The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom reviews
by Adam Knox
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom can be described using many of the most tiresome and alarm bell ringing words of video games from at least the last couple of generations. It’s an open-world game sequel, with crafting and building mechanics, reusing the previous game’s map and many of its mechanics, and so on. Tears of the Kingdom somehow manages to deftly, creatively and entertainingly jump through these critically derided hoops with Nintendo’s trademark charm and attention to detail, landing in a graceful gymnastic dismount, middle fingers on each hand raised high at every other mediocre video game that ever caused us to doubt these concepts in the first place.
We’re back in Breath of the Wild’s version of Hyrule, which is facing another crisis that Link is tasked with solving over the course of the game’s noticeably more interesting story. Seeing how the people and places have changed since the 2017 game is intriguing, the amount of things to do is one again huge, and the differences are interesting enough that they would have likely been enough on their own for this to be a great follow-up. The sky islands and new twists on old areas bring back a lot of that exploratory joy that made Breath of the Wild so special, but what really feels fresh about this sequel are the new powers Link has been granted.
You are now able to manipulate a huge amount of objects in the game, sticking them together to create imaginative contraptions. You can fuse items to your weapons, shields and arrows, giving them extra strength or bonus functions. You can jump through ceilings above you, swimming magically through to the other side. And you can rewind objects through time to throw rocks back into the enemies who flung them at you, or perhaps to ride a fallen piece of debris back into the sky from which it came. These systems are quite open-ended and versatile, allowing you to apply a surprisingly intuitive level of spatial reasoning and logic to the game’s puzzles, giving combat an improvisational sandbox feeling that improves upon the original, and adds to the sense of freedom when roaming the world. Its all well-executed and incredibly satisfying.
This complexity can occasionally mean that you may struggle with the game’s controls, and the menus are not laid out particularly well for how often you’ll be trawling through them to snap an eyeball to an arrow or whatever it is you may be doing. And then there’s the elephant shaped Divine Beast in the room that is the fact that this game is stuck on the Switch. Nintendo games have for almost 2 decades now had to come with a caveat of how impressive they look “for a Wii/Wii U/Switch/Probably-whatever-console-is-next game”. What they’ve squeezed out of the Switch for Tears of the Kingdom is impressive, but the frame-rate drops in particular are an irritation that perhaps wouldn’t be necessary on other hardware. Conjecture aside, what’s here works, and the fantastic art and music mean that the presentation matches the high artistic standard set by Breath of the Wild.
Tears of the Kingdom builds on its predecessor’s success by giving you a creative new toolbox to use on a well made second helping of inventive, appealing challenges. It’s perhaps not the revolutionary monument which Breath of the Wild managed to become, but Tears of the Kingdom is just about as much fun as you can hope for a video game to be.
10/10
by Ben Vernel
It’s been six years since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild revolutionised the open-world video game, introducing a level of subtlety, discovery and fun to a genre that had fallen into a rut (and the rut had a glowing yellow marker in it). While it was light on story, it was heavy on just about everything else that comes with a sandbox exploration action game - impeccable world design, true-to-life physics that allowed real experimentation with the game’s robust mechanics, ingenious puzzles, and…well, competent combat. Nintendo’s patented sheen of polish held the experience together, with gorgeous UI design and beautiful music.
So now, more than half a decade later, we return to this console generation’s version of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to discover that while a lot has changed, a lot more has remained the same. In the ‘changed’ column we have: a vastly improved story, new and improved magical abilities for you, as Link, to manipulate the world around you, extra verticality to the landscape for you to explore, construction mechanics, and a greater variety of enemy types to tackle. What’s the same? The ground landmass, the towns, many of the characters, the menu sounds, most of the music, the combat, the non-linear structure, and while the story is more interesting than last time, it follows very familiar beats. It’s lucky for Tears of the Kingdom that everything it retained from Breath of the Wild was done extremely well the first time round, with Nintendo wisely adopting an “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” approach to a lot of what made Breath of the Wild so good.
Shrines - self-contained puzzle levels - are back, and remain plentiful and enjoyable, largely focused on teaching you or testing you on one particular ability or mechanic. Towers that reveal the map are here again, with a twist. Koroks are scattered around, providing seeds which allow you to expand your inventory. Side quests are here again, but are a little bit more interesting and fresh this time. And while everything that’s back from BOTW is still great, all of the new concepts, mechanics, enemies and ideas are absolutely spectacular. Exploring, puzzle-solving and even tackling the game’s main questline are all made more fun with the introduction of Link’s new abilities, and small tweaks to gameplay streamline the overall experience.
