The new Harry Potter game is a mid-budget recreation of Quidditch, that’s free on PS Plus this week and surprisingly entertaining.
For Warner Bros. the Harry Potter franchise truly is the gift that keeps on giving; an eternal money-making machine capable of pumping out products across a dizzying range of media. Its latest wheeze is to manufacture a real game out of the fictional, broomstick-riding sport of Quidditch, which was last tried in Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup, way back in 2003.
Naturally, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is a lot more technically proficient, even if it suffers from the modern malaise of sign-in syndrome. As is now standard for online games, your first experience with it is being forced to create or log into a Warner Bros. Games account, followed by entreaties to link that to your Wizarding World fan ID. Most of that’s possible via onscreen QR codes, making it irritating rather than laborious, but it feels more like wearily starting work on a tax return than engaging with paid-for entertainment.
Once you’ve agreed to two sets of terms and conditions, and decided whether or not you’d like to receive marketing messages from Warner Inc., it’s time for fun, which starts with a little training. For those unaccustomed to Quidditch, it’s a sport played by teams of six wizards, all of whom ride broomsticks around a large, oval shaped pitch. Which sounds like it shouldn’t work but for years has been treated as a real sport by fans, some of who even play a non-magic version of it.
The game’s undoubted main characters are the three chasers, whose job is to gain possession of the ball – sorry, quaffle – and stuff it into one of three hoops at your opponent’s end of the pitch. To do that they have to get past the rival keeper, who’s very simply a broom-riding goalie.
The third role, beaters, use bats to defend fellow team-members against bludgers – iron balls designed to batter them off their broomsticks. Their other, more joyous, job is to attempt to use the same technique to interfere with the opposing team. Every player has a health bar, which is depleted by being kicked, bumped, tackled, or hit with a bludger, and when it’s gone they fall to Earth with a gratifying thump.
The final, and easily the weirdest job in Quidditch is the seeker. You typically only need them a couple of times each match, with the arrival of the tiny, fluttering walnut-sized golden snitch, which they have to chase and catch. Unlike the books, where it’s worth a match-ending 150 points, here it’s sensibly been nerfed to 30, although that still makes it worthwhile, since matches are first to 100 points and goals only net you 10.
Whichever position you’re playing, you’ll need solid broo- riding skills. Along with a standard nitro-style boost, that recharges over time, you can also drift, using a mechanic oddly reminiscent of the one in Star Wars: Squadrons, albeit considerably easier to pull off. It means you can hold down the left trigger to stay focused on the golden snitch or a player you’re targeting with a bludger, whilst flying in a totally different direction.
To start with, that causes numerous collisions with the invisible (presumably magic) wall that surrounds even the backyard Quidditch pitch where your training begins, but you soon get used to its dynamics, making it a vital skill for everyone apart from keepers.
Since the video game is played in 3 vs. 3 multiplayer, as opposed to the fictional game’s 6 vs. 6, you need to swap between two roles as you play, bringing into sharp focus their relative fun factors. Chasers are the game’s obvious stars, in that they do most of the flying and goal scoring, but it would be a mistake to sleep on beaters, whose job of knocking people off their brooms with bludgers – in effect guided missiles – can be immensely satisfying.
Sadly, the same can’t be said for keepers and seekers. Saving goals feels pretty great, as does catching a golden snitch, but especially in the latter case, the process of actually chasing the snitch, which means repeatedly boosting up and down the length of the field, trying to fly through the boost-prolonging rings it leaves in its wake, is as dull as it sounds, and effectively removes you from the game itself.
Luckily, you won’t need to spend too long in either position, leaving you to enjoy the polished and often frenetic game of Quidditch from the perspective of chasers and beaters. Games are long enough to get a feel for the opposing team’s tactics, but short enough that they never outstay their welcome, maintaining a sense of momentum, and enhanced by the simple yet effective commentary that lets you know what’s actually going on.
Because the game takes place in a large expanse of three-dimensional space, unless you’ve got possession it’s almost impossible to know what’s happening elsewhere on the field. Luckily a yellow, pulsing cone points to the quaffle, making it nice and easy to spot, and the commentary helps anchor you in the action, telling you what players are up to, and when saves, tackles or bludger-based de-brooming occurs.
There is obviously a nagging sense that all of this could, or possibly should, have been included in Hogwarts Legacy, whose weirdly deserted, unused Quidditch pitch you had to walk past frequently enough that many assumed something approximating this game would arrive as DLC. The issue with that would have been the player roster, given that Champions draws on the full cast list of the Potter universe, rather than the no-names who occupied most screen time in Legacy.
The real question of course, is whether it’s any good. Fortunately, the answer to that is ‘yes’. Turning a made-up sport into something competitively playable in real life is no mean feat, and Quidditch Champions offers a refined experience that has just enough depth to make it quick to learn but ensures that your trajectory as a player is about more than just levelling up and acquiring better brooms.
There’s no doubt that some positions are more engaging than others, but since you’re forced to swap between jobs it’s a problem that’s automatically limited, even if it is still present for sections of each round. The other potential issue is whether there will be anyone left to play against in two months’ time.
Quidditch Champions’ masterstroke is being included free with this month’s PS Plus on PlayStation. It’s cross-platform, which is helpful for matchmaking, but that initial fillip worked wonders for Rocket League, a game with many similarities to this one – notably its hectic multiplayer action and general replayability. In the long shadow cast by Concord’s recent instantaneous collapse, there must be a lot of very tightly crossed fingers at Warner this week.
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99*
Publisher: Warner Bros. Games
Developer: Unbroken Studios
Release Date: 3rd September 2024
Age Rating: 12
*free with PlayStation Plus subscription during September
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