Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions review

Despite his name being in the title, Harry Potter doesn’t show his face all that often in Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions. Sure, he’ll make an appearance during the Seeker training part of the tutorial (because who else is going to teach you about the Golden Snitch?), but after that, Potter very much takes a back seat. This is all about your custom character and the rest of your custom Quidditch team, and it’s all the better for it.

There’s a decent campaign in Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions. After you’ve gone through the entertaining training chapter — where Harry and a number of the Weasleys will teach you the different roles in Quidditch — you’ve got several championships to get through, beginning with the Hogwarts cup. You can choose what house you want to represent, of course, and you’ll be playing against the other three houses, where you’ll see some familiar faces (Draco Malfoy, you’re going down).

The training will prompt you to play in every role (Beater, Keeper, Chaser and Seeker) but when it comes to playing a campaign match, you can choose the role that you feel more at home in. The Seeker, of course, aims to catch the Golden Snitch; the Keeper protects the goal posts; the Beater exists to antagonist the opposing team by lobbing balls (known as Bludgers) at them; and the Chaser tries to score by chasing the Quaffle and keeping possession of it.

If you prefer playing Seeker, as I do, you’ll find the role isn’t always available. The Snitch isn’t released until part-way through the match, so you’ll need to start out in a different role. Switching is easy: just a press of the d-pad will bring up a menu allowing you to choose the position you want to dive into.

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There have been some tweaks made to the “official” rules of Quidditch here, though, which impacts some of the roles: catching the Snitch, for example, will only net you 30 points, and it’ll be released twice each match. If you’re familiar with the Harry Potter books or movies, you’ll know that catching the Snitch is worth 150 points and the game only ends when it’s been caught. Not so here. It ends when the time runs out, or when one team has reached 100 points (each goal is worth 10 points).

A match may be short, lasting only a matter of minutes, but it’s enough to really get your teeth stuck into it. Controlling your broomstick is easy and it feels intuitive, whether you’re dashing for the Quaffle or tackling another player. If you’re unfamiliar with the world of Harry Potter, it might take a little time to wrap your head around the rules, but the training does do a great job of introducing the basics, so you can hit the ground running.

Outside of the main single-player campaign, you can jump into quick matches or take the fun online. Currently, the servers seem well-populated, so getting a match shouldn’t take too long. You can choose the roles you’d like to be in, although I suspect some may be more popular than others so you might have to wait a little longer. But even when I opted for Seeker (where there’s only one per team), I was up and running in a match in about 30 seconds.

There’s a good balance here between leaning into the Wizarding World at large and letting you focus on your own little team of Quidditch players, I think. There’s a nice bit of fan service for those who want it, and somehow it manages to capture the magic of Harry Potter that we all felt when we first read a book or watched a movie all those years ago. If you’re not a fan, it’s probably not going to appeal to you for obvious reasons, but even if you’re only marginally familiar with the world at large and like the idea of a sports game that isn’t Fifa or NBA, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is absolutely worth a go.

This review of Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is based on the PS5 version of the game, with a code provided by the publisher. It’s available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC. A Switch version is coming soon.