Sports are hard. Playing sports requires a lot of time and energy most of us don’t have — not to mention the social aspects of coordinating schedules with other adults. Watching sports can be brutal, too, thanks to the heartbreak of seeing your favorite team fail or the endless rabbit holes of stats, facts, and trends. Yet these pale in comparison to inventing sports. Imagine the confidence it takes to create a new sport and expect people to care. But if it can happen for curling, why not the most popular sport in the bestselling children’s series of all time?
Harry Potter Quidditch Champions from Unbroken Studios landed on PS+ on Sept 3, bringing with it Potterheads’ best chance to experience a Quidditch pitch since 2003’s ill-fated Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup. While nominally a Quidditch game, that entry didn’t have the speed or intensity fans expected. This time, Unbroken Studios delivers the feel of Quidditch with a fast-paced, strategic sports game that plays like Rocket League on flying broomsticks.
Quidditch Champions is the rare fandom-driven title that manages to succinctly explain itself to newcomers without boring them to tears. The intro tutorial is superb at explaining how Quidditch works and how playing Quidditch as a video game works.
For the uninitiated, here are the basics. Each end of the Quidditch pitch has three goal rings, and the objective is for players to send the quaffle (the ball) through the hoop to score 10 points. Simple enough. The skill and strategy come in on the different positions on the field.
Each team has three Chasers whose job is to move the quaffle up the field and score. Standing in their way are two Beaters, defensive players who can tackle Chasers or pummel them off their broomsticks by hurling Bludgers (an iron ball). Every player has a health bar so it's possible to knock them out of the game completely.
A Keeper (goaltender) posts up in front of the hoops and tries to intercept the shots before they go in. The wildcard position of Quidditch, the Seeker, is tasked with chasing around the golden snitch. Anyone vaguely familiar with the franchise will remember the titular Harry Potter in this role on the Quidditch pitch. It’s massively OP in the books, as capturing the Snitch is worth 150 points, or 15 standard goals. In Quidditch Champions, it’s been nerfed to 30 points, or three standard goals. Seekers only enter play once the Snitch does, so it adds an element of excitement and surprise.
Where Quidditch Champions succeeds most is that it doesn’t require you to know anything about all the trappings of lore hung about everywhere. The tutorial puts you on the Quidditch pitch at the famous Weasley household, and you practice against the who’s who of Harry Potterdom, including Harry. If you could care less about the franchise, there’s a fun little game here to enjoy regardless of how many online Sorting Hat quizzes you took in middle school.
Because Quidditch is centered on flying broomsticks, Quidditch Champions feels like a hybrid of flight combat sims and soccer. Players can zoom, evade, dive, and drift with ease thanks to responsive, intuitive controls. It’s fun just whipping around the pitch in the tutorial and it gave me Pilotwings 64 vibes.
Once you finish the tutorial and play full matches, you can switch to different positions using the d-pad. Opposing team on a breakaway? Switch to your Keeper. Snitch on the field? Time to go Seeker. Bad day? Take out your frustrations as a Beater.
While the fundamentals are sound, the difficulty and long-term prospects for the game are less so. Playing on easy is laughably so, with reports you don’t even need to touch the controls to win matches. Higher difficulties do present more of a challenge, and the single-player campaign to take the Quidditch Cup will keep you busy over the weekend.
The AI does get a little better, but it’s hard to say for certain where it will end up right now as there will be lots of patches and rebalancing going forward. Online multiplayer is restricted to 3 vs 3, a curious decision given the strength of the game is how well it handles the mechanics for the four different positions.
I’d be remiss not to mention the mobile game feel of the aesthetics and currencies (available for purchase, of course) for unlocking new costumes and upgrades and whatnot. In the short term, this won’t be an issue for curious fans and PS+ subscribers, but it won’t be immune to the same live-service woes you’ll find elsewhere in games these days.
Still, as a new addition to a subscription service, Harry Potter Quidditch Champions is about as good as it gets. It’s easy to pick up, fun for a few hours, and has the potential to hook players who love sporty gameplay but don’t have tons of time to commit to something. For a franchise steeped in fandom, this is a bit of casual fun anyone can enjoy.
