It’s been over a year since Hogwarts Legacy, and despite that game doing such a good job of capturing the essence of being a student at Hogwarts, there was a glaring omission. Despite spending many hours in the castle and its surrounding grounds, you never get to play a game of Quidditch. Quite the phenomenon, apparently in both real life and the world of Harry Potter, it always felt odd that Quidditch wasn’t in Legacy. And while it’s been a hot minute – since 2003 – since we had a new Quidditch experience, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions has the basics down pat. But while it gets so much of the core experience right, it still feels undercooked.
The game occurs around the same time as the Harry Potter stories. You’ll run into many series stalwarts like the Weasleys, Hermione and most students who make a sizeable appearance in the series. The game’s very loose structure has you building a fully customisable team that must work through the various tourneys to win the Quidditch World Cup. There’s not much of a story here, honestly, and it feels very small scale.
There are multiple ways to play Quidditch Champions, whether with your friends or against them. But you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for a wealth of single-player content. There is a “campaign” of sorts, which sees you competing in three different cups – a school, interschool and international – but that’s really it. The “story” is a cutscene before each cup, explaining what the cup is and narrated by a low-rent soundalike of your favourite Harry Potter characters. The Seeker of each team, such as Cho Chang or Cedric Diggory, might pop up beforehand to say a sentence or two, but that’s really it.
The campaign really serves as a loose tutorial to teach you the basics of each role and how Quidditch works, especially as a video game. The beginning of the game wastes no time teaching you how to fly your broom, selecting which camera controls you want to use and even showing you how to drift. Each role is also explained to you and has unique controls and mechanics, but that’s really it. It feels more like an extensive prep course to prepare you for multiplayer, though I appreciate that no matter which mode you play in Quidditch Champions, there’s still online functionality with full crossplay available, too.
In this version of Quidditch, two teams of six battle it out until one side reaches a hundred points. A goal is worth ten points. The roles are simple – there are three Chasers, a Keeper, A Beater and a Seeker. Chasers play the leading role in the game, chasing after a ball called a Quaffle, scoring points by throwing it into the opposing team’s goals. Keepers are goalkeepers, but they can lay down rings that other players can fly through to buff or debuff their speed. Beaters are the most interesting, armed with bats and controlling a magical iron ball called a Bludger to knock other players off their brooms, while the single Seeker must look for the Golden Snitch, a fast-moving object on the field.
The most significant change with Quidditch Champions is how the Golden Snitch works. It appears roughly twice in each game’s seven minutes, and the Seeker must boost through rings left behind it to stay close to the Snitch to fill a meter. Once the meter is filled, the Snitch can be caught. Rather than ending the game, however, it gives the team thirty of the required hundred points towards their win. It’s a nerf, but it has a remarkably positive effect on the flow of the game and keeps things fair right up until the very end, as sometimes grabbing the Snitch can be the difference between winning and losing.
The other roles, barring the Keeper, are all just as fun. Something is satisfying (if not slightly macabre) about beating people off their brooms as a Beater or sending your bludger after the opposing Seeker to give your team member a better chance at catching the Snitch. If you want good old-fashioned sports, the Chaser is more of a role for you, coming with the typical functions you’d expect for a player in any sports game – sprinting, tackling and the like. There’s something for everyone here, even if you’re not typically into sports games (like myself).
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And while the AI is pretty average sometimes, most of the magic happens when you’re playing online. The online modes are fairly robust for a game of this scale, offering role-specific queuing or any role queueing to reduce wait times. For the most part, I wouldn’t be waiting for more than two minutes to find a match, so the population seems healthy right now, but it’ll be interesting to see how long it will stay like this. Online performance is great, too – everything works, which is excellent but rare in today’s gaming climate.
Online games work differently from offline. Three players control two roles each, and they can switch between them on the fly as needed. Your roles are assigned to you as you’re put into a game, though you can choose your preference before matchmaking. It’s a great system that keeps things interesting, though, much like any multiplayer game, it can get frustrating when your Seeker doesn’t actually go for the Snitch.
It’s an absolute dream when a team of humans plays their roles correctly in Quidditch Champions. A fast-paced game that has all of the twists and turns to keep things tense and chaotic. But beyond that, Quidditch Champions doesn’t have much more going for it. The primary sense of progression is a Battle Pass-esque system where you unlock cosmetics as you complete matches and earn XP. It’s a tried-and-true system, but it feels empty at this stage and fills pretty slowly.
At first, I assumed this was because the game wanted to sell you all the trimmings that often come with games structured like these – skips, experience boosters and the like. But remarkably, Quidditch Champions doesn’t have any microtransactions. All progression is earned in-game and can’t be purchased with real currency. This is a relief, but at the same time, it also masks something far more telling – there’s just not a lot to earn or do in Quidditch Champions.
Which is a shame, because the core gameplay is solid. Quidditch Champions plays incredibly well. But the other elements surrounding the game, that compelling reason to stick with it and keep playing, just doesn’t exist yet. The game is structured as if it will set up new content drops as future seasons come, but it feels rather barebones for now.
From a visual standpoint, Quidditch Champions looks decent enough. It employs a stylised artistic direction, allowing it to be visually distinct from Hogwarts Legacy and whatever other Wizarding World games are coming. It runs well, too, with no performance hiccups to note in my time with it. Novelly, the game also is the first time we’ve seen both the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons schools realised in a video game (or perhaps ever), which is a nice touch for those deep into the Wizarding World.
However, there is a real gap in the presentation regarding the original score. Harry Potter films have some incredible music that could be used significantly in Quidditch Champions, especially while you’re playing the Seeker. Instead, what’s here is a pale imitation of what came before. It all feels incredibly flat and wooden, especially during the final moments of each match. I thought we’d hear some of John Williams’ soaring music here, but what’s here instead is just unremarkable.
While the actors are soundalikes, which I can handwave away given how expensive the talent would be to get back for recording, the commentary is seriously lacking. Even worse for what is ostensibly a sports game, it’s arduously repetitive, too. There are about one or two lines for each event that might occur in the game, and when you’re playing across seven minutes, it can get incredibly grating to hear “HOGWARTS GAINS POSSESSION” more than ten times in the span of a few minutes.
So, while Quidditch Champions has the potential to grow into something more, right now, it’s too barebones to hold your attention for long. Hopefully, with time, there’ll be a more compelling reason to jump back on the broom, but it needs a little more time to capture the magic it’s missing.
