Before jumping into this review, I want to offer a quick disclaimer about the type of content being discussed. While there will be no major events spoiled outright, I do look generally at quests, puzzles, dungeons, and their rewards to give a better image of the game as a whole. If you intend to go into the game entirely spoiler-free, the verdict boxes at the end of the review will be kept as such. Having said that, they will lack the depth and context required to justify my thoughts.

A Slow Start on the Great Sky Island

The game opens in the same cinematic manner as its predecessor, skipping the title screen and taking you straight into depths of Hyrule Castle alongside Zelda. You're there to investigate the source of a new blight to the kingdom dubbed the Gloom, and fully powered up from your previous adventure, very little is going to get in your way. Though it serves as a natural introduction to the basic controls, its larger purpose is in showing you murals of the Zonai, an ancient race that you'll come to know more through the game, and the source of the Gloom himself, everybody's favourite Demon King: Ganondorf. Ending in a dramatic sequence of his revival, Link gets quite soundly beaten and weakened, Zelda disappears into the void, and the world shakes as a new calamity begins to unfold.

With the world below fragmented and upheaved, you wake up on the Great Sky Island, serving largely in the same vein as the Great Plateau of Breath of the Wild. It's here you'll learn the ropes by the guiding hand of a friendly spirit, being taught the basics you'll need to survive in the world below. There's a lot of parallels, and while I do feel it's a step up from the Plateau, it does lack that first major "wow" moment you had as you left the Shrine of Resurrection and ran up the hill. Here you get a much slower burn. To get a key mechanic out of the way, your core movement is pretty much the same as what you had in Breath of the Wild. You have the same freedoms, with the ability to run, jump, and climb, with the same limitation of stamina. The Great Sky Island is a much more interesting environment than the Plateau could have hoped to be, and the freedoms given to you by your new abilities open you up to a huge amount of experimentation out of the gate. It does a great job in cramming a lot of information into roughly an hour of playtime if you're eager to get to the surface, but can feel slower than it perhaps needed to on the grounds of you having had three wheels of stamina for the guided introduction before being powered down to just one. It's a tough battle to win. You know the Link you see at full strength isn't going to last, but with the introduction being so heavy on just running, I was more aware than I perhaps needed to be of how much I would come to miss having a bunch of stamina. While there was a lot to see on the Great Sky Island, I instead wanted to rush to get off it to start powering back up. It's not as though I didn't enjoy the island though, and the abilities acquired as I progressed were at the core of why I had as much fun as I did.

The Evolution of Abilities

Much like in Breath of the Wild, and I fear you might read that phrase a lot, the Great Sky Island features four shrines, with each of them either providing you with, or showing you how to use, a power that'll be useful to you for the rest of the game. To start with the most impactful of these, we have Ultrahand. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that your enjoyment of the game will in no small part depend on your enjoyment of this mechanic. At its core you can think of it as Magnesis. You have the same basic way of interacting with objects on triggering the skill where you point and click, and can then move it around. What changes here is that you're no longer limited to just metal objects, and the freedom you have to move the objects is vastly increased. You can now push, pull, rotate, twist, you name it. But that's not where it stops. The most significant part of this skill, and the foundation of many of the game's puzzles to come, is the fact you can fuse objects together. There's several levels of this, and the game breaks you in gently. My first thought, and the thought of many others I can only assume, was to make giant bridges to solve every problem. That worked, and even after beating the game, I have a profound sense of satisfaction every time I bridge a gap instead of doing something smarter and probably more intended. There's obviously more at play here though, and while binding together objects in the wild is fun to make rafts out of trees and the like, the ability comes into its own when you mix in Zonai devices.

As the hip new ancient civilisation on the block, Zonai technology offers an incredible range of gadgets and gizmos to glue together. Though you can find these out and about, they also quite conveniently come in capsule form, with you able to collect them from what are ultimately gachapon machines littering the landscape. Each of these machines contains four or five types of capsule, and they're generally setup to give you devices that are useful to your specific environment. The variety of Zonai devices on offer is more than enough to get you through the world, and opens up a degree of creativity that's never been explored in the series. If you want to ride around on a Green Goblin-style glider, you can build it. If you want to watch a camp of Bokoblins get assaulted by rocket drones, you can, if you would believe it, build that too. There are a few limitations in how the Zonai devices will just break after so much use, and even within that invisible timer they're powered by batteries. Despite that though they manage to be an incredibly engaging part of the larger game and remain both interesting and relevant even after 50+ hours.

