Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition Gamestop
Hyrule Warriors on the Wii U was a love letter to the Legend of Zelda franchise, taking hack-and-slash Dynasty Warriors-style gameplay and scattering it across the series' strange timelines. Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition, the enhanced port for the Nintendo Switch, is even better. Now we have a true follow-up, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity ($59.99, also for the Nintendo Switch). This far-more-focused game serves as a prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and builds its aesthetics, mechanics, and story completely around that singular title. Age of Calamity is a bit deeper and more complex than its predecessor, but its appeal isn't quite as broad.
The Age of Calamity
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity takes place a century before Breath of the Wild, when Calamity Ganon is a looming threat over the kingdom of Hyrule, but not yet the devastating force that eventually takes over the land. You play Link before his century-long slumber, along with Princess Zelda, her loyal advisor Impa, and the four Champions of the Goron, Ruto, Zora, and Gerudo races. Ancient technology has been uncovered, including the four massive Divine Beasts, giant mechanical animals that could save the kingdom. If you already played Breath of the Wild, all of these concepts will be familiar to you.
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You fight through battles scattered across Hyrule's map, both large set pieces with multiple stages that advance the plot and smaller side missions that help build up your characters and resources. It's the same map as Breath of the Wild, and absolutely filled with activity. Not only are there dozens of side missions, but there are countless shops and character upgrades to unlock with the spoils you accumulate.
It's a dense game with a single campaign mode that's much more complex than Hyrule Warriors' simple, chapter-based campaign mode and grid-based adventure mode. It feels like a properly epic adventure in the same vein as Breath of the Wild, and indeed covering many familiar places from that game. The map's size and density is a bit harder to navigate than any of Hyrule Warriors' modes.
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Combat starts with the basic Hyrule Warriors concepts, but like the campaign mode's structure, it also quickly becomes more complex. The core combat elements are present: Y button for weak attack, X button for strong attack, and most combos are simply a string of weak attacks punctuated by a strong attack as a finisher. Pressing B dodges, and pressing A uses a special attack from a meter you build up as you fight.
That's just the start, though. The Sheikah slate's runes from Breath of the Wild factor heavily into gameplay, letting you move metallic objects, freeze enemies, jump up on an ice block, or throw remote bombs by pressing the R trigger and one of the face buttons. The runes add tactical options as you fight, and serve as context-sensitive counters to enemy attacks. Sometimes, when a big enemy winds up to attack, a rune flashes over it indicating what you should do to instantly block the attack and stun the enemy. That lets you drain its Weak Point meter to eventually perform a powerful Weak Point Smash. The runes are all based on a single, short timer that recharges, so you can't simply spam these powers.
You can also use magic attacks by picking up fire, ice, and electricity wands from Wizzrobe enemies. These are accessed with the L button and one of the face buttons, and let you aim at and bombard an area in front of you to exploit elemental weaknesses. The L button also lets you eat food when your health gets low; enemies and objects don't drop hearts like in Hyrule Warriors, but instead apples that both refill your health and fill your food bar so you can restore health when you need it. Apples are more rare than hearts were in Hyrule Warriors, though, so you need to be deliberate with your food.
If that isn't enough, each playable character feels significantly different, to an extent that reaches far beyond the different characters in Hyrule Warriors in complexity. Link is a standard hack-and-slash fighter, but the other characters each have different mechanics to learn. Impa sets runes on enemies and then hit those runes to summon multiple doppelgangers of herself. Princess Zelda uses the Sheikah slate in battle, so her attacks are completely rune-based, with additional triggers to set off different properties. The Ruto champion, Revali, jumps into the air and fly around the battlefield to attack enemies from above. The Goron champion, Daruk, generates lava with his attacks, which he can make explode. It's a lot of variety for a roster that's much smaller than Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition's.
It's Like Dynasty Warriors
Most missions fit the standard Hyrule Warriors/Dynasty Warriors structure of running around, slashing hundreds of small enemies and capturing outposts around a map. Larger enemies, such as Moblins, take longer to kill and require more strategy, and big monsters, like Hinoxes, take longer still. Finally, rival warriors equivalent to your character are the hardest and most complex enemies to fight, and the rarest.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity's maps are also more dense and complicated than the maps in Hyrule Warriors. Outposts are spaced unevenly, and rough, jagged paths can be a bit more confusing to navigate than the mostly easy-to-follow, straight corridors in Hyrule Warriors. It makes the maps look and feel more detailed, but it can also be frustrating if you're trying to quickly travel to a specific map point. It doesn't help that you don't get Hyrule Warriors' quick-travel owl statues that let you zip to places you've already been; you need to run everywhere.
For some variety, some missions task you with you piloting one of the divine beasts. Here the game changes from a Dynasty Warriors-style game to a lumbering mech combat game. You stomp or fly through sprawling maps filled with entire armies you can destroy with lasers, bombs, and other attacks. It feels like piloting an invincible mecha, though you can take damage from bombs flung at you. It's a fun, powerful-feeling diversion from the standard combat in the game.
Beautiful Carnage
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is a gorgeous game, with graphics much closer to Breath of the Wild than Hyrule Warriors. It has Breath of the Wild's stylized, slightly overexposed, muted-color, cel-shaded look. Dozens of enemies can appear on-screen at once, which is nice for hectic close-quarters fighting. Unfortunately, they tend to pop in at a medium distance, which limits how many you can see from far away.
The nice visuals don't translate into great performance, though. You won't get 60 frames per second on this game. On my Nintendo Switch Lite, at 720p resolution, the game struggled a bit to keep up a 30fps pace.
Specifically for Breath of the Wild Fans
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is a fine action game with plenty to do, and a satisfyingly robust combat system. It's denser and more focused than Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition, but that focus removes some of the charm. Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition was a love letter to the entire Legend of Zelda series, a game filled with familiar characters and places from several of titles. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is very much a Breath of the Wild-specific game, which is certainly fine (Breath of the Wild was excellent), but not nearly as much of a fan-pleasing barrage of elements from the entire series. It's a game that expects you to specifically love Breath of the Wild, and be invested in what happened before its events. If you dig that idea, you'll dig Age of Calamity.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (for Nintendo Switch)
The Bottom Line
If you want to know what happened the century before Breath of the Wild's events, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity tells that tale, with plenty of horde-wrecking combat.
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Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition Gamestop
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/hyrule-warriors-age-of-calamity-for-nintendo-switch