So over the weekend I've sunk about 24 hours into my first Zelda game in the last three days. As promised I am here to provide my review. A couple of things to note though before I continue. No, obviously after 24 hours of playtime I have not beaten the game. I've done two of the major dungeons, about 30 or so shrines, and a ton of random shit out and about in the world. I also probably died at least 100 times, maybe more. After all of this I feel like I can justify putting the thoughts on my experience.
So what I decided to do with this write-up is to break down the game into sections and review each section in chunks. That way it breaks down my thoughts easier, as well as makes things hopefully easier to read.
THE WORLD:
So let's start with the huge world that Breath of the Wild instantly offers to the player. It's huge, it's impressive looking with wildly different settings that transition in natural ways that running into a forest from open plains doesn't feel sudden or jarring, it melts together very nicely. The dynamic weather also helps the world feel complete like you are actually in a real world. However I do feel like the world is TOO big, which is a crazy thing to say, but hear me out. As you explore the world, you'll pretty much come across the same handful of things over and over again. Towers, shrines, enemy camps, rinse and repeat. While there are some scatters little extras here and there, I found that most of my journey was spend just running and working towards something in the distance, either a tower or trying to find a shrine that my compass said was nearby. The sense of wonder and excitement at discovering things wore off on me really quickly once I realized that everything in the distance was only going to be one of a couple of things.
Now I know there are little forest keeper dudes to find tucked away and there are some scattered world puzzles here and there, but those things felt too spread out to add any real impact on my play. Honestly it felt like the developers were soooo in love with their world, that they just kept making it bigger and bigger. There is even a loading tooltip that tells you your horse will run along paths automatically so you can look around without bothering to navigate. That speaks volumes here.
Compare the world to something like a Far Cry game, or the Witcher 3. In these games the map is literally showered with shit to do, and each activity is varied. Saints Row 3 did this very well do with almost a dozen different mini-games to find on top of collectables and such. The Witcher 3 offers boss hunts, puzzles, treasure hunts, beast dens, full storied side-quests, herbing, and a CCG.
That isn't on offer here. And that was my biggest fear, was that they would make a huge, beautiful world, (and it is really really good looking) but not have enough different things to do to justify it.
SHRINES AND DUNGEONS:
This is where the game truly shines in my opinion. The puzzles in BoTW feel like the most creative things in the game. It's where everything just comes together, all your tools can be put to use in wonderful ways to solve the puzzles. Oh, right...So Shrines and Dungeons are found all over the world. There are over a 100 shrines which act as short mini puzzles that provide you with items and level up points, and there are 4 or 5 main Dungeons (think Earth, Fire, Water temples from previous games). While the shrines are small bite sized little adventures, the Dungeons are big, complex and elaborate beasts (literally) which end with boss fights.
It is the puzzle solving that I really liked in this game. Almost every puzzle has multiple ways of solving them and it was a lot of fun playing beside a buddy and finding out that we tackled and solved almost every puzzle completely differently. It was nice to see that the tools in the game allow for such a wide arrange of approaches when it comes to taking on this things.
However they aren't all good. I found a couple of gyroscoptic puzzles that required me to tilt and rotate the controllers in order to move a piece of the world. These sections were frustrating because the object in the game never moved quite the way I wanted it too, and often times moved at a different ratio to how I moved my controller. Not only that but these puzzles were impossible to play while playing in full handheld mode with the joy-cons connected to the Switch.
But for the most part the puzzles were great and a lot of fun to work out.
COMBAT:
Here is where the game completely breaks for me. The combat sucks, for a couple of reasons. The first being the controls. Holy balls the controls feel shitty. The lack of a lock-on function drove me insane, and having to hold LZ to keep a target only made swapping weapons, judging attacks, and moving the camera all the more cumbersome. I cannot even begin to describe the frustration I had trying to keep track of two monsters running around me on horses, while trying to swap arrow types, and trying to not get run over all at the same time. It is a mess.
Then you have the extreme durability issues. Isn't Link supposed to have a master sword? What happened to that? Everything you get fucking breaks, usually after one or two enemy encounters. Did you find a kick ass broad sword? Enjoy fighting on enemy with it, because apparently they make everything out of cardboard in this world. I get that you find weapons all over the place, but there is no joy in finding weapons when they are all throw away objects. Nothing has value when you either can't use a weapon (for fear of breaking a good weapon on a worthless enemy) or you are forced to use something because you weapon inventory is EXTREMELY limited. And it is even more limited because you need to make sure you have a hammer and an axe on you at all times. (hammer for ore, axe for wood). I don't understand the tight limitations on inventory when you are expected to keep so much with you all the time.
Thankfully armor doesn't break, and once you have it, bam it's yours forever. But the weapon situation almost forces you to find other ways to fight. Forces you to use the environment and picking off as many enemies from afar with a bow as you can. Bow's break randomly too, but since they have their own slot, it's not as big of a deal and no other item shares their category (that I know of). While some people might enjoy this need to think outside the box, and approach combat from a different angle to preserve their equipment as much as possible. I fucking HATE it. In a game about freedom, I want the freedom to run in and fuck shit up with having my weapon fall apart constantly.
