The newly-released Hogwarts Legacy brings the magical universe of the Harry Potter franchise into an open-world single-player action RPG filled with challenges and collectibles that are perfect for completionists. Although the game has received heavy backlash due to the franchise creator's controversial political statements, Hogwarts Legacy has been released to overall praise from critics and fans. The detailed school of Hogwarts and its surrounding areas are brimming with content, making it easy to get lost for hours exploring the world, doing quests, completing challenges, discovering secret areas, or searching for collectibles.
As players will quickly become aware, much of Hogwarts Legacy’s gameplay revolves around exploring a new area, using Revelio (a revealing charm that highlights chests, enemies, and interactable items), and completing puzzles or quests to unlock a new spell, cosmetic, or currency. There are hundreds of items and collectibles discovered through the use of this spell, so most players will be trained early on to use Revelio as often as possible. With constant reminders of undiscovered locations, nearby collectibles, and numerous secrets hidden throughout its large world, Hogwarts Legacy tempts players with discovery around every corner.
Hogwarts Legacy's Dense Open World Invites Exploration
After a brief opening sequence, players are brought to Hogwarts Castle as new fifth-year students, where they are sorted into a house and soon set free to explore Hogwarts to their heart’s content. If players were to rush through Hogwarts Legacy’s story and only complete the main quests, they’ll find themselves outside the castle’s walls within no time. However, the sheer number of collectibles and secrets within the castle alone makes it easy to spend several hours within its halls before venturing out to explore the surrounding world.
The world of Hogwarts Legacy is large and beautifully detailed with many iconic locations that Harry Potter fans will recognize. While the size of its map doesn’t quite stack up to other open-world RPGs like Elden Ring or Fallout 76, the world is filled with surprises, and exploration is almost always rewarded. Because most challenges are completed by discovering collectibles and partaking in combat, exploration becomes the focus early on for many players looking to travel to every location, earn every upgrade, unlock every cosmetic, and discover every hidden secret.
Sometimes even without realizing it, players will regularly complete challenges that earn them cosmetics, crafting recipes, and inventory expansions. Though there are five categories for challenges, exploration lies at the heart of each category, as they are almost all dependent on players exploring the world. The five challenge categories include Combat, Quests, Exploration, Field Guide Pages, and Room of Requirement, and a majority of the rewards are cosmetics. For diehard Harry Potter fans, Hogwarts Legacy’s quests and cosmetics are sure to help fulfill their Hogwarts student fantasies.
Many modern open-world RPGs suffer from throwing too much at players, giving dozens of quests and making countless locations visible on the map at once. Though it suffers from this as well, Hogwarts Legacy features a generous fast travel system and flying mounts that can make exploration both thrilling and entertaining. One redeeming quality of games like Anthem or Forspoken is their movement mechanics, which points to the significance of not just making a large world but making it fun to explore. Hogwarts Legacy’s world is large, and its gameplay systems are solid, so being able to fly around adds a bit of fun to simple exploration.
Avalanche Software’s Hogwarts Legacy may not be the biggest or most technologically advanced open-world RPG of all time, but it excels in what it sets out to accomplish. It features an interesting cast of characters, impressive accuracy to the source material, and a large world to explore with hundreds of people, places, secrets, creatures, and items to discover. Gamers that pride themselves on searching every corner of a game world to uncover every detail are sure to find plenty to keep them busy in Hogwarts Legacy.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC. PS4, Xbox One, and Switch versions are currently in development.
