This game is excellent for the $5 I paid for it. I would not be pleased if I had paid more.
The graphics are amazing and the world is beautiful. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the castle and surrounding area, and later flying around on my broom in the open world. It's borderline photorealistic, and I was blown away by how nice everything looked. Sebastian was a cool character and I wish we got more of him.
Here unfortunately, my praise ends. I am not a Harry Potter fan (I read the books as a teenager and have half-watched most of the films) but I came to this game ready for a good experience.
The story sucks. It's so uninspired. Evil goblin is evil, and superpowered chosen one (that's you!) has to stop him. Because you're so special, you get to start at Hogwarts as a fifth-year, which is unheard of! Except not really, you'll see other students who started as fifth-years in flashback. A major part of the game is conversation. Invariably one-on-one and linear, maybe you can ask a few side questions, but you won't influence the character or the conversation (with the exception of Sebastian, who is the only character in the entire game with a motivation that isn't "help the player character no matter what"). Every professor feels like a copy of every other professor, they all talk the same and say the same thing. You, the player character, are super special and powerful and all the professors are bending over backward to help you. And they'll all tell you! One at a time, every single professor pulls you aside and tells you how wonderful you are. It's exhausting. Professor Fig, the character's mentor, is a tool. The headmaster is a stuck-up taskmaster that everyone barely tolerates.
The pace at which things are unlocked in this game is maddening. It drip-feeds you spells and unlocks over the course of many hours. You'll go several quests at a time without an unlock, then the game will give you the Room of Requirement, or you'll unlock Beasts (livestock) after hours of exploring. Most puzzles you find in the world are not solvable until you have some distant unlock. You almost might as well not even explore until you've completed the story.
Combat is boring. Almost any enemy can be stunlocked, even overleveled enemies. Then it's just spam-clicking to win. I found it frustrating that spells are assigned into "trays" of four, each of which must be unlocked one at a time. It is cumbersome to switch on the fly between these trays rather than just having a larger hotbar. There are enough combat-oriented spells that this becomes a problem.
Everything that's dumb about the Harry Potter world is dumb in this game too. Nothing really changes and you're not supposed to ask too many questions. It's... flat. What you see is what you get, there's not much more to it. And when there's so little to what you can see, well, the price ought to be pretty little too. My point is that if the game is going to be as story-driven as it seems to want to be, it needs a better story to tell, and it needs to do a better job of telling it. It was all just so boring! Good graphics and a fun time exploring for a few hours was worth $5 to me, but this isn't a game I'm going to remember or play again.
