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Harry Potter: Wizards Unite Review

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is a 2019 augmented reality mobile game developed by Niantic. It’s a highly disappointing effort.

When I first heard about Harry Potter getting its own AR treatment similar to ‘Pokémon Go’, I was absolutely thrilled. Sure, the Wizarding World universe may not seem like a perfect fit for the AR treatment the same way as the Pokémon franchise naturally fits it, but there were still countless opportunities for them to delve deeply into the lore that I love so much.

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Unfortunately, it was all for nothing as Wizards Unite ended up being one of the most disappointing games that I have played in recent memory. It has its strengths, but it mostly misses than it hits. So, let’s discuss it aspect by aspect.

There is this calamity that threatens to tear down the wall holding muggles and wizards and witches apart, and you as a player most stop it. That’s the plot in a nutshell and it’s pretty mediocre. At first, judging by the premise alone, it had a lot of potential as I personally am fascinated by the role of muggles in the Wizarding World. However, the execution is terrible. Basically, you are given so many text boxes that actually are pointless as they do not give any meaningful information whatsoever. Whenever they appeared in the game, I was annoyed as it was the same old tired “this confoundable is getting stranger and stranger” routine.

I liked seeing all the different famous characters from HP, but the character design and animation of them was quite weak. The overall aesthetic to the game is pretty good, especially for the spells and the creatures, but the humans look odd as they tried but failed to make them look realistic.

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As for the confoundables themselves, they are poorly explained and overly complicated, but rather a simplistic gameplay mechanic when you think about it properly. It is pretty similar to ‘Pokémon Go’ in its concept, but somewhat different in execution. To catch is here to save a character or creature from a confoundable and the mechanic is more complex and better this time around with the spell traces being excellent.

But, and this is a big but, this becomes pretty tedious when you realize that you do not collect characters per say, but all the characters in different uniforms etc, and you have to catch them all for so many times as they are parts and not wholes. At first, I was intrigued by this collectibles album of sorts, but eventually it became monotonous in its repetitiveness.

In Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, you can also collect ingredients and make potions out of them to later fight in fortresses. It’s a good concept, but unfortunately the game gives you very little money from time to time, thus aggressively pursuing microtransactions. But the potions are quite well utilized into the fights themselves.

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Speaking of those, I liked the fortresses and how they worked, but the problem for me was that I honestly never found anyone playing this game outside, so the cooperative mode where you play the more difficult fortresses with other players was rendered impossible for me. The portkeys are undoubtedly the greatest part of this game as they transport you to a real WW location inside your own location and it is the closest to magic that this AR game came. It was technologically impressive and immersive unlike the rest of the game which was quite dull.