Probably should play it while it last
I absolutely LOVED Hogwarts Legacy when it dropped in 2023. Consumers and fans like loved it as well but we ALL had one complaint. And that was where is the Quidditch?! The game even when so far as to make a point of the headmaster shutting down Quidditch for year. Of course, now we know the reason for this omission was because WB was developing a standalone Quidditch game in Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions.
Quidditch Champions is 100% ‘what you see is what you get’ and brother what you get isn’t much. There is a career mode that starts with teaching players the ropes in the Weasleys’ backyard all the way to the Quidditch World Cup. While the game does have this single player campaign mode and exhibition modes where players can enjoy one-off matches. The main competent of gameplay is the 3v3 multiplayer and I honestly feel like that is a mistake.
MSRP: $29.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, Switch, PC
Price I’d Pay: Should be F2P
Players will be taught the ropes by Ginny Weasley as she introduces each of the positions in Quidditch: Beater, Keeper, Chaser and of course Seeker. Players will be forced control all of the players on their team by swapping to them and the AI will control the rest. But while this makes sense in the contest of the single player game, this puzzlingly swapping mechanic finds its way into the multiplayer as well. Each player on a team will in essence control two positions while the AI handles the one not actively being used. This is just an odd choice but maybe one made to ensure that various positions would always be filled for the online matches.
Controlling your character on the brooms is fairly easy and movement is fast and fluid. Players are able to perform dodge moves, which is important to avoid bludgers that the beater position can hit them with. There is also a really good drift mechanic that allows players to maintain boost and speed and change direction on a dime. As players progress the battle pass, they will unlock new brooms that can be upgraded to add more speed or agility in matches.
The gameplay is overly simplistic, this is only exacerbated when you play online in the game’s PVP mode. Quidditch Champions effectively boils down to getting the quaffle and blasting towards the opponents’ posts and scoring an easy goal before they do the same to you, hoping that your Seeker is better than theirs to net you the extra 30 points. That is, one change the developers made in an effort to make the game more balanced is that unlike in the books when catching golden snitch nets the team who caught it 150 points and automatically ends the game; now the snitch will appear twice in the game and the first seeker to grab it will net 30 points for there team. And to make matters worse, Seeker feels even further nerfed because it is by far the worse position on the field.
As I said the snitch only appears a few times during the match, when it does players have to follow it in a set path back and forth for about a minute before eventually catching it. For fans of the book series, Harry’s struggles to catch the snitch during the quidditch games were some of the most exciting parts of the story. To see it here, relegated to a simple chase while building a meter; just makes me really sad to think about what could have been.
There is some fun to be had in Quidditch Champions but that mileage is going to vary by player for sure. Hardcore Potter heads will probably love being able to experience this sport, and chasing all of the unlockables; including skins of Harry, Cho, and many other quidditch players in the books. For anyone else, this is going to feel like a subpar package, that if I am being honest feels like a ripoff for being $30. In a time where we just saw Concord, a major first party game, make the mistake to charge for a game that has a focus on multiplayer which should be free to play; Harry Potter Quidditch Champions just feels like its flying toward the same ending. It already is a bit of a niche game but tying it to multiplayer and therefore player counts just seems like someone was hit by an obliviate spell.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
