Let me preface this by saying I'm in no way a Harry Potter fan - but I am a fan of RPGs and open-world games, and I've played a lot of them.

Introduction
Hogwarts Legacy is a love letter to the world of Harry Potter - taking place before Potter's time, the game has you fight against a goblin rebellion by harnessing ancient magic. The nature of this magic isn't clear, but of course, your character is the Chosen One, so...

Gameplay
The gameplay is incredibly basic. Spam cast magic, with the occasional switching of spells in order to form impotent combos that don't really do much damage to your enemy. Your character is a Hogwarts student in his fifth year, and yet he is learning the magic of a first year - yet, at the same time, he can learn the unforgiveable curses and use them without punishment or repercussion. Combat is slow and clunky, and there isn't enough variety to really keep me interested.

The game is mostly about exploration. Find this, collect that. Hogwarts is filled with secrets to seek and puzzles to solve, but they don't feel organic - rather, they feel as if they were added in order to make the game artificially longer. Movement is really slow, which just makes me less likely to want to collect everything.

Environment
This is where the game stands out. As a fan of huge, sprawling maps, Hogwarts itself feels too small for my liking, but the detail that has put into building the castle is phenomenal. Staircases, corridors, towers, and parapets all come together to form a wondrous piece of architecture - and you get to explore it, albeit, feeling less like a Hogwarts student and more like a placeholder for someone more important. Hogsmeade is less beautiful, but still a spectacular sight.

Characters
The game is filled with bland NPCs, and the secondary characters are not much better. Dialogue sounds artificial, almost robotic, and before long I was spamming the skip button because of how long the conversations are.

Final Thoughts
I cannot recommend Hogwarts Legacy to anyone with an ounce of sanity. The game is clearly unfinished - features promised by the developers - Quidditch, anyone? - have not been included in the full game, obviously coming as a DLC at some unknown point in the future. The combat is clunky. Exploration seems to be key to the gameplay, but it is so slow. The game itself is optimised poorly. THE GAME IS BORING. Out of my four hours, at least an hour and a half of that was spent in cutscenes, by the way. Please don't buy this game.

Oh, and to the reviewer who likened this game to the Witcher 3. Not only is that a grave insult to CDPR, but what kind of drugs were you taking when you wrote your review?