I once ran into a Bogkin camp and broke every weapon I had on the group of six or seven guys that where there. Leaving me with nothing but clubs to take with me to whatever came next. And the problem doesn't seem to get better. I understand rusty swords, and shitty clubs breaking quickly, but you would think once you start getting awesome shit like thunder blades, and curved boomarang swords you could use them a bit more freely. NOPE! Fuck you! That awesome 35 damage sword, yeah it'll break before you can kill a boss with it. I went into the elephant dungeon boss with a badass guardian sword and massive fuckoff axe, and both weapons broke before I beat the boss. I ended up killing him with a stupid bogkin spear, aka a sharp shitty stick.
Thankfully combat isn't hard, and most of the enemies are stupid, which means once you figure out their attacks you can parry and dodge all fucking day and nothing bad can happen to you. I was fighting a big centuar and laughing because he couldn't hit me, I dodged and parried all his shit and he never did anything different. Though a lightning storm (the first I had seen thus far) decided it didn't like me make fun of it's bad guys and make my face explode. So I had to come back and fight it seriously the next time because the weather in this game is a dick.
OVERALL:
So Zelda is a weird game for me. There are some really cool things about it, and I can see how fans of the series would really really love the world and the lore and shit going on here. This being my first Zelda game, I didn't have any connection to the characters (they didn't seem to have much character to begining though), and the world didn't matter to me. What I ended up with was a huge open world game where the main goal is to look for puzzle rooms.
The controls drive me crazy, the combat stinks, weapon durability is fucking bullshit, and the open world feels spread too thin. Too often I found myself uninterested in exploring if it was in the same direction as a tower, or shrine I was already on my way too.
Again maybe if I was a fan of the series and I understood the easter eggs, and references, and lore, i might feel differently. But the game doesn't explain a fucking thing. It does nothing to try and bring me into it's characters and it's world. Ironically I found myself playing it a lot like a Dark Souls game, strictly playing for the gameplay and nothing else. I set myself goals and died a lot trying to reach them. I want to say this is a challenging game in terms of difficulty, but I felt like my deaths were more controller related than anything else.
As it stands I would probably give Zelda: Breath of the Wild a 6/10. It's an okay game, and parts of it are very very good, but those parts are too spread out by uninteresting and frustrating other problems that I have with the title.
As I expected when I initially read all the perfect 10's all over the internet last week, none of the reviews actually mentioned any of this. I didn't read about how fast weapons break, or the unexplained cooking systems, and other unexplained things like warning you about hot and cold. Again it's like Dark Souls in that way, the game doesn't tell you shit and basically just gives you tools and sends you on your way to figure it all out yourself.
So what I decided to do with this write-up is to break down the game into sections and review each section in chunks. That way it breaks down my thoughts easier, as well as makes things hopefully easier to read.
THE WORLD:
So let's start with the huge world that Breath of the Wild instantly offers to the player. It's huge, it's impressive looking with wildly different settings that transition in natural ways that running into a forest from open plains doesn't feel sudden or jarring, it melts together very nicely. The dynamic weather also helps the world feel complete like you are actually in a real world. However I do feel like the world is TOO big, which is a crazy thing to say, but hear me out. As you explore the world, you'll pretty much come across the same handful of things over and over again. Towers, shrines, enemy camps, rinse and repeat. While there are some scatters little extras here and there, I found that most of my journey was spend just running and working towards something in the distance, either a tower or trying to find a shrine that my compass said was nearby. The sense of wonder and excitement at discovering things wore off on me really quickly once I realized that everything in the distance was only going to be one of a couple of things.
Now I know there are little forest keeper dudes to find tucked away and there are some scattered world puzzles here and there, but those things felt too spread out to add any real impact on my play. Honestly it felt like the developers were soooo in love with their world, that they just kept making it bigger and bigger. There is even a loading tooltip that tells you your horse will run along paths automatically so you can look around without bothering to navigate. That speaks volumes here.
Compare the world to something like a Far Cry game, or the Witcher 3. In these games the map is literally showered with shit to do, and each activity is varied. Saints Row 3 did this very well do with almost a dozen different mini-games to find on top of collectables and such. The Witcher 3 offers boss hunts, puzzles, treasure hunts, beast dens, full storied side-quests, herbing, and a CCG.
That isn't on offer here. And that was my biggest fear, was that they would make a huge, beautiful world, (and it is really really good looking) but not have enough different things to do to justify it.
SHRINES AND DUNGEONS:
This is where the game truly shines in my opinion. The puzzles in BoTW feel like the most creative things in the game. It's where everything just comes together, all your tools can be put to use in wonderful ways to solve the puzzles. Oh, right...So Shrines and Dungeons are found all over the world. There are over a 100 shrines which act as short mini puzzles that provide you with items and level up points, and there are 4 or 5 main Dungeons (think Earth, Fire, Water temples from previous games). While the shrines are small bite sized little adventures, the Dungeons are big, complex and elaborate beasts (literally) which end with boss fights.