That's just the first ability though. While the others may not be quite as impactful, they each fit in well to this new world, one even addressing a common complaint held against Breath of the Wild: durability. While there can be an argument made for it forcing you to use a more varied pool of weapons, there was a larger issue in ensuring you constantly had viable weapons on hand. Fuse fixes this, to a reasonable degree at least. I'll be blunt, durability is still a large part of this game. It's here to stay, for better or worse. At the very least, there's a justification in-world as to why the weapons are weaker and break so easily, with them having been decayed by the Gloom. What Fuse does is address a part of the issue in the difficulties of maintaining an inventory of viable weapons. In Breath of the Wild you could quite easily find Bokoblins carrying sticks, but you wouldn't be able to use those for anything more than beating the very enemies that carry them. Fuse evolves the weapon system by still making these basic weapons accessible, but allowing you to attach material from your inventory onto them for an assortment of buffs. Where previously beating your bog standard Bokoblin would give you a low-damage stick, you'll now get their stick and perhaps the horn that was on their head. In the worst case, you can throw those together and just like that, you have a relatively capable weapon. This expands further, with certain materials having unique characteristics. Gemstones now have a use outside of their value with diamonds and amber offering a good damage buff, and other stones adding elemental damage. The weapon types remain as they were in Breath of the Wild, adding further variety to fused weapons. Because the game makes basic weapons so accessible, I never felt like I was going out of my way for the sake of durability or having to prepare. If I ran out of good weapons, I'd make more on the spot and just carry on fighting.

Zonai devices also come into play for the Fuse ability, with you able to not only add them to your weapons, but also your shields too. With devices like flame and beam emitters available, it shouldn't take much effort to think up how they might be viable weapons, but shields? It's not something immediately obvious, but a good chunk of devices thrive when on a shield. You can throw a hydrant on your shield if you need easy access to water, a spring if you want a high one-time jump, or even a cart if you want the smoothest shield surfing of your life. It's a great mechanic that both addresses an issue of Breath of the Wild, and integrates well with the additions of its sequel.

The third ability worth talking about is Recall. As the name suggests, it allows you to reverse the path of any selected object. The Great Sky Island sells it a little short, demonstrating the ability by asking you to make some gears turn in a different direction so they'll carry you up them. That's cool and it's functional, but it only scratches the surface of what you can do with it. Thinking simply, anything an enemy throws at you can be pinged right back at them. That alone is incredibly strong, but with a bit more creativity, you can combine it with Ultrahand and create your own moving platforms to cross gaps or get you up a ledge. It's a powerful tool in finding alternate solutions to puzzles, and also serves as your primary means of getting back to the sky outside of warping, making use of rocks that fall from the heavens. As a skill it's unique in use since it slows time down when activated, giving you a good window to catch whatever it is you're wanting to rewind.

Our fourth and final major ability is a simple one to explain: Ascend. If you stand below a relatively flat ceiling, you can jump up to and swim through it until you reach ground above. This is a quality of life ability at its core, and aims to make traversal of vertical terrain that bit simpler. On top of this though, you have a fairly interesting potential present for hiding secrets, and it was fun to see how this was utilised. A closed door is no longer just a closed door; if there happens to be a way under the room, you have a new way in altogether. A number of mountainous areas now also have rocks and overhangs to pull you up, making the once-frustrating climbs that bit shorter.

