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When Hogwarts Legacy came out, one complaint that made the rounds was that you couldn’t play quidditch. As it turned out, the reason for the sport’s glaring omission was that a separate game was already in the works. Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is the first standalone quidditch game since 2003, and if I’m being honest, would probably have been better served as a Hogwarts Legacy minigame.
Quidditch Champions is, by and large, a simple game. You’ve got a Campaign Mode that takes you on the road to glory, from learning the ropes in the Weasleys’ back garden to the roaring crowds of the Quidditch World Cup. As you progress, the teams get harder and you’ll come across some faces that will be immediately familiar to even the most passing Harry Potter fans. A single player game at first, you can later head online to play with and against other players with up to three players on each team.
Beginning at the quaint Weasley abode, Ginny Weasley takes you through the ropes, introducing you to the different positions: Chaser, Beater, Keeper and of course, Seeker. As a solo player, you’ll be required to take control of all your players, swapping between them over the course of a match while AI controls the rest. This swapping is fairly clunky at first, especially coming from the now seamless player-swapping of traditional sports games, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not particularly egregious.
Flying is also fairly easy to get in the flow. It’s fast and fluid, and once you get the hang of drifting, you can make tight turns and manoeuvre confidently around the field. As you play, you’ll unlock new brooms that can be upgraded to be faster, stronger, and more agile, giving you even more of an edge in your matches.
But while the premise of the game is decent, once you actually start digging down into it, there is very little actually there. Given that quidditch is a fictional sport, it doesn’t have the depth that real sports have developed over decades. There are no differing tactics, nor clashing styles of play, so once you get comfortable flying around and scoring some goals, there’s no variation – you’re effectively just playing the same match over and over again.
It’s a game that has somehow managed to be loaded with pointless mechanics while still managing to be too simple in its gameplay.
The gameplay is overly simplistic, and in an effort to remedy that, a few extra gameplay mechanics have been added. As a Keeper, you can place rings across the field that speed your players up and slow opponents down. You’ve got a Need for Speed-style nitrous boost for your broom and can drift to quickly change direction. Chasers have different types of passes which, because of the quality of the AI, drop to the ground as often as they reach their target. It’s a game that has somehow managed to be loaded with pointless mechanics while still managing to be too simple in its gameplay.
This is only exacerbated when you play online in the game’s PVP mode. With no tactical nuances, and a gameplay system so simple that you couldn’t even foster the beginnings of tactical nuance, the game 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.
On the topic of the Seeker, this might be my least favourite change of all. In the books, catching the Snitch scores you 150 points and effectively wins you the game. In an effort to make it more balanced, it only scores you 30 and appears a couple of times per game. And it’s been seemingly nerfed even further, by making catching the Snitch perhaps the most tedious part of the game. You have to follow it in a set path back and forth for about a minute before eventually catching it, turning what was the most exciting aspect of the game in the lore into something I’d rather let the AI take care of.
The other positions are fun enough, but still rather uninspiring. After a few hours, most of the fun I got out of the game was sticking as a Beater and flinging bludgers at people because, to be fair to Quidditch Champions, knocking people off their broom is actually very funny.
Unfortunately, given how shallow the gameplay of Quidditch Champions is, it begins to grow stale after only a couple of hours, especially due to the poor opponent AI, which even at the hardest difficulties is a breeze to beat. Once you complete the Campaign Mode, your choices to keep playing are an Exhibition mode for one-off matches, and playing online – a marked lack of content, begging the question of why this had to be a separate game in the first place.
There is a lot to like about Quidditch Champions, especially if you are a Harry Potter fan. There are plenty of cameos from fan favourite characters, lots of themed cosmetics to unlock for your characters, and including the other wizarding schools of Durmstrang, Beauxbatons and Ilvermorny was a nice touch. But that’s all there really is to it. It feels as if the game’s entire raison d’être is to be a vessel for references that Harry Potter fans can point at and say ‘Hey look, they added a Hagrid mask from the PS1 game’. A bit of fun, sure. Worth being its own title? Not for me.
Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is, in my eyes, a minigame that’s been bafflingly given a full release with almost no extra content. It feels like the kind of side content you’d see in a AAA game, which you need to complete to unlock a particularly tedious achievement. I’m not saying there’s no fun to be had here. But for £25, there’s certainly not a lot of it.
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Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions
- Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox Series X
- Genre(s): Arcade, Multiplayer
