izigame.me

Great, immersive, fun and disappointing game.

Graphics are beautiful, the characters are really well done, the environments are very detailed and gorgeous, the creatures look fantastic, there are plenty of places to stand and just enjoy the beautiful views. The different spells look amazing and unique, and the casting animations are great.

Sound effects are amazing, the same can be said about the music and voice acting. Sounds in general are really well done. From exploring the castle, to flying on your broom, to caring your beasts, to fighting dark wizards and spiders, everything sounds great. The music also follows you on the different activities you do, sometimes a bit repetitive (for example in combat) but for the most part is really immersive too. The similarities to the original HP soundtrack are a nice addition. Finally, the voice acting is great, they give a lot of personality to the different characters, and it's a lot of fun interacting with some of them.

On the gameplay side, there are really cool things, and some disappointing things too.
To start with the cool things, the world. If you played any of the old HP games where you could explore Hogwarts, this game is the best iteration yet. It delivers that same magic that those old games did, but with a more realistic and lore accurate view. You can fully explore the castle and it's grounds, the forbidden forest, Hogsmeade, and even a lot of places around the school.
To continue with great things, combat and spells interactions. Combat is really fluid and fun, you have different type of spells which you can combine in different ways to make combos on your enemies and break their defenses.  Later, when you unlock your talents, you can further enhance your spells to have additional effects that drastically change the combat. Spell interactions also work outside of combat, with a lot of puzzles, in which you can use different spell combinations to solve them.
Speaking of puzzles, that's another great thing in this game, there are lots of them, some harder than others, but for the most part, if you stop for a minute to think and observe your surroundings, you can solve them easily, also try every spell you know, some puzzles have some interesting results with some spell interactions. The only thing that is a bit annoying is that many of them are just copy-paste, it's cool to do a puzzle once or twice, but coming across the same puzzle 10 times, it's just annoying and also without any reward for doing them.
Another awesome feature, is your very own room/player housing, which surprisingly is not your dormitory in the common room, but the room of requirement. This place is truly awesome, the more you advance in the story, more features and things unlock in this place. You can fully customize this room, add decorations you unlock all over the world, build different things, etc. But the most amazing feature, is the vivarium which is the place where you take the magical beasts you rescue. You can catch many magical creatures in the world, there are even shiny ones (like in pokemon) that are very rare, and you can take them to these different vivariums, each with a different biome.
There are many other things that are really cool, but they are a bit disappointing because of the wasted potential. To name a few, flying. Flying in this game is truly awesome, but for some strange reason, the only thing you can do is only 3 time trial races, where you have to fly from ring to ring and beat a timer. I mean, you could have done so much more with flying, not even talking about quidditch, which even the first HP game had quidditch in it.
Another thing is the school life, the classes are a joke, there's no way of failing a class, it's just press a couple of buttons, and you made the most difficult potion, or cast the most difficult spell. I mean, come on! Even the old first HP game have more interesting lessons with actual puzzles you could fail, and even get points for your house if you succeeded. There's not even exams, which are the perfect excuse for a challenging puzzle combining all the spells you learned, and the professors even reference the OWLs in the game like it IS a thing you will have to do at the end, but nothing. Also, there's not even competition with the different houses, no matter what you do, you always win the house cup.
This game had the potential to make a full 7 year school cycle, I mean even the mobile game has the seven years, come on!!
Furthermore, tied to the classes, only ONE class per teacher? The game tells you all the time you have to catch up with all your classmates that had 4 years ahead of you to master a lot of things, and you get only a single class with each professor, and the amount of spells you learn is just underwhelming. Brewing potions, if there is something that could be really cool from a gameplay perspective, has to be brewing potions, but here is just: press button, move the mouse, press button, move the mouse, there you have it, brewed the most difficult potion in the game perfectly, without a single mistake.
Another very disappointing thing is the character's gear progression, you have different rarities, that are meaningless, because you can easily get access to the legendary pieces, and you will never use any of the others, and that's ok if the legendary pieces were hard to get, but no, you can just buy them from the vendor with perfect stats in no time. Also, further in the game, you unlock the ability to customize your gear with different traits that you can find in enemy camps, which is cool, until you realize there's no real choice, you just put the max damage for the type of spell (or plants) you use in all slots, I mean, you can put other things, but you will be making your game time and fights harder for no reason. This issue could be easily fixed by limiting the type of trait you can put in different pieces of gear, that would make the trait selection a little more interesting and also giving the player a more interesting choice of gearing.
There are many more things like these, that are cool things, but they only scratched the surface and wasted a lot of potential.
The only bad thing I can say about the game, it's the unskippable wall of text and the unending loading shader bar EVERY SINGLE TIME you start the game.

The story is really cool, very engaging. Full of interesting characters and great moments. The only disappointing thing is that you have no agency at all in it, no matter the dialog choices or the things you do, there are no consequences and also nothing changes (except for one little thing in a side quest). You are just watching a movie, in which you can select a few dialogues, but with no impact. Don't get me wrong, the story is really cool, but it's sad that there are no choices, because the story certainly leaves a lot of room for choices and player agency. Not even the house choice, which it's supposed to be the most interesting choice you can make has any consequence, just a cosmetic difference in the attire and common room, and a little variation in one quest. They could have done different side quests for different houses, different relationships with different characters, even the professors could also have acted differently depending on your house, but no, all the same for everyone. Also, there are no character relationships, you can't romance any of the characters, or become rivals, or anything. You just do side quests for some of them, and that's it.

In short, is a really cool game, with amazing things, but with a lot of wasted potential in most of them. If you are a fan of the HP universe, you will definitely have fun with it, but also probably will be the most disappointed in the wasted potential of most of the things the game has to offer. I recommend getting it only on sale, because it's not worth the full price.