Harry Potter: Magic Awakened hands-on — F2P has no business being this good

I'm talking Genshin levels of polish here, high-quality stuff

Harry Potter: Magic Awakened is a collectible card game from NetEase that's found massive popularity in China and other Asian territories since its initial launch last year. Seeing that it made over $228 million in its first two months, the game is coming West. The English version is in testing now that's it's available for pre-registration, and so I sideloaded the title to test the gameplay while recording a lengthy gameplay video to share with everyone.

So if you've been curious to see exactly what Harry Potter: Magic Awakened will bring to the table when it's inevitably released in the West this year, I've gone hands-on to clue everyone in. Surprisingly, things are much more polished than anticipated, so pack up your preconceived notions, Harry Potter: Magic Awakened just may turn out better than expected.

Above, you can view the first hour of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened. Keep in mind the game is currently in testing in the West, so some bugs are present, like the doubled audio at the beginning of the video. All the gameplay was recorded at 1080p at 30FPS, and while the game does offer graphical settings to adjust both resolution and framerate, changing these did not actually change the framerate. So clearly, some settings aren't fully functional yet.

Of course, the first thing I noticed when I booted up Harry Potter: Magic Awakened was that it's incredibly polished. Like Genshin levels of polish, and I'm not kidding. First and foremost, the graphics are simple yet stylish, which makes for an excellent cell-shaded look that isn't too demanding. Even while recording a gameplay video, my ROG 5 never got too hot.

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Beyond the inviting graphics is an overall design that pays tribute to Harry Potter lore. You enter Hogwarts on a boat, just as a first-year student should, with teachers and characters derived from both sets of movies, along with tons of supporting characters that ensure the world feels familiar while remaining respectful of the media that inspired it. The music is also top-notch, though a little Christmassy at times.

Best of all, the cards you collect, the very things all of the gameplay is built around, well, each card offers a lore-filled description, a slick animation, as well as video that displays its attack/power. I'm honestly flabbergasted by the attention to detail. Few mobile games bother to respect their brands as well as NetEase has with Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, and that's something to celebrate.

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As for the gameplay, this is a card-based game, and you will collect these cards to build out a powerful deck. When battling enemies, you are provided a pool of replenishing points, and each card uses a certain amount of these points, so you have to pick and choose the attacks most pertinent to taking down your enemies by dragging and dropping your cards right on top of them. It's a simple RPG setup just about anyone should be able to grasp, with enough complexity to keep people returning to build out better decks.

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The current balancing sees you earn cards at an even clip, with an almost insurmountable amount of content available spread across several game modes as well as a PvP section. What's really great is that all of this content contains animated sections that move the story forward, as there is a heavy emphasis on the story, again illustrating the game's overall polish. You're constantly immersed in the Harry Potter universe.

But here's the thing, Harry Potter: Magic Awakened is still a free-to-play game that contains competitive PvP, and since this is a card game all about collecting cards, you can indeed pump money into a secondary in-game currency to purchase as many card packs as you like, which means just like all collectible card games, the PvP gameplay of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened is by definition pay-to-win, perhaps explaining precisely how the game earned $228 million in two months. This also means the homescreen is absolutely cluttered with alerts and buttons, which is highly annoying as the alerts never stop.

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So it would seem NetEase has taken a page out of miHoYo's book to bring to the table the most polished Harry Potter mobile game we've seen to date. In contrast, the annoying underpinnings of F2P mobile games remain, with heavy monetization that leans towards paying to win. Still, Harry Potter fans will indeed get a kick out of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened thanks to its stylish/performant graphics, nostalgia-driven music, and lore galore. Even if you don't plan on competing in the game's PvP, I can see why HP fans might want to spend time in the game collecting its cards, and since there is an absolute wealth of content to explore across several modes, there's no shortage of ways to earn new cards. Sure, it's still early days, and things can always be rebalanced for the worse, but for now, my first impression of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened is that I'm cautiously optimistic.

About The Author

Matthew Sholtz (1812 Articles Published)

Matthew is a furious nitpicker and something of a (albeit amusing) curmudgeon. A person who holds an oddly deep interest in Android and advancing the state of gaming on the platform. Some may say a ridiculous task, but it is one he is willing to take on from the comfort of his armchair.

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