[h1]Death by a Thousand Cuts[/h1]
and the reasons why
[h2] TL;DR [/h2]
The game starts off good and then it slowly goes downhill from there. There was excitement at the start the game but the more you play, the more little bits of bugs, performance issues, and lack of quality of life just makes it unbearable to continue playing. The story is great overall but after it ends, the gameplay is not enough to keep me in the game
[h2] Story [/h2]
From my POV, the story is not half bad. It is a linear story with clear plot, a protagonist that has special sense to learn about a great power, an antagonist that has a reason to despise the world and want to obtain said power, both clash against each other at the end to either protect or alter the world using it.
A little too cliché for the genre but they did a good work on it in my opinion
[h2]Gameplay[/h2]
The missions are alright at the beginning, but it is not entertaining enough. Most of the missions you go from point A, do things, back to point B, the end. There are puzzle in those missions that you sometimes have to do but they are quite simple. The bad thing about the puzzle sadly comes from your own character telling you what to do and how to do them. It is helpful on some cases, but when i don't want to hear my character explaining how to finish the puzzle while i want to explore the area.
The combat is quite basic and there are some combo that you can do although you basically get the hang of the spell casting as you play the game. But in my experience, the more i play, the more repetitive it becomes. The game only has 3 types of enemies (small, medium, large) and with the small and medium having 2 or 3 sub-types and the large just being a troll. There are hostile animals but there are only 3 or so creature. There are some creative ways for you to defeat [b]specific[/b] enemies by letting them do a [b]specific[/b] move then use a [b]specific[/b] spell to defeat them, but with the amount of enemies that exist in combat, most of the time you just forget to do them and just brute force you way through. There is also a stealth approach where you get to sneak up on enemies and use [i]petrificus totalus[/i] but it doesn't 1 shot enemies with a big level difference and you end up alerting every enemy around you.
The controls are fine and generic. I used mouse and keyboard to move and navigate through the menu. Movements on general is fine but i do hate when the character need to have a wide area to turn around instead of doing a "stop and turn" motion. [u]it feels like moving a car instead of a human.[/u] jumping over obstacle is also kind of janky. Sometimes you are able to vault over some obstacle but others with the similar kind of obstacle you cannot go over them. It is alright at first, but the more you move around, the more those tiny things build up and make you struggle to move around. And finally the menu navigation is [b]SLOW[/b]. There are too many animations that is nice to have at the start, but slowly becomes [b]UNBEARABLE[/b] at the end.
[h2]Open World[/h2]
I am not a big Harry Potter universe fan but i do enjoy the magic that it gives off. With that being said, the world interaction could have been better than what it is.
From what i can see, the game expands a bit more than what it was shown in the Harry Potter movie. Meaning other than Hogwarts and Hogsmead, it also shows small villages around it alongside the more wide Forbidden Forest. I will breakdown the exploration between "Hogwarts" and "Surrounding area" because Hogwarts itself is quite [i]complex[/i] compared to the open world aspect of the game
Hogwarts has many hidden secrets. it is a shame for me that those secrets shall stay hidden because of how horrible the map is shown in the menu and the game itself. I understand that the paths in old castles are made deliberately to be confusing, but it also makes the players confused when you dont have layered map and only show a 3D model of the castle from the outside in a 45 degree angle. Even though it is separated by sections by the game to make it easier to understand the split AND have fast-travel points in most area of the castle, it does not help navigating the area itself. Combined with the janky movement and restrictions, going over railings are [b]IMPOSSIBLE[/b] even though your feet are clearly over the height when you jump. [spoiler]not to mention there are locked areas that you need INCREASING LEVELS of Alohomora. Here i thought it is only 1 spell and it can basically unlock all non-protected locks[/spoiler]
Outside of hogwarts, you can see a lot of different areas such as Hogsmead, Forbidden Forest, and all the surrounding villages. Exploring these areas outside of Hogsmead are made easy using the flying broom. [spoiler]There are other methods of exploration using Hippogriffs, Thestrals, and Graphorns, but the broom is by far the best.[/spoiler] Walking is also an option if you want to take in the beauty of the world, just keep in mind that you cannot go over plants in someone's garden. Maybe because the height of the hitboxes are not reflecting the objects but it still irks me so.
Puzzles also exist outside of missions objectives in the form of aligning constellations with a telescope, Merlin Trials, or opening doors to caves. Outside of the Telescope and Cave doors puzzles, which are simple enough, Merlin Trials gives you an array of puzzles that requires creative thinking on how to finish them. This is the more fun puzzle in the game and the character doesn't talk about how to finish them at all. I say it is fun, but there are only 9 versions of the trials while there are 95 in total. so after 20 puzzles or so, you would already get the gist of it and complete it with ease. But the enjoyment of the trials also comes with a horrible downside of [b]UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENE[/b]. When you finish the trial, there is a cutscene that shows a gazebo being made showing you have finish the trial. The game shows this EVERY TIME you finish it, and it takes quite a bit of time for the cutscene to stop after the gazebo has been made. Like i said on most of this review, this is welcoming at first but it gets annoying the more you see it.
[h2]Graphic/Performance[/h2]
Horrendous. The end.
To be fair, most of the time it runs well on my laptop. the specs are attached below. But i would assume it would run horribly with the spec lower than that. It does lag a bit at the beginning of the game when the game is trying to load the world in. It also most of the time freezes when I cast a spell after a certain time when the game has been opened. Sadly the game also, on some occasion when i explore a cave, [b]BLINDS ME WITH THE RAY OF GOD[/b]. Perhaps there are some texture glitches that happens in the game but i never try to dive deep into it. Also when i try to close the game, the game doesn't actually close and instead it keeps running in the background taking 2000 MB of memory and i had to force close it using task manager because Steam library was too slow to open because the game takes a chunk of my memory to run in the background.
[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
The story of the game helps me able to finish the game. but the exploration part of the game is just too bad to recommend. in conclusion:
[h3]Pros[/h3]
[list]
[*]Good story
[*]Drip-feed contents to keep you in the game
[*]Great world implementation to the HP universe
[*]Fun puzzle to an degree
[/list]
[h3]Cons[/h3]
[list]
[*]Dialogue are like a long winding stairs the more you play
[*]Janky and slow movements
[*][b]SLOW[/b] menu navigations
[*]Character hand-holding you to finish puzzles by constantly talking
[*]Horrible Map representation on Hogwarts
[*]Unskippable cutscene on Merlin Trials (there are 95 of them, so 95 the "brief" cutscenes)
[*]Terrible Performance on starting the game
[*]Need to force close the game through task manager after closing the game itself
[/list]