An Upheaved World

The larger world has changed greatly in these past six years, and while we may have the same Hyrule as a base, it'd be disingenuous to just call it Breath of the Wild's map. Breath of the Wild did a good job of putting forward a vast landscape devoid of life after 100 years of a looming evil. Thematically I think it was quite interesting, but there was little in the way of engagement as you moved from point to point. Tears of the Kingdom takes what is ultimately the blank canvas of a beaten down Hyrule and presents it as a living, breathing world. If Breath of the Wild did an apt job in showing a downtrodden people, Tears of the Kingdom excels in showing a populus on the rise. You'll see people on the roads, more frequent locations of interest, and materials littered throughout the land from an era of rebuilding. It's a clever setting that works well with the new abilities given to you, and ensures you pretty much always have some kind of building blocks around you to start fusing away.

Enemy variety and placement throughout the world sees a vast improvement too. Gone are the days of Bokoblin and Moblins at every crossroad; we now have Aerocudas, Boss Bokoblins, Gibdos, Horroblins, Like Likes, Evermean, as well as the new Zonai Construct enemies that will fight Ganon's minions if they happen to meet. On top of this, you have a great assortment of new bosses spread around to support the returning cast.

Outside of the ground, Tears of the Kingdom gives you two other areas to explore in the sky and the depths. Given it's where you start the game, the floating islands are something you quickly become familiar with. The reality of it really isn't all that complex, and they mostly just serve as another area to explore, complete with their own style of puzzles and certain things that are only possible so high up. More than anything I came to rely on the sky more as a means of navigating the lower world than as something to explore. Moving over large areas and scouting the map for landmarks and shrines becomes much easier by using Reverse on a falling rock and getting a bird's-eye view. One thing I wasn't expecting is the inclusion of low gravity mechanics on the highest of the sky islands, giving you high floaty jumps that you can repeatedly initiate bullet time arrow shots out of. I wish it were utilised a bit more, with some of my favourite content in the game quite surprisingly being the three mazes lurking in the corners of the world.

Though you might remember these mazes from Breath of the Wild as being Guardian-littered balls of stress, they're now presented as a unique three-part trial. This trial is, as you might have guessed from the larger topic here, split between the ground and sky, and finally finishing in the depths. I really had a great time traversing between the different environments, and coming up with my own somewhat clunky ways to make it to the sky with the Zonai devices I had on hand. A part of me wishes there were more areas that linked all three layers of the game together, but I thoroughly enjoyed what was available.

The depths are our final layer, and probably the most interesting addition. If you happen to stumble into them as I did before progressing the relevant quests, you'll be met with a remarkably dark environment littered with Gloom. It's also around this point where you'll realise Gloom is in fact a new status ailment that will reduce your maximum health until you leave the depths. It's remarkably stressful, but as you figure out how to light up the world around you and begin to explore, it really becomes a highlight of the game. This is where you'll find the most difficult enemies, as well as some of its more lucrative treasures. Unlike the more limited sky islands, this area stretches beneath the entirety of Hyrule, giving you an impressive amount to do and see should it interest you to do so. Despite being a map almost completely devoid of human life, it manages to keep you invested with breadcrumbs to follow and frequent rewards through the darkness.

Let it Shrine

Shrines return in full force from Breath of the Wild with 32 more to find across the sky on top of the 120 throughout the kingdom, notably in new locations now. With a fresh new design and some new puzzles to go with it, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of them. With the nature of the abilities in Tears of the Kingdom, I can imagine it somewhat difficult to create a puzzle that has one explicit solution as so many of the shrines in Breath of the Wild had. While you can often pinpoint what an intended solution is fairly quickly, it's very rare to find yourself limited to just that option now. You can usually skip the puzzle with a bridge, by flinging yourself, by rewinding a platform of your creation, or by just making something obscure and outside of the scope of what the shrine expects. You aren't penalised for this in any way. Instead, the shrines act as a means of nurturing that creativity and showing you new and fun ways you can interact with the world. This is especially true in the new combat-oriented shrines that take your gear from you.

Similar to the Eventide Island quest in Breath of the Wild, these shrines take everything you had and present you with a limited set of tools to beat all the Zonai Constructs present. Each of these shrines comes with a theme. You might have one that focuses on vehicles, one that focuses on sneaking; my favourite was one that had you running around dodging attacks while setting more and more homing robots loose with weapons strapped to them. Even after clearing 90 or so shrines I still found myself looking forward to the next, which is a marked step up from my experience with Breath of the Wild.

