Hogwarts Legacy review: Is the new Harry Potter game worth playing?

radiotimes.com:

The Hogwarts Legacy release date is beginning its gradual rollout this week, but is this new Harry Potter game worth playing? That was the primary question on our mind as we downloaded an early access review copy of the Deluxe Edition on PS5.

Before we get started with our Hogwarts Legacy review, it's worth stressing that this is in fact a prequel to all the Harry Potter books and films — set as it is in the 1800s, the Hogwarts Legacy story even predates the Fantastic Beasts movies.

You play as a character of your own creation (you can pick their name, their skin tone, their body type, their voice and a whole lot more), who is joining Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as a fifth year student. Although this set-up is a clear departure from Harry's journey in the original stories, the developers at Avalanche Software clearly have no qualms with leaning hard on your nostalgia.

For example, the first scene of the game sees a kindly wizard visiting an otherwise ordinary muggle street. The echoes of Dumbledore on Privet Drive are clear, and you'll spot other such parallels at various points throughout your adventure. Once your character has been picked up, thankfully enough (from our point of view), things do start to deviate in major ways.

What immediately follows is an eye-opening visual spectacular, evidence that publishers Warner Bros Games have spared no expense to bring the Wizarding World to life like we've never seen before in a video game. Here be dragons, here be beautiful landscapes, and here be a mysterious new story that digs into hitherto unseen areas of the magical sandbox that JK Rowling created.

It's worth noting, though, that Rowling has not been overtly involved in making Hogwarts Legacy, and the