Sadly, this phenomenal artistic achievement is still hampered by the underpowered Switch hardware, with frequent hitches and framerate drops during key moments in battle and exploration, putting a dampener on what might otherwise have been truly transcendental moments. Textures will often look blurry and low-res before suddenly popping in, and the draw distance and adaptive resolution switching mean that things can become extremely muddy.
And it must be said that a lot of the freshness and excitement of BOTW has not been recreated here due to the recycling of the previous game’s landmass, towns and characters. We revisit the same stables and stores, climb the same mountains, and stumble across the same odd characters as we did in 2017. They’re still great characters, fun designs and tough mountains to climb, but because I saw them once before - and felt like I’d organically discovered them - it simply can’t feel as surprising and enjoyable as it did the first time round.
Had the same amazing creative team decided to design a completely new land for us to explore, with sky islands and caves to boot, then this would easily have leapfrogged Breath of the Wild in my favourite games of all time. However, as it is, Tears of the Kingdom feels like the most amazing, expansive DLC I’ve ever played, and I can’t wait to finish this sentence so I can dive back in.
9.5/10
by Tommy Dassalo
As the release of ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ crept up, I had my tinfoil hat firmly on, convinced that Nintendo had some big trick up it’s sleeve.
Surely what they’d been showing off was only the tip of the iceberg, deliberately baiting their audience so that they could pull a massive switcheroo on us. After all, this feverishly anticipated sequel was using the same map as it’s predecessor.
They couldn’t seriously be expecting us to spend another hundred plus hours running around an identical landmass. How could that possibly be fun and exciting all over again?
As it turns out: yes, they did and yes, it is.
After a lenghy tutorial on the new Great Sky Island which introduces Link to new abilities, new weapons, and new enemies, we skydive through the clouds to old Hyrule, which is full of old enemies, old locations and old items.
The sense of discovery and wonder that Breath of the Wild evoked felt like a once-in-a-generation feat, impossible to recreate - even if Aonuma and his team had opted to create an entirely new location for this game. What’s remarkable is how close Tears of the Kingdom manages to get to that feeling, while asking you to see and do a lot of the same things.
It’s perhaps unfair to have spent this long fixating on how similar the experience is, because the Hyrule of 2023 has been absolutely stuffed to the brim with new things to experience. Admittedly, I played Breath of the Wild to the exclusion of all else when it launched on the Switch and I haven’t been back since, but I don’t recall stumbling across this many characters, secrets, curiosities, treasures and items back in 2017.
That’s not to say that Nintendo’s approach has been limited to simply jamming more weird little freaks into every nook and cranny of this map. A great deal of the joy of discovery in Tears of the Kingdom comes from the familiarity with the Hyrule of it’s predecessor and learning what’s happened in the intervening years. Entire villages have been changed by the apocalyptic events that fuel the story. Routes in and out of areas are now blocked by giant structures that have fallen from the sky, and townspeople gather around to casually pontificate about what this strange phenomena could mean.
For Link, what it means is a bunch of new bullshit to mess around with, in form of new powers and ancient technology.
I’ve never found myself drawn to building and creation in games, so I was skeptical that this mechanic (like for a car ha ha) would feel exciting and necessary, and not just a cheap and hollow way to make feel an old map feel different, simply because you can drive a truck around it now.
Obviously, I needn’t have worried. Shrines will routinely force you to make specific contraptions in order to solve them, and these always feel fun and engaging - less focused on trying to break your brain, and more interested in showing you some neat tricks and inspiration for out in the “real world”.
Organic puzzles that you encounter on your travels might take place next to a convenient pile of wheels and lumber, not-so-subtly hinting at one possible option for how you could solve this particular dilemma, but the experimentation is left entirely up to you - you could take those materials and attach a rocket to them, or you could forego all of the creatives options and simply carry the target to it’s destination. While Breath of the Wild was operating with a much more limited toolset, it’s ethos has been carried over: there is no right or wrong way to play this game.
There’s a million other things going on here that I adore and I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Weapon durability and increased variety in enemy types working hand in hand to create a rewarding new system that enriches the experience of combat and rewards ingenuity. The music has stepped up and become way more prominent and interesting, the light piano flourishes of Breath of the Wild mingling with sombre horns and ambient electronica.
It's thrilling to be conversing with friends who are playing this game like we did six years ago but in a way that still somehow feels fresh and new.
At the time of it’s release, I was someone who felt like Breath of the Wild was as close to perfection as it’s possible for a video game to get. Somehow, Nintendo has improved on that, by simultaneously doing a lot and not much at all. Turns out they did have a twist up their sleeve.
10/10