The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom has been out for about a week now. Usually by that time I have played a game enough to get the full picture and write down my thoughts.
Not this time.
A normal run of the previous game, Breath Of The Wild, ran me about 50-60 hours, and you kind of got the feeling you were nearing the late-game around hour 30. I’m around that time in Tears, and I feel like I’m nowhere NEAR the end. So yeah, one week later and 30 hours in, and I still don’t feel I’ve experienced enough to get a full review in. This is a first impressions piece, which should tell you just how big this game is.
We might be looking at one of the most advanced games of all time, even if it might not look like it at first glance. Lets take this step-by-step. Get ready Tears of The Kingdom review/first impressions piece.
Performance and Optimization
Lets get this one out of the way quick; the Nintendo Switch is not a particularly powerful console. Its a system with less power than the average modern smart-phone, and its being pushed to its absolute limit here. Framerate caps out at 30 FPS, and frequently dips below that when loading new areas or in combat heavy sections. I wouldn’t that optimization is terrible-for what is being rendered, loaded and computed by this game near constantly. The fact that the Switch is even able to run this thing without exploding is nothing short of a miracle. On the plus side, I haven’t had the game crash at all, which I think is an achievement in itself. Performance comes down to “yeah, the Switch isn’t very powerful”. However, Tears is surprisingly well run with the hardware they had to work with.
Alright, we got the boring stuff out of the way, we can move on to the fun stuff.
New Mechanics
Tears of The Kingdom sees the return of Breath of The Wild’s paraglider, along with what is essentially the same combat mechanics and movement. What’s really the gamechanger, though, is the replacements for Runes. The bravest design choice in Tears of The Kingdom is easily Nintendo basically giving you the Infinity Gauntlet and saying “go nuts”. Ascend, Fuse, Rewind and specifically Ultrahand are legit game-changers, and allow you to do some truly ridiculous stuff. The big new thing in Tears of The Kingdom is the building mechanics and fusing. Various objects around Hyrule are ready and waiting for Link to stumble across them and build his own ridiculous vehicles. Anything from basic cars and gliders to drone strikes and releasing automated sentries upon your enemies. That’s not an exaggeration; some of this stuff would get Link charged as a war criminal in real life.
That’s probably the most impressive part of these new mechanics introduced; They impose virtually no limits on what you can do. If you can dream it, and the game can comprehend it, you can do it. Everything from rewinding thrown enemy projectiles to missile strikes and full blown planes is possible in Tears of The Kingdom, and more.
That “Most Advanced Game Ever” part
Fusing is another great combat enhancer, allowing you to fuse any physics object to your weapon for a big damage and durability boost. everything from small rocks to enormous spike balls to explosive barrels can be fused to your weapons, and a lot of the materials can be fused to arrows for different effects, such as explosive, tracking and fire arrows, just to name a few.
Remember how I mentioned that this game might be the most advanced game ever? I wasn’t exaggerating. This stems entirely from the Rewind ability and the Ultrahand ability. These 2 abilities make it so not only does every single physics object remember where its been for the past 20 seconds or so, but also means that every single physics object must behave realistically when FUSED to one another as well.
Every. Single. One.
This applies to ambient debris, puzzle architecture, flying objects, chained objects, big and small. Everything is moldable and rewindable, and that is seriously impressive and opens up a breadth of new gameplay opportunities.
Returning Mechanics from BOTW
Despite all of the new mechanics introduced in Tears of The Kingdom, make no mistake; this is still pretty much BOTW 2. That means a lot of the previous game’s mechanics carry over, including all of the traversal mechanics and base combat movesets and enemies.
Now, I might catch some flak for this, but I do not think the base combat of Tears of The Kingdom is very good. I get that its not the point of the game; you’re meant to experiment and find ways to get OUT of participating in the normal combat loop. But when you can’t find a way to get out of that loop, the base combat loop is very uninspired. All weapons of the same type have pretty much the same moveset, shields all function identically for the most part. Headshotting something with a bow and sprinting up to whack it is a winning strategy for pretty much everything in the game. It’s never bad, but its kinda boring. At least it encourages you to break out and think outside the box and engage with the other mechanics.
Shrines
Shrines, in my opinion, are also improved from Breath of The Wild. They’re are still your main source of the power orbs used to gain more hearts and stamina. In BOTW, there was usually 1 way to complete a shrine puzzle. There were some ways you could break the shrines, but they were very janky. In Tears, very often you’ll come across shrines that just put materials and an obstacle in front of you and task you with getting over it. Sometimes there’s no set way to do anything, or at least it doesn’t punish you for thinking outside the box. Can’t figure a puzzle out? Build your own nonsense machine, Climb over all the walls. Break the game. Its brilliant.
Somewhere at Nintendo there’s a puzzle designer that has looked at my play data, saw that I solved everything by sticking logs together, and either smile or wonder where it all went wrong.
World Design and Exploration
By far the highlight of Tears of The Kingdom is the exploration and world design. I’ll avoid spoilers here for your sake, you really need see some of this stuff for yourself. Just like Breath of The Wild and Elden Ring before it, there is always something crazy in the distance you want to go towards, and on the way there, you’ll see 5 other things that catch your attention and you want to go there instead, and the destination is almost always worth the journey.
A lot of the time you’ll be tasked with reaching a seemingly unreachable location in Hyrule’s world, and are tasked with using the newer mechanics along with exploring to get there to get there. And visually, this is a world worth exploring. You can’t walk for 3 minutes in this game without being greeted with some screenshot-worthy vista, even if its just a small hike to get some parts for your newest contraption. Some of the stuff you can use here is insane, as said before. That’s probably my favorite part of Tears so far; it occupies the same space of something like Morrowind. It can be blatantly unfair at times, but it also places virtuallyno limits on what the player is able to do. There is no balance. There is only the mutual agreement that you and the game are in a competition to out-bullshit each other.
What’s really insane, though, is the fact that there are 3 separate, enormous world planes to explore within Hyrule. Hyrule’s sky, surface and The Deep all offer a range of different gameplay and puzzle opportunities. And all share the same qualities of being absolutely breathtaking and full of secrets and compelling locations to explore.
Final Thoughts
It may seem obvious, but even though I’m not even close to finishing it, I wholeheartedly recommend Tears of The Kingdom. A game like this comes once in a great while. We’re lucky to have gotten a few of these truly groundbreaking open world games within the past year. If you have a Switch, this is an absolute must play, no questions asked. You have to see it to believe it.
I don’t know when I’ll have a full review up. I don’t even know IF I’ll have a full review up. There’s so much I still need to uncover and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to grasp it all in the next 20 40, even 50 hours.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom was released on May 12th, 2023 on Nintendo Switch.
Need to find another game to play if you don’t have a Switch? Check out our Jedi: Survivor review or some other articles!
