Harry Potter: Wizards Unite Review

By Jonathon Dornbush

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite may not be the wizarding world game of my dreams (hopefully that leaked Harry Potter RPG trailer is more than a concept) but I’m pleasantly surprised with how much I’m enjoying Niantic’s latest augmented reality “walking RPG.” This followup to the phenomenally successful Pokemon GO does a lot of heavy lifting to justify its storyline that makes the actual idea behind it a little wonky, but the many, many layers of exploration and collection it encourages have kept me engaged on a daily basis… so far.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is, in a nutshell, Pokemon GO but with wizard tchotchkes instead of collectable pocket monsters. The longer version of the description reads a bit more like a J.K. Rowling lore tweet: in the quiet, post-Deathly Hallows epilogue lives of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, a great calamity has hit the wizarding world and threatens to tear down the wall between muggles and magic. You and wizards around the world are enlisted to help uphold the Statute of Secrecy and eventually solve this Calamity.

Manageable Mischief

It’s a silly but not uninteresting hook for me as a Harry Potter fan, and it’s given me an excuse to interact with a number of famous items, people, and creatures from the wizarding world. And also…Daily Prophet newsstands. The story is doled out in very small doses, though, as it’s meant to be explored over the months to come, so you get a lot of text, with some VO, to comb through with some cute character moments from new characters, a surprisingly spot-on Daniel Radcliffe impression, and expectedly unconvincing impressions of Emma Watson and Maggie Smith.

For anyone who’s played Pokemon GO, Wizards Unite’s format proves instantly familiar, and still works as a great foundation for a mobile game. Exploring the real world with an augmented overlay — this time, the prettier, more colorful storybook aesthetic of Wizards Unite’s map – you hunt around for an assortment of items, known here as Foundables. Or, Confoundables. Well, actually, the confoundable is the thing holding the Foundable out of its place in space and time, and you have to free the Foundable from the confoundable…

Look, it’s a very complicated way of explaining what you really do: tap an icon on the map, trace the form of one of several spells as quickly and accurately as you can, and hopefully free whatever item is before you. It’s a smart and better version of Pokemon GO’s catching mechanic. While not nearly as great a wish-fulfillment mechanic as the chance to actually throw a Pokeball at Pikachu, tracing spells is a more fun, engaging way to approach Wizards Unite’s collectathon. And the neat inclusion of signposts that tell you what type of Foundables can be, well, found, in certain locations on the map really helps when you’re trying to fill out specific pages of your Registry, aka the Magic Pokedex.

But Niantic’s latest doesn’t do a great job of breaking down the specifics of this central mechanic. It’s so wrapped up in justifying its existence that there’s little in the way of actually teaching you or helping you improve in your spellcasting (how much speed versus accuracy is weighed, for example, is frustratingly unclear). Part of that issue may stem from just how much Niantic throws your way in the opening levels of Wizards Unite.

In addition to Foundables and Confoundables, you can also collect potion ingredients around the map, find Portmanteaus which hide Portkeys scattered around the world, manage a friends list, achieve daily and ongoing objectives, upgrade professions with skill trees and tackle the multiplayer Fortresses. It’s a lot, and Wizards Unite doesn’t do the best job ingratiating you into every aspect. instead its text boxes are filled with silly character asides and moments that, while fun, distracted from actually teaching me how to be a better wizard. And that’s unfortunate because, at the end of the day, Wizards Unite isn’t all that complicated. It actually does some pretty cool stuff to elevate the genre Niantic made so popular, while also making some bizarre missteps.