Lending a Helping Hand

Looking outside of shrines and to the larger topic of quests, I found myself never lacking in a goal to be aiming for. Much of this comes down to the more active world, and every other NPC wanting something from you, or wanting to talk to you about something interesting. The quests themselves are nothing spectacular on paper. You might be taking a picture of something, you might be collecting materials, or using your abilities to clear an obstacle. Where they thrive is in the stories they tell and how they manage to make you care about even the least significant of characters.

Structurally quests can be broken down into three types: standard side quests, side adventures, and shrine quests. Side quests are what we're used to from Breath of the Wild, and will generally see you working with one character to solve an often-straightforward problem. Some of these can be quite lengthy, such as one NPC's desire to be told about each of the 58 wells in the world, but it's in side adventures where things really step up. A new quest type to this game, side adventures see you interacting with multiple characters on larger scale questlines. These might involve you trekking across the kingdom to follow up leads on the location of Zelda, or chasing a familiar face through the depths below. There's a little more variety at play and they feel like more significant endeavours, both in what you're being asked to do and your reward for completing them. As for shrine quests, you can really just think of them as a shrine puzzle outside of a shrine. You might get a riddle to solve, or sometimes need to get the shrine rock to the shrine location by following a beam of light Howl's Moving Castle-style. This style of transport quest is really elevated by the new mechanics, giving you all manner of freedom to get from A to B as you see fit.

Koroks make their return, and again you're tasked with finding 1000 of the blighters between the ground and sky. It is good to see the short puzzles that make them appear are a little more varied, making good use of the new abilities available to you. A surprising standout in this regard is in the escort-oriented Koroks, requiring you to get one Korok back to their friend a short distance away. You can naturally carry them softly, but there is much more fun to be had in strapping them to a rocket and watching them go. Between this added variety and the fact that a tight inventory isn't as much of an issue here as it was thanks to Fuse, I found myself just enjoying the Koroks as I came across them in oppose to feeling it necessary to seek them out.

As a whole I had a good time with the quests, but there were a few that had me guessing a little in what they wanted me to do. In retrospect I don't think these were the worst, but they did stand out quite clearly in a game that otherwise is fairly straightforward in its requests.

The Meat of the Adventure

The main quests are where you'll find the meat of the story content, and while I will keep my thoughts brief here for obvious reasons, I really did enjoy it more than I expected to. Much like Breath of the Wild, the story is split between two areas: the events unfolding around you and the fragments you learn via memory cutscenes. Though I did enjoy this concept in Breath of the Wild, it fell short in the larger context of the game with the stories having a significant disconnect. Learning about the past events and world was interesting, but it never really impacted your current quest in a meaningful way. This time around is different, and while I won't delve into it too much here, it does a much better job of linking everything together for a more cohesive experience. The game also explicitly lays out the order of the memories for you and where to find them within the world, which is a nice touch for those wanting to see events in chronological order.

The current-day plot is similar in structure to Breath of the Wild. Zelda is missing, and while each of the four major hubs would love to help you, they have their own issues to sort out first. And you'd better believe you're going to lend a hand. The Gerudo are suffering from an unending sandstorm, the Rito a blizzard, the Zora have sludge raining on them, and the Gorons are addicted to contaminated rocks. I really like these conflicts as opposed to it being the same issue of a big machine turning against the people, and it allows for the game to tailor each of these quests better to the area of the world you're in. Your efforts ultimately find you in a temple containing the cause of the issues, and while it might be exciting to hear the word temple, you should temper your expectations a little.

I do like the dungeons on offer here, but it's difficult to compare them to the dungeons of old. While there is a sense of linear progression in getting to the dungeon itself, it ends on reaching the puzzles. Again we're back to a similar structure to Breath of the Wild, though again we see it improved and refined. You have a number of terminals marked on your map that you need to get to and activate, but where I think this really thrives is in keeping with the freedoms the rest of the game offers. A number of these puzzles have alternate solutions you can employ if you're creative with your powers, and it really does feel good to skirt around what's expected of you. Each dungeon ends with a boss, and following the better enemy variety in the overworld, I had a great time seeing something outside of four very similar looking Ganon blights. The bosses themselves tie into the disasters currently occurring, and fit nicely into the world and environment they find themselves occupying for an engaging and fun fight.

