Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions Review

ign.com:

Let’s be honest: quidditch is not a good sport – or at least it’s not one that was ever designed to actually be played. Its role in the Harry Potter series was just to show off how special Harry is, to the point where you might as well call it “Harry Potter the Seeker and Some Other People on Broomsticks, I Guess.” So the team at developer Unbroken Studios had their work cut out for them with Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, having to both honor the source material while also adapting quidditch into a real game. Surprisingly, they’ve done a pretty good job at that, with moment-to-moment action on the quidditch pitch that’s actually pretty great. But once you land between matches, Quidditch Champions doesn’t have much off the pitch to keep you coming back.

On the surface, the quidditch in Quidditch Champions is just like the stuff in the books and films. There are still four positions: Chasers grab the Quaffle and shoot it at the opposing team’s goals, scoring ten points if they manage to get it in; Keepers defend those goals; Beaters launch Bludgers to satisfyingly stun members of the opposing team, and when that fails they can whack them with their bats directly; and Seekers chases the Golden Snitch, a small, hard-to-catch winged ball worth a lot of points. But Unbroken has introduced a few rule changes that make things work better – most notably among them, the Seeker is no longer the only one of these positions that ultimately matters.

Matches end either when one team scores 100 points or a time limit is reached, and they don’t just stop the moment someone catches the Snitch. Speaking of, the Snitch itself is only worth a much more reasonable 30 points instead of 150, and it can appear multiple times (usually about twice) per game. That smartly makes the times you can switch to Seeker a fun little (optional) bonus during a match rather than the do-or-die moment of the entire thing. There’s also only one Beater per team, not two, which makes a lot sense given how