Hogwarts Legacy - Review After 100%

all right [Music] what's going on everybody mortum here this time bringing you my review after 100 for Hogwarts Legacy the open world RPG where we take on the role of a student at Hogwarts and of course the Harry Potter franchise that said but this game being very near to release I'm going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible but there might be some contextual stuff in here and I will be talking a little bit about the story set up during one part of the video as well so make sure to use those time stamps to jump around a bit though to get my usual stuff out of the way I review games after 100 all the time to set me apart from other reviewers on the platform and while this does include the achievements it also includes a lot more than that though in this particular case the achievement list for this game is very thorough but if you're curious about everything I go over there is a video Linked In the description that talks about it and if you're not subscribed and go to my channel it's also the first video that you will see furthermore my steam profile is public and Linked In the description below and yes I am playing this on PC now at the high level this being an open world RPG set in a very specific universe that comes with a decent amount of expectations of how things flow and surprisingly I think it just about nailed it in every way while in some ways the game is a somewhat traditional open world AAA RPG which we'll talk about of course all of it is done to a pretty high standard outside of a few minor problems that we'll discuss but by and large the game definitely captures the magic of the universe and pays close attention to the details but from there let's actually start diving into the specifics a little bit first up we have the difficulty of the game there are four options story to hard and these do change quite a few things as you might imagine story is very easy enemies will do very little damage to you and things like blocking and countering are given very prominent problems that tell you exactly what button to hit things like that and then as you go up the list from there the game holds your hands a little less there are still visual cues as to when to block encounter but it's more like color-coded stuff as opposed to telling you what actual button to press you take more damage though in general it looks like the health of enemies Remains the Same the best that I could tell but what does change is that enemies become more aggressive with you as the game ramps up in difficulty as well and then from there just a quick note about character creation by and large you can create whatever character you want picking things like body types your voice hairstyles it's all pretty much cosmetic and what you would expect from a game like this as a lot of the development actually happens in game so character creation is a cosmetic choice and it can be changed later in game via one particular vendor so you're not stuck with your choices here by any means and that brings us to the story setup reminder some minor spoilers here just kind of the nature of it skip ahead a little bit if you don't want to hear it but the story of Hogwarts Legacy sees us joining the school of Hogwarts as a fifth year student which is highly unusual and the game itself is set in the late 1800s so quite a bit before the books take place however on our way to the school we are attacked and thanks to some magic teleported away after a very intense cut scene this sets up the plot which revolves around you being able to see traces of ancient magic and along the way you'll uncover what this means what it can do how it's going to Aid your own Journey as you learn to be a full-fledged Wizard and overall I would tell you that the story is pretty good one thing that I enjoyed about it quite a bit is that the pacing and sort of like general plot setup actually kind of mirrors what we tended to see in the books with it taking place over the course of the school year which means environments and things change as the time passes into different seasons fall and winter and it culminates in a big action sequence as you might imagine but overall it was pretty good it had some moments that were genuinely really great and when you combine that with the elements of choice to the game such as picking your house as well as customizing your wand which is a big thing from the franchise itself it again really manages to capture the magic of the universe however a problem that this does run into throughout much of the title is that the game gives you a lot of options but these options don't really tend to have any consequences for instance we get to go to the Sorting ceremony which lets you potentially pick a house you can answer a couple questions and get given a house choice but you can choose as well and there are some minor differences between the houses but it's mostly cosmetic it's going to change where your sort of room is in the castle itself which will give you different dialogues with different characters early on and then each house gets one unique Quest but beyond that there really isn't much in the way of consequence realistically your house choice is the biggest choice in terms of actual effects on the rest of the game but nonetheless this does provide you the opportunity to role play the game the way in which you would like though personally I would have preferred to see a few variations or consequence apart from what we do see for instance you take something like getting to pick out and customize your own wand which is a very cool key moment from the franchise But ultimately a wand is a wand you're using magic before you get it it works much the same way after you get it and it's just there to sort of line the game up with how it's supposed to work in the universe so while this Choice doesn't really have any consequences outside of the visual appearance of your wand it does nonetheless allow you to role play that moment which again is just something that we see repeat over and over throughout much of the game itself now that said taking my time leisurely with the main story doing Quest as they popped up but certainly not everything it took me about 25 hours to finish the story and then I got about another 25 going around the rest of the open world wrapping up objectives Collectibles all that stuff so the game isn't terribly long but it's certainly got some length and some optional