[STEAM] Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions Review

[Steam 0]

Let’s be honest: quidditch is not a good sport – or at least it’s not one that was ever designed to actually be played. Its role in the Harry Potter series was just to show off how special Harry is, to the point where you might as well call it “Harry Potter the Seeker and Some Other People on Broomsticks, I Guess.” So the team at developer Unbroken Studios had their work cut out for them with Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, having to both honor the source material while also adapting quidditch into a real game. Surprisingly, they’ve done a pretty good job at that, with moment-to-moment action on the quidditch pitch that’s actually pretty great. But once you land between matches, Quidditch Champions doesn’t have much off the pitch to keep you coming back.

On the surface, the quidditch in Quidditch Champions is just like the stuff in the books and films. There are still four positions: Chasers grab the Quaffle and ****** it at the opposing team’s goals, scoring ten points if they manage to get it in; Keepers defend those goals; Beaters launch Bludgers to satisfyingly stun members of the opposing team, and when that fails they can whack them with their bats directly; and Seekers chases the Golden Snitch, a small, hard-to-catch winged ball worth a lot of points. But Unbroken has introduced a few rule changes that make things work better – most notably among them, the Seeker is no longer the only one of these positions that ultimately matters.

Matches end either when one team scores 100 points or a time limit is reached, and they don’t just stop the moment someone catches the Snitch. Speaking of, the Snitch itself is only worth a much more reasonable 30 points instead of 150, and it can appear multiple times (usually about twice) per game. That smartly makes the times you can switch to Seeker a fun little (optional) bonus during a match rather than the do-or-**** moment of the entire thing. There’s also only one Beater per team, not two, which makes a lot sense given how they can force other positions to play around them.

The end result of all these tweaks is, frankly, a better game. It allows Chasers to matter just as much, if not more, than Seekers, while keeping the hunt for the Snitch important, especially in tight games. It lets the Beater, who can incapacitate a member of the other team if they deal enough damage, be a strong and strategic part of a whole match without entirely dictating how it plays out. It makes every shot on goal matter, and, most importantly, it ensures matches don’t go on for six months.

Smart changes make for a better, more fun version of quidditch. So yeah, smart changes make for a better, more fun version of quidditch, but what kept me coming back was the way the on-field action feels. Flying around the pitch is awesome, especially if you master Quidditch Champions’ movement techniques. Managing your boost meter and learning how to dodge and drift properly are the differences between accidentally blowing past the other team as a Chaser and faking out a Keeper to land the perfect shot or keeping up with the Snitch during tight turns and taking a Bludger to the skull before contemplating your choices while face down in the pitch for the next twenty seconds. Mid-match commentary will chime in alongside those plays either way, though it’s unfortunately pretty stilted and generic – whether it’s Lee Jordan at Hogwarts or Rita Skeeter during the Quidditch World Cup, there’s good lines here and there, but they’re usually reserved for the beginning and end of a match while the mid-game stuff is… dry, to say the least.

Thankfully, every position has a fun role to play. I loved playing Keeper because I enjoyed the chess match between myself and the opposing Chasers, reacting to their shots, and dropping Playcalling Rings that restore my Chasers’ energy and give them speed boosts; Chasers are constantly tackling each other to steal the ball, moving up and down the pitch, and testing themselves against the Keeper; a well-played Beater can pick apart the other team, disrupting a Seeker at the last second or taking the Keeper off the board to allow a game-winning goal; and because Seekers can’t just grab the Snitch — they have to stay close to it and fill a meter before they can finally ******* it — every ****** for those bonus points is essentially a race with another Seeker. And since you can switch positions on the fly, you can spend as much (or as little) time in each role as you like. It’s great.

It’s even better, of course, when you’re playing with friends. You can play cooperatively with two other players or take on human teams in 3v3 action online, though switching positions there works a little differently. In that case, you choose a pair of positions — Chaser and either Keeper, Seeker, or Beater — and swap between those. What you lose in position flexibility you make up for in the ability to coordinate with your team. In my first online game, I mostly played Keeper, making saves, using the Playcaller Rings to set up shots on goal, and passing to my friend so they could score as a Chaser. It was a close game, but we won because we worked together.

So Quidditch Champions is great on the field, but unfortunately it’s pretty mediocre off it. There’s really nothing to do besides play these straightforward quidditch matches, be that online or alone. You’ve got a limited career mode with four Cups to win, with the opening Weasley Cup serving as a (very good) tutorial. The other three are the House Cup at Hogwarts, the Triwizard Quidditch Cup, and the Quidditch World Cup. After a series of preliminary matches, you’re seeded into a single-elimination bracket, winner-take-all – and while that may sound like it could be exciting, there are a couple of issues here.

First, the Triwizard Cup and the House Cup only feature three and four teams, respectively, so the bracket stage is pretty short (and in the case of the Triwizard Cup, only consists of one match because a team is eliminated in the prelims). Second, while you can play Career in co-op (and the menus encourage you to do so), Quidditch Champions doesn’t actually track your progress if you do, meaning I ended up playing the House Cup three times to unlock the Triwizard Cup. My first two attempts, made in co-op, weren’t saved. I didn’t get credit for any games I played on my Challenge screen either, which tracks your daily, weekly, and career-wide progress across games and offers rewards once you complete them, which meant I missed unlockable cosmetics as well. That feels bad.

Beyond career, multiplayer, and an obligatory practice mode, there just isn’t much to do in terms of modes, which leaves the whole package feeling thin. The character customization, however, is at least quite good. You can customize your team, allocate per-position stat points, and upgrade the several brooms you can choose from, all of which have different stats. This tinkering is welcome; there are a lot of options for your custom characters, letting you choose their look, how commentators refer to them, and plenty of cool bits and bobs like robes, wands, emotes, and such, though it’s a bummer that the co-op progression problems mean you will have to grind single-player games to unlock a decent chunk of those items.

Don’t want to use custom characters? You can unlock Harry, Ron, Hermoine, Cedric Diggory, Draco Malfoy (ew), Cho Chang, and the rest if you save up enough currency or, say it with me, level up your battle pass. While your eyes might already be rolling upon reading that, the good news is it’s totally free so far, and you earn everything just from playing. There are no microtransactions in Quidditch Champions; at least, not right now. After all, this is Warner Bros. – do you trust it to build an in-game shop and not ask you to open your wallet at some point down the line? I don’t.

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