Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Welcome in to the magical world where wizards, witches, and many other creatures have grown to live in. Inside of this world, people have learned to harness the power of spells and brew an assortment of potions.
As a new student inside of Hogwarts, you’re expected to be able to learn all of this and more. A variety of quests are waiting for you to complete whether it’d be by the other students or even the faculty at hand. Not to mention there’s over 73 different locations to discover on Hogwarts, in the Wizarding World, and even inside of London itself.
Highlights
- An impressive recreation of the J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
- Immersive locations to discover and get lost in
- Various monsters recreated into Minecraft
- Tons of puzzles to complete
- A good amount of magic spells for different situations
This review was from John Glacious playing the map live on StickyPiston.TV.
If you wish to catch me live playing Minecraft Maps, tune into 📺StickyPiston.TV on Sundays @ 1 PM CST / 2 PM EST / 7 PM GMT. You can catch the playthrough of WitchCraft & Wizardry on YouTube. The playback can be found in the YouTube Playlist here:
Now it’s time to get a bit personal when it comes to this map. Originally I didn’t find myself wanting to play this map in my spare time. It’s not that I wasn’t impressed with the work I saw when being introduced to it – I was! It’s moreso just that, recently, I got stuck with moving consistently and playing a decent amount of magic-based modpacks with a group of friends. So playing another magic-based game just wasn’t on my list of playing.
However, I was recommended to start this out as my Stream Team Map for StickyPiston and I gotta say that I wasn’t disappointed. I want to tackle each point of interest individually so let’s go with the Resource Pack itself first. I think Floo Network did a good job at trying to translate what different characters looked like from the movies and games into Minecraft itself. The limit that Minecraft offers hinders what the team can do, but it’s not like I wasn’t recognizing characters the moment I saw them.
Moving onto the environments, they’re absolutely gorgeous. It’s not just that the team did well in making them look pretty, BUT they also recreated just about everything to the best of their ability! Hogwarts is an ever-changing environment and they did well in making it a confusing yet organized mess of a building. This is not to say it’s bad, but rather to say it shows how well they know what they’re doing! Even out of Hogwarts, places like Diagon Alley or the Ministry of Magic. I could go on and on about how everything looks.
Now we’re moving onto the final part of the map which is the gameplay. There’s a couple positives to it, but also a few things I feel like could’ve been improved into the game. Let’s go over the positives first. The use of potions and handling of spells out and during combat is pretty good. The variety that’s offered from Stupefy to Expecto Patronum has their uses and don’t feel like they’re overpowered for a beginning student. It also doesn’t feel like enemies overpower you too much to begin with. There’s easy ways to avoid them so long as you utilize the location around you.
However, unlike everything else there are some downsides to the combat that I experienced. Certain spells with double clicking right didn’t always activate and did require a 3rd or sometimes 4th click. Not to mention once there becomes a large group of enemies, it’s hard to deal a decent amount of damage to them asides from one spell. It’d be cool if we had a way to overcharge or handle spells a bit differently. I also learned a little after I finished the map itself that there was ways to utilize melee weapons, something I didn’t notice as nothing was told about them during the main game. The bag in general was a bit hard to get used to so I did wish there was another way that was handled asides from chat scrolling. I know the team did their best so it’s not a huge complaint, just a personal gripe at the end of the day.
Overall, Witchcraft & Wizardry looks great and was handled the best the team could’ve made it. While there is some irks to spells and combat, I do believe it was handled as well as it could be. Overall, I’d give the map a crisp 9/10. There wasn’t enough to hinder it from being a fantastic to play and I’d recommend everyone else to give it a look.
Want to play this map for yourself? Check out our Witchcraft ordering page to get yourself into the wizarding world of Harry Potter.