The Legend of Zelda: Tears of Kingdoms Review

In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you can ride heavy metal skeleton horses, eat boiled stones, and have fairies in your pockets. These aren’t even core aspects of the game.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of Kingdoms still has weapon durability, but you won’t care.

There are so many silly, cool or ridiculous nuggets hidden in Side Adventures, or crammed into hidden corners of the vast map. It was during one such side quest—hot on the trail of the aforementioned skeleton horse—that I said to myself, “This will be on the back of most games’ boxes.”

What makes Kingdom Tears so successful is that it combines an impressive sense of scale with mechanical granularity, meaning you can always interact with its open sandbox in creative and surprising ways.

The next adventure takes place at an indeterminate time after the previous game, Breath of the Wild, in which Zelda and Link rescued Hyrule from the Dark Beast Ganon following a cataclysm that used Evil monsters have destroyed the world.

As the titular princess and her legendary protector rebuild after the destruction, they discover a new enemy lurking beneath the castle of Hyrule, triggering another world-shocking event, the upheaval on land. The crippling gloom spread almost everywhere, causing ecological catastrophe and social unrest, with huge glowing rifts opening to dark, ominous subterranean regions below.

It’s a fittingly epic story with catastrophic stakes, but you can also take a back seat as you get lost in preparing food and potions, fighting Bokobrin and figuring out what’s on the other side of the next mountain , solving temple puzzles and repairs for each region in Hyrule’s diverse biomes as you progress.

The potential for non-linear discovery of story beats means that the number of repetitions between main missions is a bit odd, but the masterful, expansive score in the talking cutscenes sets a good mood for these crucial moments–even if the dubbing itself is ham-fisted.

Underpinning it all is the great strength of Tear of Kingdoms lies in its physics system, which provides exciting unpredictability to combat and iterative variety to puzzles.

On the battlefield, the much-debated weapon durability mechanic is back, with Upheaval causing every weapon in Hyrule to rot to the point of breakage. However, in Breath of the Wild, this resulted in you hoarding high-powered weapons for emergencies, whereas weapon collection in Tears of the Kingdom is more focused on the new Fuse power.

Fuse lets you bind one weapon with another to make a new weapon, or – even better – combine a weapon with a monster part or item to create something completely different. Fusing a stick with a sword…well, a stick with a sword on the end, and fusing a sword with an electric chameleon horn creates a jagged blade filled with lightning.

This means you’ll likely draw from a smaller pool of discrete base weapons, but you can craft more variants with a ton of different items you can scavenge. The ubiquity of these fusion parts means you’re less precious when it comes to actually using the weapon, knowing you can make another without a lucky drop.

Fuse is an essential part of the game and the key to TotK’s DNA.

Fuse is a great example of dealing with criticism wisely. Tears of Kingdoms not only does away with the controversial weapon durability, but situates it more firmly in the storyline, then builds the mechanic by giving you a reason to be excited when something breaks – now you have Opportunity to invent something more interesting.

Piecing bits and pieces together is also how you solve most of Tears of the Kingdom’s puzzles, whether it’s manipulating objects into a target, building a rickety bridge, or building a makeshift platform that slides along certain tracks. Fuse, and the way it interacts with the pre-existing Zelda sandbox, allows for a whole new and very compelling part of the game loop that Breath of the Wild doesn’t have at all — and a key part of the sequel’s identity.

You use the power of your Ultrahand to connect things together, and overcoming obstacles has a “holy grail” feel to it, like you break the game when you accidentally find a solution.

Ultrahand is also what you use to put parts together to make the planes, cars and other vehicles you might see in the trailer (but unfortunately building wacky race cars has fewer numbers in the program than I’d like ).

Link uses Rewind power to throw a giant spiked ball in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — Be kind and rewind.

Building simplification is powered by the same resources you use to upgrade your total battery power, which can feel very expensive. But when you do have the opportunity to get creative with a vehicle, it’s great to jump into it.

For a while, the biggest question hanging over Tears of the Kingdom was its performance on the Nintendo Switch, a six-year-old hybrid console that wasn’t even the most powerful on the market when it launched. game console. But first-party Nintendo exclusives almost always wow with a unique style that makes the most of the system rather than striving for realistic graphical fidelity. It’s just that the recently released open-world Pokemon versions cast doubt on that, really.

With that in mind, my overall performance during the game was fine. However, it’s definitely clunky in places, with frequent decelerations and a noticeably shorter draw distance that slowly bring distant objects into view.

This slowdown feels like a reaction to the sheer amount of physical interaction happening at any one time. A particularly large explosion will drop framerate (and anyone or anything unlucky enough to stand within the blast radius), and one story area with lots of flowing lava and floating particles is more prone to collisions than others.

Plus, playing this exclusive game on the Switch makes loading screens feel rather long and frequent compared to newer consoles.

But really, these technical complaints are just my brief pause in Tears of the Kingdom so far–they don’t define it.

While it takes place on the same map as Breath of the Wild (with some key changes, of course, due to time jumps and upheavals), Tears of Kingdoms feels distinct enough from its predecessor to be entirely separate, thanks to new powers and mechanics. It’s a massive open world that feels dense and exciting without being clogged with icon fatigue, since much of the game is based on physical interactions with core mechanics rather than rigid systems.