

Hagrid, for instance, appears in the game’s tutorial in a moment that nicely calls back nicely to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in which Hagrid is the first magical being our hero meets prior to arriving at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In return, players get to see augmented reality cameos from some of their favorite Harry Potter characters.

Where Pokémon Go requires players to actually walk around with the app open to locate monsters to catch in various real-world locations, Wizards Unite has them looking for traces of magic. the world of unmagical humans like you and me - and it’s up to Wizards Unite players to clear them out. There have been “traces” of magical energy detected throughout the Muggle world - a.k.a. The game transforms players into a wizard tapped to help out Harry and an original character named Constance Pickering, both of whom work at the Ministry of Magic (one of the most important governing bodies in J.K. Wizards Unite transplants some of Pokémon Go’s core gameplay features into Harry Potter’s beloved wizarding world. (There are plenty of in-app purchases, although you can play without indulging in them.) The launch came as a surprise, one day earlier than Niantic’s originally advertised release date of Friday, June 21. It’s called Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and as of Thursday, June 20, it’s available as a “free-to-play” download on iOS and Android.

And yes, that’s a pun, by the way, because Niantic’s latest augmented reality game for mobile is centered on Harry Potter. Although the heat hasn’t completely died down on Pokémon Go, it’s not even close to having the near-ubiquity it once enjoyed, so now the game’s developer, Niantic, is looking to recapture its magic. Remember Pokémon Go? Like millions of other people, you probably at least tried the augmented reality mobile game back in July 2016, when it became an immediate monster-collecting phenom upon launch.