It is the puzzle solving that I really liked in this game. Almost every puzzle has multiple ways of solving them and it was a lot of fun playing beside a buddy and finding out that we tackled and solved almost every puzzle completely differently. It was nice to see that the tools in the game allow for such a wide arrange of approaches when it comes to taking on this things.
However they aren't all good. I found a couple of gyroscoptic puzzles that required me to tilt and rotate the controllers in order to move a piece of the world. These sections were frustrating because the object in the game never moved quite the way I wanted it too, and often times moved at a different ratio to how I moved my controller. Not only that but these puzzles were impossible to play while playing in full handheld mode with the joy-cons connected to the Switch.
But for the most part the puzzles were great and a lot of fun to work out.
COMBAT:
Here is where the game completely breaks for me. The combat sucks, for a couple of reasons. The first being the controls. Holy balls the controls feel shitty. The lack of a lock-on function drove me insane, and having to hold LZ to keep a target only made swapping weapons, judging attacks, and moving the camera all the more cumbersome. I cannot even begin to describe the frustration I had trying to keep track of two monsters running around me on horses, while trying to swap arrow types, and trying to not get run over all at the same time. It is a mess.
Then you have the extreme durability issues. Isn't Link supposed to have a master sword? What happened to that? Everything you get fucking breaks, usually after one or two enemy encounters. Did you find a kick ass broad sword? Enjoy fighting on enemy with it, because apparently they make everything out of cardboard in this world. I get that you find weapons all over the place, but there is no joy in finding weapons when they are all throw away objects. Nothing has value when you either can't use a weapon (for fear of breaking a good weapon on a worthless enemy) or you are forced to use something because you weapon inventory is EXTREMELY limited. And it is even more limited because you need to make sure you have a hammer and an axe on you at all times. (hammer for ore, axe for wood). I don't understand the tight limitations on inventory when you are expected to keep so much with you all the time.
Thankfully armor doesn't break, and once you have it, bam it's yours forever. But the weapon situation almost forces you to find other ways to fight. Forces you to use the environment and picking off as many enemies from afar with a bow as you can. Bow's break randomly too, but since they have their own slot, it's not as big of a deal and no other item shares their category (that I know of). While some people might enjoy this need to think outside the box, and approach combat from a different angle to preserve their equipment as much as possible. I fucking HATE it. In a game about freedom, I want the freedom to run in and fuck shit up with having my weapon fall apart constantly.
I once ran into a Bogkin camp and broke every weapon I had on the group of six or seven guys that where there. Leaving me with nothing but clubs to take with me to whatever came next. And the problem doesn't seem to get better. I understand rusty swords, and shitty clubs breaking quickly, but you would think once you start getting awesome shit like thunder blades, and curved boomarang swords you could use them a bit more freely. NOPE! Fuck you! That awesome 35 damage sword, yeah it'll break before you can kill a boss with it. I went into the elephant dungeon boss with a badass guardian sword and massive fuckoff axe, and both weapons broke before I beat the boss. I ended up killing him with a stupid bogkin spear, aka a sharp shitty stick.
Thankfully combat isn't hard, and most of the enemies are stupid, which means once you figure out their attacks you can parry and dodge all fucking day and nothing bad can happen to you. I was fighting a big centuar and laughing because he couldn't hit me, I dodged and parried all his shit and he never did anything different. Though a lightning storm (the first I had seen thus far) decided it didn't like me make fun of it's bad guys and make my face explode. So I had to come back and fight it seriously the next time because the weather in this game is a dick.
OVERALL:
So Zelda is a weird game for me. There are some really cool things about it, and I can see how fans of the series would really really love the world and the lore and shit going on here. This being my first Zelda game, I didn't have any connection to the characters (they didn't seem to have much character to begining though), and the world didn't matter to me. What I ended up with was a huge open world game where the main goal is to look for puzzle rooms.
The controls drive me crazy, the combat stinks, weapon durability is fucking bullshit, and the open world feels spread too thin. Too often I found myself uninterested in exploring if it was in the same direction as a tower, or shrine I was already on my way too.
Again maybe if I was a fan of the series and I understood the easter eggs, and references, and lore, i might feel differently. But the game doesn't explain a fucking thing. It does nothing to try and bring me into it's characters and it's world. Ironically I found myself playing it a lot like a Dark Souls game, strictly playing for the gameplay and nothing else. I set myself goals and died a lot trying to reach them. I want to say this is a challenging game in terms of difficulty, but I felt like my deaths were more controller related than anything else.
As it stands I would probably give Zelda: Breath of the Wild a 6/10. It's an okay game, and parts of it are very very good, but those parts are too spread out by uninteresting and frustrating other problems that I have with the title.
As I expected when I initially read all the perfect 10's all over the internet last week, none of the reviews actually mentioned any of this. I didn't read about how fast weapons break, or the unexplained cooking systems, and other unexplained things like warning you about hot and cold. Again it's like Dark Souls in that way, the game doesn't tell you shit and basically just gives you tools and sends you on your way to figure it all out yourself.
