Intro: Welcome to my very first video game review. (Yay!) I like to play video games from time to time it’s a fun way to get your mind off the real world & to help get immersed into the world and the setting and characters. That’s why I love video games. Nowadays some video games feel like you’re watching an epic movie but you’re playing the lead character. If you want this same experience the last place to start is on your phone because they’re mostly Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery. Let me explain.
The Premise: So I started playing this Harry Potter type of adventure game on my iPad like a month ago then came back to it to review on it. It took about 2 to 3 weeks to finish the first year & I’ve had an appalling time. So this game is free in on your app store or android store to play. (So you have a good idea what you’re going to get.) You play as a Harry Potter type boy or girl & you’ve been accepted into Hogwarts. You to go to Diagon Alley to buy your school books & wand then you can choose your house. Once you are settled in you can meet your favorite characters & new characters while going on an exciting adventure. It sounds awesome doesn’t it? (But trust me it ain’t)
This game was made by Warner Bros Interactive & they help made the Lego games, the Arkham games & Shadow of War with micro-transaction Orcs. (They actually removed that once the money went dry) Jam City made a bunch of Candy Crush inspired games because who hasn’t and a bunch of other mobile freemium garbage. So to those who thought they were going to get a great Harry Potter RPG well that game wouldn’t cost 0 dollars.
The Gameplay: So let’s start at the beginning you start with creating you. You can be a boy or girl protagonist, you can change your color skin, change your hair, mess with your face, looking at all the cool stuff stuck behind a level system with absurd prices, give yourself a generic or funny name & then we have you. You’re immediately thrown into Diagon Alley where you meet the Ron Wesley type character who you’re forced to be best friends with & you can either be super nice, be encouraging, be a know it all & sometimes be a horrible person. But don’t worry you’re always the perfect student. Then you go through a boring tutorial system that rushes you into the pay walls… I mean story.
The gameplay involves tapping on meters & tapping on meters & you can earn experience points for the different emotion types. Jerk, Charity & Know It All. You also have three currency’s the most important one is your Energy Meter (This is the one you’ll hate the most), Gold Coins aka the useless currency you spend on clothes & hair that’ll never use & Gems aka the real currency this one you use to speed things up, bring back your energy & buy stuff you actually want. Once you’re at Hogwarts you put on The Sorting Hat & you can choose your house. (What’s the point of the hat?) If you know the books & movies you should be familiar with all the houses.
Then we are introduced to The Draco Malfoy type character who isn’t rich & is a girl. Your character wants to prove she’s a bad influence on everyone so our hero gets trapped with a big plant thing & has 8 hours to escape the room with 5 stars required to continue & this is where the pay walls come in. As you watch your character being strangled to death because you are out of energy & it takes 4 minutes to get one ball of energy out of 25. Your child has two options:
- Go & do something else for a couple of hours or so until your bar feels up
- Get your parents to drop in some dough so you can keep playing right away.
And that’s Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery in a nutshell everyone.
The Other Stuff You Can Do: Right after choosing a house it’s time for class first years have Charms with a cartoonish looking Professor Flitwick, Potions with a Squidward sounding Professor Snape & Flying lessons with a boobless Madam Hooch & they’re okay at first but you’ll grow to hate them as the game goes along. These lessons involve doing the same stuff for every lesson with no alterations just tap on bars until you get 5 stars then play the same level again to get more stars & to unlock a new ability. The main quests & side quests are the same except once you’ve completed a quest you have to wait for 2 to 8 hours to continue the game or again just cough up some dough.
There’s also a mini game involving some marbles & eating never-ending sandwiches where you just say nice things to your friends to win stuff. This doesn’t change your relationship with them at all. Then there is dueling (For First Years) where you beat up your fellow students in a rock, paper, scissors system to show them whose boss. I guess these mini games are good change from on tapping meters! You can explore the bland castle but you can’t go too far because this is a freemium game & it’s an eighth-finished. As you see the same animations in the same classes, the textures & backgrounds look very unfinished especially where the Flying lessons are. You can notice somethings never look right. Like in the great hall where The Slytherin kids always look like their eating red paint. There are bugs & glitches because we got get it out as soon as possible. The highlight of the Charms class for me is when my character always punches through the girl standing next to him when he celebrates. (Yes it is worth celebrating)
Harry Potter Hogwarts School of Grinding & Gambling: How I like to play games is I always expect to play a couple of hours of it at a time & then come later to play more of it. I love playing in small doses to get more out of the game. Why this game fails is simply by design. There is no way you can play up to 5 minutes or 3 or maybe even 1 minute without running out of energy or being cornered by the pay walls to stop playing. I had to keep motivating myself to keep this game, I had to stop playing other games, watching movies & TV Shows that I would rather put my time into just so I can get all 5 stars to continue on because if you don’t you all 5 stars then you have to start all over again. This game fails is because it’s a casino for kids. You drop in 20 bucks & you come out with nothing & you feel sad and miserable because you just wasted a small chunk of life.
This game actually made me suffer to keep playing. I only played to the end of the first year of this game & the ending made me feel more miserable. I was hoping I would get some sort of conclusion so all my time put in to it was worth it, but no it ended with ‘Great, you made it to the end of the first year. Good for you. Now keep playing to see what happens next’ Warner Bros. Good luck trying to convince to me to keep playing this garbage.
Conclusion: It’s a cash grab made by corporate heartless business men who wanted to make a quick buck on a well-beloved franchise. It’s a scam disguised as a game. It’s not even worth a rating because it’s not finished a game & I refuse to keep playing. To those who have kids if you want a good Harry Potter game then just play the Lego Harry Potter games. There the best games ever & they are made by the same people but there more of a game than this.
So those are my thoughts on Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery if you agree or disagree please let me know in the comments. If you have any games you want me to check out then please let me know.
Thanks for reading this review and I’ll see you again in the next review.