As much as I’ve enjoyed my time with Pokemon GO, much of that time after that game’s initial few months has boiled down to walking around, occasionally catching the same Pokemon for the umpteenth time or hoping my Tyrannitar doesn’t get kicked out of a gym. With Wizards Unite, the separation of Foundables into a bunch of different categories has actually encouraged me to go on specific hunts, trying to find locations in San Francisco that may hold specific items, like the plaza near the IGN office that would hold more Dark Arts Foundables, as opposed to the park near my home, where I could easily find more of the Care of Magical Creatures variety. And the nice ability to essentially prestige a page of the Registry – that is, reset it once I’ve captured enough items to gain more XP when I collect more – is a really smart way of encouraging me to continue on long after I’ve found my twentieth magical megaphone.

The items themselves range in intrigue when collecting them, and while many of the animations can be cute to watch, the unfortunate choice to go with a realistic design of human characters just can’t hold a floating candle to the real humans I’ve seen in the Harry Potter films. The in-game characters are approximations of the movie actors who played them, but the light detailing, somewhat jagged animation, and limited expressions make the characters feel like Halloween costumes rather than the real thing.

Dumbledore’s Army of One

Meanwhile, the change of Pokestops to Greenhouses and Inns adds more to do to these various stops, but the very limited inventory you’re saddled with at the start makes hunting for more seeds and water a chore. And the same goes for potion ingredients to brew into items used in battles. I find more ingredients than I can collect because of the small inventory, but rarely do I have all the items I actually need, leading to tedious item management. Or worse, to get more room in my inventory I need gold (why are they not called Galleons!?), which is the rarest commodity unless you’re willing to dole out quite a bit of real-world money. Pokemon Go definitely had its fair share of Pokecoin purchase opportunities, but in that game I didn’t feel like I needed to spend money to be properly outfitted nearly as quickly as I did in Wizards Unite.

Speaking of outfits, it’s disappointing that you aren’t able to design your own wizarding character beyond the color of your Hogwarts House. I actually like my little Slytherin-shaded wizard, but a great feature in Pokemon Go is the customization options available. Instead, Niantic has opted to let us focus on customizing a photo you take of myself at the start with borders and AR costume types, which would be fine except that I never look at it and it never gets shared with friends. It seems pointless to interact with.

While the AR customization adds little, Niantic’s other use of AR in-game is one of my favorite innovations in the full experience. Once you’ve walked a certain distance with a Portmanteau you unlock a Portkey, which, after being “placed” in the world around you, lets you step into a familiar wizarding location, like Borgin and Burkes or Hagrid’s hut. Hunting for extra experience or a handful of Registry points is the closest to bringing magic alive Wizards Unite comes, letting you walk into and look around the space. It sets Wizards Unite apart from Niantic’s past work, and I wish that same ingenuity could be more apparent in other areas.

One aspect I both like but worry about the longevity of is the real-life multiplayer aspect, Fortresses. Though they can be tackled solo, you can join together with other players to fight through floor after floor of any Fortress you come across, putting in different combinations of runes to earn rewards. You’ll essentially use spell tracing to attack and block, but by choosing different professions and mixing with friends who have different abilities, there’s a nice bit of strategy that can really come into play beyond simple type matching. It’s a much more engaging system than tap, tap, tapping through every Pokemon gym around.

But, at least anecdotally, I’m not expecting to run into too many other wizards as I play. After exploring each day of launch week in San Francisco, I never once found another wizard by chance to play with. In one of the most densely populated cities in the United States, it’s a little disheartening (and perhaps unfair) to think back and compare this to my memories of rushing from one Pokemon gym to the next in GO’s launch month. I really like the flow and cadence of Fortresses, and when I’ve brought friends along it’s fun to cheer each other on and push toward victory together. But they won’t always be around, and that determination just turns into the vague hope that I’ve brought enough healing potions with me to push through.

And on that note, Wizards Unite of course still suffers the same problem any location-based game will: availability of things to do. While it will see some items populate based on time of day and weather, not density of your neighborhood, you’re still likely going to struggle to find things to do in more rural areas. And when spell power, which is required to deal with Confoundables and Fortresses, can be in short supply unless a lot of inns surround you, it can feel like Wizards Unite’s monetization is even more of a strain.