Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells Review

A mobile match-3 game in which you get to play as a wizard in Hogwarts, choosing your wand (out of a limited selection), and your very own house? I'm in.

Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells is a fun Harry Potter themed match-3 game in which you get to watch the stories of the movies unfold as you complete levels. It was exactly what my wife and I wanted because we were looking for a game to play together throughout the months in which we couldn't use our computers.

The game features everything you'd expect a match-3 game to have, thousands (yes, thousands) of levels to play through, power-ups for different kinds of matches, guilds that will allow you to team up with other players, and of course, power-ups that can be purchased and used to pass the particularly difficult levels.

The very first thing that charmed us about Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells was how many infinite lives players can get. With each event, players can acquire several hours worth of infinite lives that should make those same events easier to accomplish. This meant that my wife and I could play for as long or as little as we wanted (usually as long).

With several thousand levels worth of playing, the future of the game looked bright. However, after a few levels, the game changes the "scene" of the movie and introduces a brand-new mechanic along with it, such as the bathroom ogre that attacks Hermione in the movies, or the Devil's Snare.

Although most of these aren’t annoying when separate, once they began piling up one after the other the game began feeling more luck-based and certainly far harder to finish, and this was before I was introduced to several other mechanics that seemed rather unforgiving. It came to a point in which we asked our guildmates if one of the particularly annoying obstacles stuck around, only to get answered with "you end up appreciating it with the annoying ones coming up", which didn't bode well for the game.

The later levels also begin to become significantly cramped, often allowing only one or two moves to be made that might not even work towards accomplishing any of the three or four objectives present in that particular level and leading to inevitable shuffles. These levels often took the longest to beat, because there was no way to control what moves to make, and a lot of them were wasted on just trying to open up more opportunities to be able to work towards the objectives.

This isn't as much of a problem early on, as the levels are more skill-based apart from some few luck-based levels, but once the game starts picking up and making them harder and harder, it eventually becomes impossible to think your way out of any given level due to the sheer amount of things thrown at you.

Although the events assisted with infinite lives, those began suffering from several questionable choices. Most events have two different scores, one of which is based around how well you did individually, and the other around how well everyone in your team performed. Although the former often rewards handsomely enough, the latter tends to have the better rewards. This is a problem due to several balancing issues that should have no-brainer fixes.

For one, some of the guild-wide events that pit guilds against each other don't take into account how well some players will be able to score due to the level they are present in. A person that has played well over 1,000 levels and has to deal with three or four difficult objectives at a time can be paired up against one that is level 100 with some of the easiest puzzles still.

The other issue lies with house-wide events. While players that come from Gryffindor should be safe in these, those that create their character on the Hufflepuff house will have a disappointing time as their player base is practically non-existent, and beating the Gryffindor house is impossible for any of the other three.

Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells was so close to being a great game, but so many awful design choices brought it down. I wish the levels hadn't become so luck-based and the events had at least a little thought put into them that pit two different groups of people with a clear advantage on one of the two sides. The game should be tolerable in short bursts up to a certain level, but when reaching the mid-hundreds, it'll be more luck based and infuriating.