Harry Potter: Revue des champions de Quidditch

As I send another Bludger hurtling into a teenager’s skull with a satisfying ‘crack’, I have to admit one thing. Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions might be shallow, kitschy, and more than a little bit repetitive once you settle on your positions-of-choice, but it is a lot of fun. It’s the kind of fluffy time-filler I can see myself playing for precisely one week before putting it down again once I get sick of fake Lee Jordan and fake Rita Skeeter’s commentatorship – which, fais-moi confiance, I will.

For all its gimmicks and cyclicality, Harry Potter Quidditch Champions is a perfectly fine competitive multiplayer game. It’s by far the best representation of the wizarding sport yet seen in video game form, broadening the scope of 2003’s Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup to present its more tactical side. Cela dit, the spit-shined magical veneer can’t hide the fact that Quidditch Champions is neither the best Harry Potter game nor the best sports game of its generation – it’s simply an approachable blend of the two, and it seems quite happy to occupy that space.

A load of quaffle

The goal of Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is simple enough. Rotating through each quidditch position at the push of a D-pad button, you need to score goals, intercept your opponent, and be the first team to reach 100 des points. Alternatively, the team with the highest number of points after the seven-minute timer runs out will emerge victorious.

Like many other Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions hopefuls, I’d been holding out for something to fill the quaffle-shaped hole left in Héritage de Poudlard. The result is a competitive online multiplayer sports game with a solo campaign mode, though even that requires a steady internet connection.

Let’s get this out the way early: the live service elements of Quidditch Champions are predictably grind-y, but the free battle pass is nothing to sniff at. There are three currency types to collect in-game, all of which can be unlocked in the rewards track alongside cosmetics, brooms, and new equipment. To move through the seasonal rewards, players earn XP from completing challenges and matches. It’s a fairly standard way to chart one’s progress, though collecting all 50 stages of the rewards track is a bit of a slog. I had beaten all four of the game’s championships at least three times apiece by the time I’d reached level 10.

Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions wants you to find value through replayability, but unless you make use of the online multiplayer component, the experience grows dull quickly. I did have a lot of fun in campaign mode making my way through each of the four cups my first time around: starting with the Weasley Burrow Garden Cup, the Hogwarts Cup, the Triwizard Schools Quidditch Cup, and finally The Quidditch World Cup.

Developer Unbroken Studios’ beautiful renditions of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons’ school grounds respectively deserve a lot of praise, with the player transported to each school’s quidditch pitch when pitted against them during the Triwizard Cup matches. The vistas are striking, from the Aurora Borealis skies above Durmstrang to the snow-capped Alpine mountains encircling Beauxbatons, that I can even excuse Fleur Delacour’s bizarrely exaggerated French-English accent. Her voice acting is second only to the one and only Draco Malfoy’s when it comes to the most hammy performance in the game. But once I reach the all-important international battleground, I feel the whimsy of Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions steadily drain away. The reason? The Quidditch World Cup feels like it’s trying to be wizarding FIFA, only without much depth or customizability unless we’re talking about the elusive broomstick upgrades.

Something about the jump from high schooler to international quidditch star feels disjointed. Where the House Cup saw me donning the scarlet and gold as a proud Gryffindor, and the Triwizard Tournament put me in the shoes of an aggressive Durmstrang pupil, the World Cup wants me to choose a country to play for and lead it to victory. It all feels just so Ordinaire, putting a muggle-shaped dampener on what was supposed to be a magical experience. I’d have loved an option to play on a national level first, honing my skills with the Chudley Cannons or one of the other British quidditch teams we’ve heard and read so much about in the books and films. Tous les mêmes, I get my team kitted out in their Team GB best, smash through the rankings at Expert level, and quietly accept the World Cup.

With the air of magic neatly wiped away, I have to face facts: Quidditch Champions is a fun yet forgettable nostalgia play, and while a successful video game translation of the wizarding sport, it lacks the heightened stakes or momentum that would emulate a sense of realistic career progression in campaign mode.

Playing the field

Something about the jump from high schooler to international quidditch star feels disjointed.

After winning the cup, it’s back to square one. I thought a game about winning tournaments would give me a little more payoff for making it all the way through the four available scenarios, but nothing about winning the cup feels any different to completing heat after heat as a Hogwarts student.

The campaign track in Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is a fully solo experience, letting me swap between all quidditch positions with ease – though I am largely drawn towards Beater or Seeker. Beaters get to pelt people with metal balls, and Seekers get to ignore everything else and go hunting for the Snitch; I don’t mind the Snitch being retconned to provide 30 à la place de 150 des points, because at least that means I get to swap into the role twice per match. Alternatively, I take over a Chaser every so often to secure goals when I feel the enemy’s bot AI is too good at camping the goalposts.

The good news here is that each of the above positions feels distinct from one another. Each has its own distinct controls, with on-screen prompts to help you switch between them with ease mid-match. It makes for an easy job of finding which role suits your playstyle best, and given how many times you need to play and replay the same four cups, you’ll have plenty of time to refine your strategy. This is precisely what I do during my eight or nine-hours honing my skills in campaign mode before bursting onto the scene in multiplayer.

If the bots are aggressive at higher difficulties, playing against actual humans is even more brutal – and all the more enjoyable because of it. Beaters once again feel like the obvious choice for aggressive players, being the official playground bullies of the quidditch pitch with full licence to knock out Seekers repeatedly. It becomes a problem when there is a clear meta being set from the outset, and that meta seems to abandon the Keeper position entirely. When everyone wants to be a Seeker, Chaser, or Beater, it makes sense that the fairly idle goalie will be left stranded. This makes for tedious matchmaking sessions, a feeling compounded without any clear discernible balancing between players of different levels or experience.

At its core, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is a sports game for only the most hardcore Potter fans out there. Cependant, looking at its largely cosmetics-focused content roadmap on Steam, it doesn’t seem well enough equipped content-wise to keep them hooked in the long term. If you want to play a Harry Potter game, there are better ones to play. If you want to play a sports game, there are better ones to play. Sure it’s a good time in small doses, but for all its moment-to-moment enjoyability, Quidditch Champions is a technically fun, overwhelmingly average live service venture that was made for the few, not the many.

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