objectives and if you want to play through the game multiple times there is plenty there to enjoy at least as far as time goes but all of that brings us to our progression systems now a thing this game does really well is that it has multiple sort of interlaced systems that kind of require you to progress here and there such as the main story requiring either levels on your character part or specific spells to have been learned in order to progress so we're going to break down some of the these but just know that a lot of these are sort of interconnected As you move through the story but to begin with and probably most importantly throughout the title we can level up to a maximum of level 40. however your experience is limited by challenges challenges represent basically every facet of the game in some way or another but challenges are how you get experience completing the challenges both gives you experience as well as typically cosmetic rewards but once you're done with a specific challenge that thing will not give you experience anymore which sort of incentivizes branching out and interfacing with different aspects of the game but one thing I will say here is that the experience is very front loaded you'll get to like level 25 to 30 very very quickly however 30 to 40 takes a much longer time because there's less experience to get and you've likely done a lot of the easy stuff already just by playing through the game and speaking of playing through the game you'll likely want to advance the story up to the point at which you unlock talents which are available starting at level five and that's important because talents are huge Buffs to your spells starting at level five you'll get a talent point every level thereafter and you can spin these on various augments to various abilities and you can even pursue the dark arts which allows you to curse enemies dealing extra damage this will turn regular simple spells into aoes you can even focus on stealth which allows you to be ridiculously overpowered especially out in the open world where you can make the most use of it and I will say a lot of my early enjoyment of the game especially in regards to the combat came down to not having the talents when having them would have been more fun and it was afterwards but speaking of spells and augmenting them we learn spells through a variety of means now you have to remember that we are a fifth year student despite just starting at Hogwarts so we know very little in the way of spells and we need to get caught up and learn them some spells you'll learn through the main story but other spells require you to complete specific side quests or extra assignments from your teachers which usually involve completing a variety of objectives that are related to What that particular professor teaches is and then they will teach you an extra spell and more often than not spells usually have both a combat and non-combat purpose some spells are specifically non-combat such as revelio revealing the world around you and leading you to various objectives that kind of thing but other spells will allow you to both manipulate objects or enemies mid-combat so it's important to learn all of them then we have the room of requirement which is the Crux of many other systems as well a little bit into the game will get access to the room of requirement which is essentially our base of operations at the school that we can customize using some conjuration spells to our hearts content here we can Brew our own potions take care of beasts that we can capture in the open world and later we can even upgrade our gear and things like that potions require you to both have the recipe for the potion as well as the various ingredients required to brew it which you can also grow in the room of requirement which involves getting seeds and planting them in appropriately sized containers then we have our beasts a little ways into the game we can start taking care of B beasts by capturing them and then releasing them in our room of requirements of avariums and if you take care of them they can provide you materials that you can then upgrade your gear with which of course brings us to gear gear is okay it feels a little tacked on compared to everything else to be honest with you you have a variety of slots some of which are customization options such as you can equip a wand handle to make your wand look more unique and then it's your standard like glasses hat robe gloves that kind of thing and at any time you can alter the appearance of this to any other you've already collected so visually you can make this whatever you want provided you've earned it but beyond that gear and you have three slots Health offense and defense realistically with the gear you're just going to put on the best stuff you can find but if you are taking care of Beast you can upgrade this once you get the room of requirement to that point which will give you increases in specific stats on gear which can make it go a little farther and then you can also start applying traits traits are more substantial in the sense that they all alter your spells or effects in some way the one minor problem I did run into this relatively simple system is that you're constantly changing out your gear for better stats and the problem with this is that that will actually reset your transmog for that item so I found myself constantly having to adjust that and I really would have liked to have seen some sort of outfit system which would have made managing this a little bit easier but again pretty minor problem but all of those systems out of the way believe it or not there are still several minor systems that I haven't even mentioned such as the Merlin trials these will increase your inventory sizes as you start off with a pretty restricted inventory but once you start completing Merlin trials which are just little tasks out in the open world this will increase the size of your inventory which gives you a nice little bit of progression you also get access to a flying broom of course which helps with traversing the open world a great deal and there is a side quest to increase both the speed and handling of this as well on top of a couple of other minor forms of progression as well but all of that finally brings us to the combat section now I will tell you for me the combat started off a bit slow it took about eight to ten hours to get interesting but once it got there it got really really good and again a little