Posted in: Games, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Mobile Games, Niantic | Tagged: harry potter, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic, Niantic Labs, Wizards Unite

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite Secrets Revealed Part One Review

The Secrets Revealed Brilliant Event Part One wraps up tomorrow in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Let's take a look at what worked and didn't work in this highly anticipated event.

What worked in this Harry Potter: Wizards Unite event

• The Registry artwork: As always, Niantic delivers terrific Registry pages for their Brilliant Events. These are fun to look at, nostalgic to fans of the books (that's all of us, right?), and rewarding to piece together.
• The Special Assignment: This one felt fair. While the last Brilliant Event took me longer than usual to complete, I was able to get this one done by Thursday with fairly casual gameplay. The tasks were doable, nothing felt like a purposeful item drain, and the necessary Foundables were spawning at a reasonable rate.

What didn't work in this Harry Potter: Wizards Unite event

• The storyline: I can't believe I'm including this in the "What didn't work" section, as the opposite is normally true. This event was highly anticipated because of the story, but the truth is that nothing happened. Last time, Gareth Greengrass was revealed as the mole in the Ministry, and this time… well, I guess he tried to escape and got caught? The dialogue seemed inconsequential this time around, as if the real heat is being saved for Part Two. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite normally does a great job of the character interactions being highly enjoyable though, through humor and references to memorable scenes from the books. This time, though, I was left thinking, "Is that really it?" That's not to say that there's no nuance. Niantic's writers have us wondering throughout this sequence if something else is going on here and if perhaps Gareth is being framed. Is he, perhaps, under the Imperious Curse? Is he being made to make himself into a scapegoat? That's all in the narrative, which is something, but I found this installment lacking the whimsy and urgency of previous Brilliant Events.
• The gameplay: This is likely due to the release of a new update, but I've never had so many instances of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite freezing on me. Both before updating and after, I've had Foundables leave me frozen on the spell screen, I've had Portkeys make everything else on the screen unclickable after being touched, and I've lost Runestones from the Knight Bus randomly freezing once the battle began. Hopefully, the kinks will be worked out before Part Two.

Overall

This was one of the more playable Harry Potter: Wizards Unite Brilliant Events in recent memory due to a strong spawn rate and a fair Special Assignment, but a sudden loss of whimsy and urgency in the story paired with technical issues made it lack excitement.

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