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Harry Potter: Wizards Unite available in Australia and New Zealand in open beta

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite available in Australia and New Zealand in open beta

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Worldwide fans will have to wait a little longer

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Image: Niantic / Portkey Games

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the Pokémon Go-style smartphone game co-developed by Niantic and WB Games, is now available in open beta in Australia and New Zealand. Players in the two countries can play the game now on both iOS and Android. The announcement follows a couple of false starts for the game, which included it appearing on the iOS App Store last month before quickly being pulled.

Back in 2016, Pokémon Go also launched in Australia and New Zealand first, before coming later to the US, Europe, and the rest of the world. However, at the time it was possible to get access to the game early on Android by downloading its APK from a third-party source. That doesn’t appear to be the case for Wizard’s Unite. Although we were able to successfully install the app using this method, it refused to load any content beyond a brief initial tutorial.

No workaround yet for players elsewhere

Wizard’s Unite is set to be a much more complex game than Pokémon Go was at launch, with artifacts to collect, characters to rescue, and an intricate set of skills to level up . When we tried it out for ourselves back in March, we found that this meant it was harder to immediately understand than Pokémon Go’s relatively simple gameplay loop of hunting for Pokemon and battling at gyms. However, its developers have noted that the game’s features could change over the course of the beta.

Harry Potter: Wizard’s Unite is available to download now in Australia and New Zealand on both iOS and Android. A worldwide release date is yet to be announced, but you can sign up to receive updates on the Wizards Unite website, or pre-register on the Google Play Store.