Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions review for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

Given how much I loved Hogwarts Legacy, it should come as no surprise that I had high hopes for Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions. I wasn’t expecting it to be my personal GOTY candidate or anything, but still: I figured that if last year’s Potterverse game wildly exceed expectations, this one might too.

Unfortunately, Quidditch Champions is a bit more of a mixed bag. It’s a fun game in a lot of ways, don’t get me wrong, but it’s got enough flaws that I wouldn’t recommend it unreservedly.

The biggest flaw? There’s really not a lot of content here. There’s a bit of a career mode that takes you from learning the game in the Weasleys’ backyard all the way to the Quidditch World Cup, but it would be more accurately described as a mainly comprising of a couple of small tournaments – the Burrow matches are basically tutorial levels, then Hogwarts House Cup and Triwizard Tournament are small round robins. The World Cup is obviously a bigger affair with 16 possible teams to choose from, but the only reason to sink hours into the House Cup and Triwizard Tournament is because each new level is tied to how many medals you’ve earned for various actions. If you just want to rocket all the way up to the World Cup, you have to grind a little to get there.

The game seeks to overcome this by offering multiplayer mode, but that’s a little hit or miss – partly because you don’t really have much control over what position you play, but also because of the nature of the game of quidditch, as presented in Quidditch Champions. It’s constantly moving chaos, which is great when you’re playing on your own (as I’ll explain shortly), but add in online multiplayer, and you basically have six people all flying around without any kind of coordination. Plus, of course, there’s the fact that multiplayer relies on matchmaking, and while there are enough players now, while the game is newly available and part of PlayStation Plus, you have to wonder how the game will look in, say, six to eight months, by which point online multiplayer could become very reliant on bots.

Having said that, Quidditch Champions does an incredible job of portraying the fictional sport that it seeks to recreate. It’s not a wholly faithful reproduction of what’s in the books (not only is the Golden Snitch only worth 30 points here, catching it doesn’t even automatically end the match! And it’s first team to 100 points wins! I want one of those endless games described in the book!), but at the same time, it still feels like you’d imagine quidditch would look and play. Having a dozen players soaring around a field in all directions with chasers trying to score goals, beaters trying to attack their opponents, and seekers trying to catch the Snitch is every bit as chaotic as you’d imagine the game would be.

Obviously, there’s too much going on to ever control your whole team at once – no matter how quickly you might try and switch between players. Rather, you’re better off focusing on one or two positions, and then hoping that your teammates (whether AI or real human) can play well enough to help you win. Personally, I discovered that playing as a beater in Quidditch Champions is absurdly fun: you fly around the field, pummeling players with the bludger and trying to fly close enough to punch them off their brooms. It was disturbingly satisfying to hit opposing players so hard that they went plummeting down to the grass, leaving the other team short-handed for a few moments.

Honestly, that’s enough to make Quidditch Champions worth recommending, provided you keep the above-mentioned caveats in mind. It would be nice if there was more content (and you have to be okay with a little straying from the source material), but as it stands, the game is a chaotic – if all-too-brief – good time.

Warner Bros. Games provided us with a Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions PC code for review purposes.

Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions Deluxe Edition - PlayStation 5

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