Let’s be straightforward: Quidditch is not a good sport – at least not one that was ever intended to be. Actually be played. His role in the Harry Potter series was simply to show how special Harry is, to the point that it might as well have been called “Harry Potter, the Seekers, and Other People on Broomsticks, I guess.” So the development team at Unbroken Studios had a lot to do with Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions , having to both pay homage to the source material and adapt Quidditch into a real-world game. To everyone’s surprise, they did a pretty good job of that, with the moment-to-moment action on the Quidditch pitch being really great. But once you’re in between matches, there’s not much off the pitch in Quidditch Champions that makes you want to come back.
At first glance, Quidditch in Quidditch Champions is the same as in the books and movies. There are still four positions: the Chasers grab the Quaffle and shoot it at the opposing team’s goals, scoring ten points if they manage to score it; the Keepers defend those goals; the Beaters throw Bludgers to satisfyingly stun members of the opposing team, and if that fails, they can hit them directly with their bats; and the Seekers chase after the Golden Snitch, a diminutive, hard-to-catch winged ball worth a lot of points. But Unbroken has made a few changes to the rules that make things work better – the most notable of which is that the Seeker is no longer the only position that ultimately matters.
Matches end when one team scores 100 points or when the time limit expires, rather than ending when someone catches the Snitch. Speaking of which, the Snitch itself is worth a much more reasonable 30 points instead of 150, and can appear multiple times (usually about twice) in a game. This cleverly makes the times you can switch to Seeker a fun little (optional) bonus during the match, rather than a game-changing moment. There’s also only one Beater per team, rather than two, which makes a lot of sense considering how they can force other positions to play around them.
The end result of all these tweaks is, quite frankly, a better game. It allows Chasers to have just as much, if not more, importance than Seekers, while still keeping Snitch hunting critical, especially in close games. It allows Beater, who can immobilize an opposing team member if he deals enough damage, to be a powerful and strategic part of the entire match without completely dictating how it goes. It makes every shot on goal count, and most importantly, it ensures that matches don’t last six months.
So, the clever changes create a better, more entertaining version of Quidditch, but what kept me coming back was the way the action on the pitch felt. Flying around the pitch is incredible, especially if you master the Quidditch Champions movement techniques. Managing your boost meter and learning how to properly dodge and drift are the differences between accidentally passing the other team as a Chaser and pretending to be a Keeper to get the perfect shot, or keeping up with the Snitch on tight turns and taking a Bludger to the skull before you consider your choices while lying face down on the pitch for the next twenty seconds. The mid-match commentary will interject these plays both ways, although it’s unfortunately quite artificial and generic – whether it’s Lee Jordan at Hogwarts or Rita Skeeter at the Quidditch World Cup, there are some good lines here and there, but they’re usually reserved for the start and end of matches, while the stuff in the middle of the game is… to put it mildly, parched.
Luckily, each position has an fascinating role to play. I loved playing as a Keeper because I enjoyed the chess game between me and the opposing Chasers, reacting to their shots and dropping Playcalling Rings that restore energy to my Chasers and boost their speed; Chasers constantly attack each other to steal the ball, moving up and down the pitch and testing themselves against the Keeper; a well-played Beater can tear apart the other team, interrupting a Seeker’s play at the last moment or taking the Keeper off the board to allow a winning goal; and because Seekers can’t just catch the Snitch—they have to stay close to it and fill a meter before they can finally catch it—each battle for those bonus points is essentially a race against another Seeker. And because you can switch positions on the fly, you can spend as much (or as little) time in each role as you want. That’s great.
Of course, it’s even better when you play with friends. You can play co-op with two other players or take on teams of humans in 3v3 online action, although position swapping works a bit differently there. In that case, you pick a pair of positions—Chaser and Keeper, Seeker, or Beater—and swap them. What you lose in position flexibility, you make up for in team coordination. In my first online game, I played mostly as Keeper, making saves, using Playcaller Rings to set up shots on goal, and passing to my friend so he could score as Chaser. It was a close game, but we won because we worked together.
Quidditch Champions is great on the pitch, but unfortunately it’s pretty average off it. There’s not much to do beyond playing these straightforward Quidditch matches, either online or solo. You have a circumscribed career mode with four Cups to win, with the opening Weasley Cup acting as a (very good) tutorial. The other three are the Hogwarts House Cup, the Triwizard Quidditch Cup, and the Quidditch World Cup. After a series of preliminary matches, you’re seeded into a single-elimination, winner-takes-all bracket – and while that may sound invigorating, there are a few issues here.
Firstly, the Triwizard Cup and House Cup only feature three and four teams respectively, so the bracket stage is fairly low (and in the case of the Triwizard Cup, it only consists of one match, as a team is eliminated in the heats). Secondly, while you can play Career in co-op mode (and the menus encourage you to do so), Quidditch Champions doesn’t track your progress if you do, meaning I ended up playing the House Cup three times to unlock the Triwizard Cup. My first two attempts, done in co-op, didn’t save. I also didn’t get points for any games I played in the Challenges screen, which tracks your daily, weekly, and career-long progress in games and offers rewards for completing them, meaning I also missed out on unlockable cosmetic items. That feels bad.
Outside of the career, multiplayer, and mandatory practice mode, there’s not much to do in terms of modes, which makes the whole package feel slender. However, the character customization is at least pretty good. You can customize your team, allocate stat points to each position, and upgrade a few brooms to choose from, each with different stats. This tinkering is welcome; there’s a lot of options for your custom characters, letting you choose their appearance, how commentators address them, and a ton of frosty little things like robes, wands, emotes, and the like, although it’s a shame that the co-op progression issues mean you’ll have to grind through the single-player games to unlock a decent chunk of these items.
Don’t want to apply custom characters? You can unlock Harry, Ron, Hermione, Cedric Diggory, Draco Malfoy (ugh), Cho Chang, and the rest if you collect enough currency or, let’s say it with me, level up your Battle Pass. While your eyes may be rolling after reading this, the good news is that it’s completely free to play so far, and you earn everything just by playing. There are no microtransactions in Quidditch Champions; at least not right now. After all, it’s Warner Bros. – do you trust them to build an in-game store and NO ask you to open your wallet at a certain point? No, no.
