy exploring all the different places and environments like the Forbidden Forest, Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and many more. If you want to travel faster and rise to higher ground, you should take the time to master the art of maneuvering a broomstick safely.
Talents and builds: This is one of the essential parts of the game as it will shape your playstyle throughout the game. Talents are split among five categories, including Spells, Dark Arts, Core, Stealth, and Room of Requirement. Spells will buff and improve a lot most of your attack spells. Dark Arts deals with Curses, which are evil spells capable of synergizing with each other and affecting other talents' upgrades. Core talents will equip you with some general buffs and upgrade how you cast. Stealth talents help you sneak better. Room of Requirement talents will make your plants and potion more powerful and versatile.
Attend classes: You can attend many different courses, like Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Herbology, Potion classes, and much more. They are essential to your journey, as you will learn many valuable skills and prepare yourself to face the real world outside of Hogwarts. Plenty of different challenges and events await you during those classes, so be prepared to focus and become a great magician step-by-step.
Character customization: You can create your character and customize the style of your witch or wizard through plenty of settings. Start by choosing among one of the many presets, and tweak all the different parameters, including face shape, skin color, glasses, hairstyle, hair color, freckles, and moles, add scars and markings, and choose your eye and eyebrow colors. You can even select your voice tone and pitch.

Enemies: Many different enemies, students, and dark creatures will cross your path and try to take you down. Your enemies possess their unique offensive and defensive abilities, including Stunning Spells, Blasting Curses, enchanted weaponry, and many more. Never underestimate your foes: some can directly attack, while others can enchant and incapacitate you.
Combats and spells: Thrilling and exciting battles await you as you can employ dozens of spells but also take advantage of your environment to cover, cast objects, or bring chaos. Emergent strategies will arise as you can combine your different spells in various ways depending on your playstyle and the enemies you face. For example, the Shield charm allows you to deflect ranged or direct strikes, and Stunning charms can stupefy your adversaries, allowing you to cast spells like Descendo or Incendio. Hone your skills, experiment with all the many possibilities, and become a fearsome duelist. Hone your skills, experiment with all the many possibilities, and become a fearsome duelist.

Plants and gears: Plants can be used differently depending on the situation, like helping you in combat, as part of a brewing potion, or crafting gears. Even though we can't have an exhaustive list of all plants' usage, some of them, like Mandrakes that can incapacitate your enemies, Dittany, which is used in making potions using its healing powers, mushrooms, or cabbage-like plants you can use to deal damage in combats automatically.
Companions: Take the time to explore the common rooms or other places to meet different characters that may teach you some abilities and become your friends. Your schoolmates can accompany you on your adventures as companions, help you in eclectic ways, and over time tell you their stories. They all have their own background and personality traits, like Popy Sweeting, who has a kind heart and loves magical beasts, Natsai Onai, who is brave and acts to seek justice, and many more.
Potions: Potions are another important part of the game and can help you become a stronger magician in this wild world and aid you in battles. As you attend Potion class in Hogwarts, you will learn all the basics you need to brew potions using resources and ingredients throughout the world.
Room of Requirements: This is a refreshing room standing as your own living space where you can add functional parts, like a loom-looking station to upgrade your items, a potion station, an invisibility potion jar, places to sow and harvest plants, and even your Vivarium. In the Vivarium, you can nurture your beasts and freely customize the place by adding a cottage and other furniture reflecting who you want to be.

Graphics and sound

In-game gameplay footage revealed vibrant and gorgeous graphics with a world full of diversified environments like cities, forests, mountains, castles, dungeons, and more. Also, it features dynamic seasons and climates with a day and night system evolving throughout the game and giving each place many faces as you explore the vast world. Light and shadows are smooth, high-quality textures are widely used, and you will love all the particle effects.

The Hogwarts Legacy composer is Alexander Horowitz. Until now, the game OST has not been revealed, but the in-game tracks and various sound effects gave an even alive feeling to the battles and environments.

Duration and game modes

Hogwarts Legacy offers a single-player experience of about 25-39 hours if you focus on the main story and sides, but exploring all the rich aspects it offers can take you way over 60 hours of fun. Also, you can choose among four difficulty levels depending on the type of adventure you are looking for:

Story: The game focuses on the story with minimal gameplay.
Easy: A light gameplay challenge.
Normal: A balanced gameplay challenge.
Hard: A demanding gameplay challenge.

What do the reviews say?

Hogwarts Legacy holds a very good Metacritic score of 84/100 and is rated Very Positive by over 100.000 players on Steam.

"Hogwarts Legacy provides an expansive world of magic and mystery. With a main story that is both whimsical and gritty, and over a hundred side quests, there are countless reasons to ply out an enchanting life in the game. Occasional graphical issues are noticeable but overall negligible to the abundant sense of wonder. Hogwarts Legacy is a spellbinding and enchanting experience not to be missed." (KeenGamer)