bit of this is probably my own fault from taking so long to get to the talents because without the talents and changing up how I was doing things with various spells it felt very hack and slash but once I sort of broke through that barrier I started having a really fun time once I started learning all of these different spells now one of your talents will give you access to different spell sets to allow you to sort of equip at any given time up to 16 spells meaning that you can sort of quickly switch and chain things together which gets really fun when you start also countering what the enemy is doing by either blocking the things you can block and then counter-attacking or Dodge rolling out of the way only to set up other attacks but something else that I noticed that I thought was really cool was that certain spells well maybe useless on an enemy in normal circumstances actually have a very specific effect after the enemy does something for instance a troll can do this big overhead slam M at which point you can use the spell flippendo to slam its own mace back into its face which is only available right after the troll makes that attack because otherwise it won't actually do anything and there's a variety of things like that across different enemy types that I thought was really fun to play with and the farther along you get the better it gets because towards the end of the game they're not afraid of just letting you be overpowered you can learn the unforgivable curses in this game which are three extremely strong spells that are also kind of considered terrible to do to someone such as mind controlling them killing them outright or essentially torturing them you don't have to learn these spells they don't even count against the achievement for learning all the Spells but they're very powerful especially the killing curse as this will allow you to instantly kill enemies even bosses there are a couple of enemies that aren't affected by this because they're not alive in the typical sense but it's very strong in the game will let you do it but of course there's a sizable cooldown on that spell but if you invest talents in the dark arts you can actually curse various enemies and then use the killing curse which will kill every enemy you have cursed allowing you to set up an instant kill on like half a dozen enemies but let's assume you want to role play a good wizard who isn't going around learning unforgivable curses you still have options late into the game you'll learn a Transfiguration spell which combined with a talent will turn an enemy into an explosive Barrel that you can then blow up to kill surrounding enemies as well so even there you have a similar option that allows you to be overpowered and when you combine all those systems it got really fun even though it started kind of slow for me but believe it or not we're still not done with combat as there's a variety of consumables that you can use in combat as well such as various potions that will increase your damage defense there's an AOE one that will conjure a storm around you you can even use various plants in combat such as a cabbage that will Chomp enemies a venomous plant that will shoot poison at them a mandrake which will stun them various things like that and then I haven't even touched the stealth system the game will allow you to play as a stealth character in most situations not all at which point you can run up behind enemies and essentially stealth kill them though this does do a set amount of damage so it won't always kill everything which is probably something to keep in mind but this can be devastating if you use it properly and overall combat became really fun for me I actually wound up enjoying it a lot despite the sort of Slow Burn to the start and all of that brings us to the world section if there's anything this game does exceptionally well despite doing just about everything above average the world is really top-notch they did a great job of making this feel like the Harry Potter franchise they were very true to the source material I've personally read all the books but haven't watched all the movies and the little details of the game were there such as the scene where our character sees someone die and suddenly thresh trolls become visible which is how that works in the lore of the series which is just a nice little touch which is then repeated throughout the game with a variety of different things they were very true to the source material and I really appreciated it and then we have the details of the world that's self now a lot of the content is centered around the castle and hogsmeade hogsmeat is a big town nearby the rest of the open world known as the highlands is slightly less detailed and is where the game feels like a more traditional open world but Hogwarts and hogsmead are very very content dense and the details there are really spectacular so in that way if you're a big fan of the franchise that you'll likely enjoy this because they did such a good job with that attention to detail another cool element is that time is passing as I mentioned earlier throughout the game as the story progresses the seasons will shift to fall and then winter and then this affects the entire game World which is visible along with things inside the castle such as decorating for Christmas and Halloween that kind of thing I do think this sort of brushes up against the highlands area of the game which feels much more like a traditional AAA open world it's very much so go here see this thing complete the objective move on that kind of stuff and while the rest of the world does have things to explore little Easter eggs to find to treasure vaults to loot dungeons to explore that part of the game is where they very much so stuck to the formula so to speak but nonetheless even here we do see a lot of things handled really really well such as how the game approaches to giving you the unforgivable curses that entire quest line is really fantastic but more than anything the world feels alive and they really nailed the approach that said we do see a couple of things missing like there is no quidditch which they tell you right at the beginning of the game which let's be real will likely be a DLC at some point but regardless there's a ton to do and see here and it's easy to get lost in the world itself at least up until you start only having Collectibles left to grind which is when I personally really started to notice the AAA formula here