JamCity has released a new mobile game on 25th April for iOS and Android platform titled Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery. The very expected title attracted the eyes fans of Potter series written by J. K. Rowling. With every published book translated into several tens worldwide languages, countless readers had the ability to read out even eight hundreds pages book within several tens of hours, maybe within hour units. JamCity stands behind the games like Juice Jam, Cookie Jam, Snoopie Pop or Solitaire Jam. Didn't the studio take a great deal of a pie when wanted to create the mobile game which would aim at the hearts of the hard-core fans of Harry Potter? Let's look at the game more closely and make a picture of yourself at the end of the review.

Immediately after the first download of the app to your device, you will be intrigued by the very interesting graphics and music that can tune your ears and eyes to finally play Harry Potter and are part of the story. The plot takes place shortly after the attack of Voldemort to little Harry Potter.

If you were looking forward to having a letter in your mailbox at 11, you finally did. Harry Potter is still lying in the crib waiting for his spectacular arrival, but you already have the character you picked up with Hogwarts for a long journey to Hogwarts. It is entirely up to you whether you play for a boy or a girl, a black girl or a white man, a big chin or a small chin, distinctive eyes or decent ones.

Immediately after arrival to Hogwarts, Mrs professor, Minerva McGonagallová will welcome you, and she is the first and the last person dubbed at Hogwarts. According to App Store, the game should include Czech localization, unfortunately, it is not true. Do not get confused, the game contains only languages as English, Spanish, Korean, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. If you control one of the languages mentioned above at the intermediate level, you should not have problems with the plot itself and might enjoy the story of Hogwarts' mystery. If you do not speak any of the above-mentioned languages, we must disappoint you. So far, we do not have information about whether the translation into Czech is being prepared or not.

As the right magician, you will find yourself at Diagon Alley on the way to Hogwarts where you can find useful magical items which you will need during the study in the first year at School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After few sentences, you get to know that the characters weirdly smile very often instead of dubbing and weirdly swing. In the beginning, you eagerly read every sentence to understand the story. You might say: "I don't miss dubbing," but in some time, only reading and hearing weird squawks is boring.

The first impression is charming when you after several years come back to the world of Harry Potter and a while before him. As a small wizard or a witch, you will be forced to meet with new friends or with people who won't ever like you.

At the App Store, you immediately notice the game is Free to Play, so there must be a fly in the ointment which must make the game unpleasant or even absolutely unplayable. With the help of energy, which probably gains every year at school, it is necessary to attend Potion lectures and Charms lectures. Via little pinky gems, you gain your energy back and via little golden coins, you can improve and adjust the outfit. Now you may be asking yourself if it all is free of charge or the game thinks of players' wallets to be under pressure at any time while playing. Answer B is the right one. The energy is limited up to 25 stacks. Recharging of one energy takes 4 minutes. Easy counting, a full recharge will take you roughly 100 minutes. The usage I will describe later. The gems are useful for shortening the wait time (and you will be waiting for some time) or for recharging the energy. Gems do not add up for free but for real money. Here and there,  you gain few gems for meeting new friends and for the win in duelling. I can resolutely say that spending over thousands of Czech crowns is not a problem for a dedicated fan of Harry Potter. Afterwards, we get to the gold coins which you can buy for real money as well, but I have to say that you get some of them while playing - slowly, but surely.

Gameplay looks interesting at first sight, but most of the time the game cannot offer anything else. The title is based on a storyline and the developers didn't take much care about gameplay. Attending potion class, even different activities you just touch the screen like a crank and you point to the certain area. To learn a new activity, it is required to gain the specific level of success. Every level is represented by stars. Some of the lectors require three stars, some of them 2 stars out of five and so on. Any time you can choose your own time limit if you are not limited to the game. From the options, you can choose yourself to want to learn for an hour, three hours or eight hours. The time horizon does not affect the final result. Brighter readers may think, that the god damn energy is nearly behind everything. It is possible that first attend of potions might look very easy to get the full bar of stars but in the later parts of the game, it can become very difficult. As the time goes, the game forces you to buy additional energy. In that situation, I became a little bit nervous because I had to wait almost 100 minutes for recharging the energy to the maximum and then to waste it during one minute. Controllability is horrible, I could compare it to 4 years kids difficulty to control the game, really bad.horrible,

The plot is divided into several years, so you will find sufficient content but you will wait for it or help yourself with real money. I dare to say that the plot is fine and may attract many players, even I was pleasantly surprised. in total, the impression is ruined by simple and dull gameplay.  Although, you collect house points, rising empathy number and intelligence with which you during time have an influence on some situations in the story. Total impression is negative, unfortunately.

Flying on the broom, meeting new friends and many interesting chambers and corridors wait ahead but mainly, it's all about magic, potions and dialogues. Instead of attractive gameplay, you found out after several days that the game does not delight and you innerly wait for more attractive in-game progress. So, during lunch, you waste all of your recharged energy within few minutes and then you won't launch the game in 3 hours again. The idea to create a game based on Harry Potter saga was great and the story has been well-written. Half-baked steps in a form of learning new things are simply incomplete and unattractive. And so, the developers from JamCity were able to create such an important story-based title which attracted too many fans of Harry Potter around the world, but in general, the whole ecosystem of the game undermines the story-based title with its imperfections and forces the players to constantly purchase additional stuff. I'm so hopeful, that the developers will hear out the feedback of dissatisfied fans to adjust the prices of the in-game stuff or lower the time limit for energy recharge.

 

1. 5. 2018 19:45