izigame.me

Let me start it off by saying I'm a huge Harry Potter nerd and was one of those kids who waited for the books to come out and once they did I devoured them in a few days, same for movies. I also consider myself a casual gamer, so my opinion on the game's difficulty might be not relevant for you. Last thing to say before I start complaining about the game is, I finished the game 100%, did all the side quests, found all the chests, all the pages, completed all the challenges.Spent around 80 hours to do so, my girlfriend spent around the same amount of time and the rest of the hours are my friends and family members trying it out. So needless to say, I loved the game but here are a few things that I think the game would benefit from if implemented.
Let's start off from Sneaking. It's basically useless, when you first learn disillusionment charm I thought wow cool now i will be able to sneak out of the school at night, as per books and movies students are not allowed to be out of their common room after a certain hour, but apart from a few quests it's completely useless. You can roam the castle any time you want, what's the point of invisibility potions and secret passages out of the castle if you can just walk out the front gate? Furthermore, you can steal from people's houses, no one cares that you even walked in, let alone empty their chests. We’ll leave the morality of stealing aside for a minute and go to my next point.
Money system is undeveloped.
It’s way too easy to get money in the game; you just go up to any merchant and sell all the stolen goods to them. It would be cool if merchants would accept only the type of goods they sell, like what's the point for the potion seller to buy all the weird clothing items. Furthermore, it would be cool if you couldn’t sell stolen goods to all merchants and would have to deal with a Mundungus like, shady character to sell stolen goods to. On a different note, why don’t any merchants offer a buy back option or have a budget? You just finish hearing them out about how the business is slow and you are in a poorer area, but you want to sell something worth hundreds of galleons, easy, they have the money right there. So in my opinion everything should be more expensive and merchants should have their budget limit, but you should have the ability to sell potions and their ingredients to some of them, something I can't understand why it’s unavailable. And not the ability to sell beasts.
Magical beasts
Catching magical beasts is a great idea, making you use their fur and feathers to upgrade your equipment even better, saving them from poachers, amazing. But why is there an ability to sell them to the lady in Hogsmeade? What's the difference between you selling the beasts and the poachers doing it? In my opinion there should have been a side quest where you help expand the area around the Hagrid's hut (Sorry don’t remember the name of the professor in the game) and give the creatures to the professor for safekeeping. It would make more sense and then the Profesor could teach about those animals in classes, and you as a player could see a physical impact on the castle grounds.
Scale of the castle
When I first started, I thought it would be amazing. I wanted to explore the castle, but to my disappointment it was just a bunch of confusing halls leading to stairs that lead to more halls and stairs with a few classrooms and common rooms in between. It seems the castle is designed in this way to make it more confusing and take up more space rather than utilize it. They did a great job including things from the books like the kitchens with the elves being right next to the hufflepuff common room and even added some extra stuff like the book & quill in the tower that writes down the name of everyone meant for Hogwarts, but still it feels like it's just above the bare minimum. Probably the school you went to had more classrooms than the castle in this game. Well, at least there’s flew powder if you get lost.
Transportation with flew powder
Don't get me wrong it's great to have fast travel in the game, it really gets tedious to fly all the way down the map for a chat and then all the way back up for a different quest. It's a great idea, borrowing fast travel that’s in the books and movies and expanding it. But why can you do it from anywhere on the map? You should need to go to one of these locations to travel to any other, not just travel from anywhere to it. This would make it so you have to use your broom more often.
Broom upgrades feel meaningless.
Now this might be just me, because I flew only the minimum of broom races to get through the campaign, but I didn't notice the upgrades doing anything. What would be cool is if let’s say with each subsequent upgrade you could fly higher thus allowing you to fly over certain mountains, there are few of those plopped on to the map where they don’t really do anything just make you fly around so it would be a cool reward. Talking about rewards let’s go to the house points
House points
House points are only mentioned in passing and have no effect on the game, but they could act as a morality system rewarding you for fixing carnage caused by Peeves(Love that he’s in the game, but he doesn’t cause enough mayhem), giving saved animals to the professor, or just doing well in class(I know this one would be tricky but it could be done). And punishing you any time you use a forbidden spell, destroy some school property, or get caught walking the castle at night, or if you get caught stealing outside the castle this would make sneaking useful and actually harder to collect demiguise moons, and astronomy tables, which at this point is too easy.
The game is too easy
I’m not some hardcore gamer but this game was way too easy, I played it all the way through on hard difficulty. I came in expecting a challenge and honestly, thinking that an hour or two in, I would decrease the difficulty to normal, but it was quite the opposite. The game was easy and I almost didn’t need to use the plants or potions, except for a couple of fights. I think this was down to the fact that I’m the kinda player that gets distracted by sidequests and since this game is made in stages, by the time I would get back to the main quest it would be way too easy. So it seems like there is no scaling in the enemies you have to fight. And fighting is not the only thing that was too easy. Some of the things I already mentioned, the money system, sneaking, having to deal with house points, but another one is Moonstone. Why is it possible to make a moonstone machine that makes moonstone? Once you have it, Moonstones become completely worthless, you just print them non stop, and there are not enough uses for it in quests. Sure you can build stuff in the room of requirement, but that’s just cosmetics. If you could build out animal pens and other things around the castle and be part of quests, like for example rebuilding one of those castles that "used to be quite a sight in its time” then maybe it would matter but now this resource doesn’t matter.
Dialog choices don’t matter
I beat the game once and then watched a little here and there, as my girlfriend was going through her playthrough. And the biggest disappointment was seeing her choose a different response and get almost the same answer, continuing with that thought, your choices don’t matter neither in the small quest lines, nor in the big ones, the outcome is always the same and that's a bit disappointing for a game that tries to portray itself as choose your own Hogwarts story type of thing.
Now in the end with all these drawbacks do I regret playing it? No, not at all, since I've been a Harry Potter nerd since the early 2000s, it felt cool playing a game of this scale and then sharing the experience with my Girlfriend who also played it. I feel like(hate to admit it buuut) it was a great value. Though I still think they could’ve included a variation