all of that brings us to the tech technical side of things now as I mentioned at the beginning I played this on PC personally I had very minimal issues a couple of minor things and honestly most of it happened while I was actually recording the game would run well I'd turn on the recording software and I guess the extra bump on the hardware for my computer was enough to start having more issues but generally speaking the game ran very well I encountered very few issues though I have seen reports of people having more substantial issues so if you're playing this on PC you might want to investigate your own specs versus the requirements for the game before you pull the trigger on that then we have the accessibility options one of the very first things this game does is bring up a whole Suite of accessibility options that will give you things such as text-to-speech and a variety of other helpful features that will help you get into the game which I thought was a great touch I always loved seeing a host of accessibility options but probably my favorite thing here is that they led the game with this this is like the first thing you'll see but beyond that my personal biggest issue was that sometimes the game aim would hang in the more dense areas or when I was flying over the world I'd get some minor Hedges but it was very minimal and didn't really detract from The Experience too much at least for me though certainly worth noting for a review beyond that last thing for the technical side I do wish they had changed the PC controls a little bit not so much the literal controls but how you slot and equip spells the spell set system for PC is a little bit clunky and we obviously know this is because of how it works on console and each spell set being assigned four spells that you can then cycle through but on PC the way this is implemented is a little bit strange and something like a hot bar or something that unlocked more slots as you picked up the talents for the spell sets would have felt better but again relatively minor problem all of that though brings us to our steam deck compatibility and well before release actually the game was rated verified on Steam deck and I can confirm that it runs pretty well there not perfectly I think when you're flying very quickly over the open world you might notice some issues but beyond that we've got our Cloud saves we've got our controller support obviously so it feels pretty good to play there and while it obviously doesn't look as sharp as say PC or console can it nonetheless does look pretty good it plays remarkably smooth smoother than I thought it was going to even with the verified rating to be honest with you but I can definitely confirm that it does play well on the steam deck and this does seem like a game that would be pretty great for that Medium but all of that finally brings us to our positives and negatives now on the positive side of things they nailed the world they really did I'm actually more Blown Away by how faithful they were to the franchise in terms of going to class the way the story sort of mimics what we saw in the books in terms of how the plot progresses and everything it was really well done then we have all the various options such as how you go about picking your house how that changes dialogue The Unique Quest and all of this stuff allows you to role play even if there really isn't much in the way of consequences for it and then of course we have the combat itself and all of the approaches there it feels really good to play especially once you get talents and you know get going a bit more a lot of that combat and the environmental puzzles using your spells that then have uses in combat as well just feels really great but nonetheless the game is not perfect just like any other game it does have a few negatives but they are mostly relatively minor such as again the slight PC performance hitches where like loading screens will kind of give you a spiral when you're trying to walk through a door a little bit of stuttering here and there but nothing over the top but I would say my personal biggest negative for this game is that there just really isn't any consequences for most stuff most everything is going to play out how it plays out and for a game that lets you do sort of dark wizard things and just lets you kill people all over the countryside with the killing curse I think they could have at least implemented something like detention you know but nonetheless in spite of that lack of consequence it's still a really fun game to play which of course brings us to our conclusion the regular game is sixty dollars there's a deluxe edition available for 70 at least here in the US obviously your Regional pricing will vary and for that price what you're getting is a mostly great experience while I personally would have preferred that they sort of rpged it up a little more made the Stat system more interesting introduced some more consequences that kind of thing I think it's pretty easy to overlook things like that with how very much so above average they did everything else and in the case of the world and setting it was exceptional and even within the traditional open world that they managed to perform above average in Hogwarts and hogsmeade feel really really well done so there are some minor issues there are parts of the game where I wish they would have pushed the envelope a little more but by far and away it's a great game which makes it easy to recommend to people at least based on the merits of what it has to offer as a game so with all of that said I certainly hope you enjoyed this review if you did like comment subscribe all that YouTube jazz we are growing every day I couldn't be here without you guys watching these videos and these reviews so truly thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have and amazing day [Music]

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 517,469

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, hogwarts, hogwarts legacy, hogwarts legacy gameplay, hogwarts legacy review, hogwarts legacy character creation, hogwarts legacy walkthrough, hogwarts legacy pc, hogwarts legacy wand customization, hogwarts legacy combat, hogwarts legacy combat gameplay, hogwarts legacy unforgivable curses, hogwarts legacy avada kedavra, hogwarts legacy deluxe edition, mortismal gaming hogwarts legacy, hogwarts legacy review after 100%

Id: NyglDNgKYDc

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023