I am not a HP fan but I was pretty excited about this game. It's the first major non-movie-tie-in game in a setting that is, admittedly, is a pretty original one. No matter what you think of Wizarding Worlds or whatever it's called, you can't deny that the setting itself is pretty unique and unlike anything else among the major IPs nowadays.

And on this, the game delivers. The world is vibrant and interesting, the atmosphere is great, the architecture is beautiful and it's all filled with a lot of small details that make it really a blast to explore. At least for the first 5-8 hours of gameplay.

However, personally, I quickly lost interest in the game because it gets bogged down by a lot of... inconsistencies and problems.

First, about what I call “inconsistencies”.

Don’t be fooled by the marketing campaign. The game DOES NOT deliver on its promise of making you feel like a Hogwarts student. As a matter of fact, the game has pretty much nothing to do with the magic academy student-like experience. The game tries to pretend that this is what it is about at first, but you will quickly realize that it’s just a poorly chosen “aesthetic” that is dissonant with everything else in the game and, for this reason, does not work at all.

The game’s story is completely inconsistent with what you’re doing and how it forces you to behave in it.

The best example to illustrate my point would be a particular side quest I found in Hogsmead about 7 hours into the game.

An adult woman, about in her 30s-to-40s from the looks of it, is asking the main character to “follow the butterflies” into the Forbidden Forest, because she’s interested where they lead and is herself scared of going into the Forest because… of her Hogwarts background. The teachers told her that Forbidden Forest is off limits to students because there is a lot of dangerous stuff there that will get her killed as students are not yet prepared to deal with it.

Let me emphasize. A grown woman who studied at Hogwarts and knows for a fact that entering the forest is forbidden to students and is scared to go there because she doesn’t want to get killed by dangerous stuff out there… asks a Hogwarts student to go into Forbidden Forest. Not because she’s desperate, not because this is a matter of life and death to her… but because she is curious where the butterflies fly off to. Unbelievable.

She’s not the only one who will ask the main character, a Hogwarts student, to do stuff that is in direct violation of Hogwarts rules in a way that doesn’t even imply that it would be breaking the rules. Quests like that are everywhere in the game.
The characters will ask you, a Hogwarts student, to kill deadly Acromatulas, collect stuff in the Forbidden Forest or take on a camp full of dark wizards without even remembering that they are talking to a student. Even teachers will do that. But then when we need to go to the restricted section of the Library, suddenly the rules are in place again and you have to sneak around the librarian lest she tells on you to the headmaster.

I just returned from butchering an entire village worth of dark wizards and I’m being threatened to be told on to the headmaster?

This is the core of the problem, I believe. The gameplay systems are centered around chopping up powerful dark wizards for a regular Saturday morning exercise, but the game never acknowledges it is something a student should neither be capable of nor even attempt to do.
So it doesn’t let me feel like a student, because I’m clearly more powerful and involved in dangerous stuff than a student should be, but it also doesn’t make me feel like a powerful wizard because Mrs. Scribner threatens to tell on me to the headmaster and I am supposed to take it as a serious consequence for my character.

What am I supposed to feel while playing Hogwarts Legacy, then? I have no idea. So I just stopped caring.

The game would be much better off if you played as an adult wizard instead of a student. But no, of course, the marketing team needs to make false promises about how this game will let you experience the joys of being a magic academy student. This is what the “Wizarding World” is about, right? This way we’ll be able to attract the core fanbase without actually making the game for them!

The worst part about this is that they were right - just look at the number of positive reviews and concurrent players. They’ve played us for absolute fools!

Now onto the “problems”.

Many people have already stated them in other reviews. Technical issues on PC (although I, personally, don’t have many issues. The game plays at stable 60 fps for me on medium settings. On a laptop. But I digress), collection quests being the main thing you will do in the game, lack of expected features like Quidditch and so on. I don’t believe these are really all that important or take away from the game as much as the other problems I mentioned, so I won’t focus on all that.

My biggest gripe with the game aside from what I already stated above is its UI/UX and Inventory systems. They are a disaster.

You’re being littered with pointless clothing items that don't have any differences between them aside from one stat number. And you get a new, slightly better item like every five minutes. So you’re forced to open inventory (which is not instant, you have to wait until the effects animation plays out) to change the item to get that 2 extra defense. Every five minutes.
The “l(fā)ayer” setting that changes the items' looks only applies per item instead of overall. So you have to manually change the looks for every item you equip every time. Every five minutes.
That is unless you prefer looking like a clown - in googly eyes glasses, a pointy hat, and a colorful star-riddled merlin-ish cloak.

If you want to craft a potion, which you can only do in a specific location, you have to wait 15-to-90 seconds for the potion to finish cooking. There’s no way to make it brew faster. There’s no mini-game or anything. Just waiting.
Oh, and you also can’t put several potions in a queue either. So you can’t dump ingredients for 10 potions at once and go explore to pick up all of them later. No, you have to craft one potion at a time and wait 15-to-90 seconds for it to finish so that you can brew another one. What a waste of time.

One special type of cancer that is present in this game is the locking of quick bars behind the talent tree. You get more spells than your quick bar allows you to have already at 2-3 hours into the game, but the ability to unlock talents (and with them a second quick bar) only becomes available after 8-10 hours. And you can’t use spells without a quick bar, so you have to open a menu (and wait for the animations to play out. Again) every time you need to reassign Reparo to Lumos or whatever else is required for solving a puzzle. And you have to do it quite often.
All of this disrupts the flow of the game. Instead of playing, enjoying the combat, or exploring you’re stuck dealing with slow menus.

This review is written after I played for about 10 hours. That is what the game says in my save file. But you might notice that it says 17 hours on my steam profile. The additional 7 hours are most likely spent in these menus. Yeah, It really adds up.

Overall, gameplay-wise, aside from the things I mentioned, it’s a pretty solid open-world RPG-like game. It’s neither better nor worse than any other open-world game available at the moment. It’s just the same as all of them. I will not try to evaluate if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a matter of preference, I guess.
But the game has too many issues regardless so I wouldn’t recommend getting it at full price. Especially if you’re a Harry Potter fan who wants to “feel like a student at Hogwarts”. You won’t get this experience in this game.