Your reward for completing these dungeons is essentially a companion that can be summoned to fight alongside you. Each of these companions come packed with an ability matching their race, and feel like a more meaningful addition than the champion powers of Breath of the Wild. Instead of just having a new ability, you grow your party as you progress and finish with a team you feel you earned.

Hyrule's Many Collectables and Currencies

A nice touch is that you can upgrade these companions so they'll be able to do more damage and help you better in combat. There's actually a whole heap of things you can upgrade in Tears of the Kingdom, and while I do enjoy having so many things to be collecting and improving, it can feel somewhat unwieldy at times. You have Lights of Blessing to upgrade your health and stamina, Korok Seeds returning to improve your inventory space, Poes found in the depths and Bubbul Gems in caves for unique rewards, Zonaite for battery upgrades. Everything has a place and everything has a use, but a part of me does want it to just be a touch simpler. This extends to the menus too.

Breath of the Wild operated fairly simply, and to the credit of this new game, a good bit of that does carry over. In terms of menuing, there's just a lot more to fit in for Tears of the Kingdom, especially with how the Fuse mechanic allows you to put any material on the tip of your arrows. Instead of just being able to equip a fire arrow, you'll find yourself pulling up a menu and having to scroll through your entire inventory to find the material that'll give the desired effect. While it does keep your place on the menu if you want to use the same material twice, you need to go to the hassle of re-fusing the material each time. And if you want to go to a different material, it's your entire inventory you're scrolling through again. To mitigate frustration, you are able to sort by your most used materials, but a simple favourites radial or something on those lines would have gone a long way in streamlining what was previously a really simple endeavour.

Pushing Six Year Old Hardware

Now the Vah Ruta in the room I've somewhat avoided talking about up to this point is the console Tears of the Kingdom finds itself on. The Switch was never a particularly strong system, but what may come as a surprise to some is that the game manages to outperform its predecessor significantly. While performance prior to release, or on the cartridge's 1.0.0 patch, was noted to be incredibly inconsistent, the 1.1.0 patch went a long way in ensuring a consistent 30fps for the majority of the game. It's not to say there aren't slow downs, especially when using the new Ultrahand ability, and more especially when doing so in already-busy areas, but it was infrequent enough to not really distract from the larger fun I was having with the world.

Graphically it's not all too different a story to Breath of the Wild, though the use of AMD's Super Resolution tech may make the 900p docked image look a bit nicer to some. There are more technically-knowledgeable sites that can give you more rounded information on that though. To me, the game manages to look a lot better for the fact there's just more things of interest to look at. The sky is no longer just a skybox, and the depths introduce an entirely new style that works wonderfully. This isn't going to challenge the latest AAA hits from Sony or Microsoft, but considering the context of the platform we're on, it's a fantastic showing. I do live in hope of a more powerful system to play this on in the future, if only to see the graphics a little cleaner and smooth out those final stutters, but nothing the Switch has done has made me want to put the game down.

I do think it's important to address that the Switch does actually add a few features uncommon on other platforms that go a long way in improving the gameplay experience, with gyro aiming being front and centre. It's unbelievably nice to be able to just point and shoot, whether it be with the bow or just orienting your camera to mark a shrine in the distance as you're falling. It's fluid in a way that just works, supplementing the larger control scheme in a way that feels natural. Amiibo also return for those already invested in that ecosystem, but a pleasant surprise is that the vast majority of equipment is entirely accessible in the world regardless.

Final Thoughts

Tears of the Kingdom is marvellous and natural evolution of the gameplay set out in Breath of the Wild. Offering an expansive world full of things to keep you occupied and unique gameplay mechanics to keep you hooked tens of hours later, it is a must buy for the vast majority of Switch owners. While technically held back by the platform it finds itself on, it simultaneously serves as a testament to, and reminder of, what the Switch is capable of.