The Nintendo Switch made waves in 2017 not just because of its unique hybrid handheld console concept, but because it had one of the best launch games since Super Mario 64: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A huge departure from previous Zelda games, Breath of the Wild left behind traditional dungeon-centric game structure for a sprawling open world. It was and still is a fantastic game, showing just what the Switch can do. Breath of the Wild was an instant, undisputed masterpiece.
Now Nintendo takes us back to Hyrule with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom ($69.99), a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom captures the same magic, but with a new suite of powers for Link to master and an overhauled map that adds a sky and an underworld to explore. It’s bigger and better in every way, with more clever and complex puzzles to solve, more varied environments to roam, and more ways to interact with everything. It shares the same flaws as Breath of the Wild, including a weapons durability issue and a generally clunky combat system, but that doesn't change the fact that Tears of the Kingdom is easily one of the best games on the Switch and a rare recipient of a perfect five-star rating and an Editors' Choice award.
The Demon King's Upheaval
Hyrule can’t catch a break. The kingdom finds itself in danger almost immediately after Link and Zelda beat boss-of-bosses Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild. With the mindless force of malice gone, Hyrule Castle is ready to be used again, but there are still caves and tunnels in its depths that have gone unexplored. Naturally, Link and Zelda decide to explore them, and that’s when they find a red-haired mummy held in place by a disembodied glowing blue arm. And then the mummy comes to life.
The mummy is Ganondorf, the Demon King. Whether or not he has any relation to Calamity Ganon, he’s a nearly unbeatable evil demigod who has wanted to rule Hyrule since the kingdom began, and Link and Zelda have woken him up. This triggers the Upheaval, in which Hyrule Castle and several land masses rise into the air, monsters return to the land, Zelda disappears, and the Master Sword (along with Link’s right arm) becomes corrupted and decayed. Just being near Ganondorf is enough to drain Link of almost all the life force he accumulated in Breath of the Wild, leaving him with just three heart containers and a single stamina container. Which, as far as justifications for why a character is suddenly without their strength in a direct sequel go, is pretty good.
All is not lost, however. The blue arm that was holding Ganondorf in place now belongs to Link, and it wants to get him back to fighting form to save the land once again. Welcome to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
All-New Abilities in Tears of the Kingdom
The rune powers from the Sheikah slate from Breath of the Wild are gone, but Link has a new bag of tricks to play with. His magic blue arm has the Ascend, Fuse, Recall, and Ultrahand powers, and they’re much more flexible and potent than the old runes (though perhaps not quite as exploitable for speedruns as Stasis in Breath of the Wild, with its ability to just launch Link across the map).
Ascend lets Link swim upward through solid objects, passing through ceilings and popping up on the next floor of a dungeon or the surface or the peak of a mountain. The ceiling has to be flat and low enough for a glowing mark to appear with the power activated, but even then it adds some new ways for Link to explore, solve puzzles, and pop out of caves and dungeons without going into the map and teleporting. Because of its limitations, it doesn’t completely replace climbing for getting up walls and mountains, but convenient overhangs can still make traversal a bit quicker.
Fuse is how Nintendo addresses the complaints of weapon durability in the previous game without actually addressing it. This power lets Link combine weapons with items and other objects to make them more durable and powerful. A stick won’t do much in combat, but fusing a stick with a rock makes it a hammer. Many enemies drop items that enhance any weapon’s damage, and adding elemental items and Zonai mechanisms produces additional effects such as spraying fire or electrifying your strikes. You can also fuse arrows, which lets you fire elemental and exploding arrows by attaching the right plants to them (bomb flowers are always worth stockpiling). Even though you can only fuse one object to a weapon at a time, this power adds a lot of combat options without forcing you to use a weapon slot for each potential type of enemy.
Unfortunately, there’s still no way to repair weapons. You can pull fused items from weapons if you want to fuse something else to them, but this destroys the item without restoring any durability. To make matters worse, the Upheaval has corroded most weapons in Hyrule, so outside of a few exceptions any sword or spear you come across will be rusty and fragile, so you’ll need to regularly pick up new weapons, regardless. On the bright side, since half of the power from your fused weapon comes from what you fuse it with, you can easily make any sturdy stick reasonably strong for any fight just by using a construct or monster part to enhance its power.
Annoyingly, you can’t fuse a weapon directly with an item in your inventory. You have to select the item and drop it, then fuse the weapon with the item on the ground. It adds an unnecessary step if you want to use any of your stockpiled items instead of a nearby piece of rubble. Also, while you can fuse your arrows you can’t fuse your bow, so its durability and damage are always fixed (though you can at least find better, stronger bows that hit harder and can be fired more times).
Recall is a powerful and tricky time-reversing ability. Using this power freezes time around Link and lets you move a cursor to select any moving object in range. You can then make that object go backward through its previous path while everything else moves forward. You can make falling platforms rise and send thrown weapons back at enemies, making Recall helpful both for combat and solving puzzles. It certainly has its uses—especially if you can get used to the timing to reflect enemy fire—but it feels underutilized in the dungeons and shrines I’ve explored, especially compared with Ultrahand and Zonai devices.
That brings us to Ultrahand, the shining jewel in Tears of the Kingdom’s crown. Ultrahand lets Link manipulate any nearby moveable object, levitating it up, moving it closer or farther away, and even attaching it to any other nearby moveable object. That last part is the most important bit.
With Ultrahand, Link can build machines and structures. He can slap some planks of wood together to make a raft, then attach some Zonai fans to it to make a motorboat. He can move a brick to lodge a door open. He can construct a fairly absurd tower of junk and mirrors to circuitously solve a light-reflecting puzzle in a way that’s not intended. With enough patience and Zonai devices, Link can do nearly anything.
Zonai devices are what make Ultrahand powerful. These are ancient mechanisms Link can carry around in capsules in his inventory like Pokeballs, and there are dozens of them. Link can collect Zonai fans, wheels, flamethrowers, water jets, cannons, rockets, wings, sleds, lights, batteries, and even steering columns. Attaching Zonai machines to the same object automatically connects them, and they all activate simultaneously when you strike the object with a weapon or use the steering column. The steering column also turns fans and wheels.
Even without Ultrahand and Zonai devices, there’s still plenty of experimentation to do with different items. One particularly useful trick is to start a fire by putting flint near a bundle of wood and hitting it with a weapon, then throwing a pinecone on it to make the fire flare up and cause a thermal updraft that lets Link instantly get altitude like the Revali’s Gale power in Breath of the Wild. This means that, for all of his bravado, Revali was exactly as useful as a pinecone.
In the new game, Link can build a tank and drive it around now. Or a dune buggy. Or a hovercraft. Or a jet. And all of this is on top of Link’s other powers and weapons and traversal abilities. It’s an incredible addition and you can use it as much or as little as you want. Almost nothing outside of a few shrines requires you to build a vehicle. It’s just an optional way to explore and fight.
Combat Is Still Clunky
While Link’s new powers and Zonai devices open up both exploration and action in Tears of the Kingdom, they don’t fix the janky combat. Besides the frustration of weapon durability, fighting enemies close up usually doesn’t feel particularly good. Whether they’re one-handed blades or heavy two-handed hammers, the weapons Link can swing tend to be either slow or do very little damage. Unless you take advantage of elemental weaknesses that can instantly kill some enemies, many attacks will barely chip away at health bars and weapons will break before you can even take down a single Moblin. Fuse makes elemental attacks much easier to regularly perform since Link can just pull an elementally related item like a Chuchu Jelly out of his inventory and slap it on a weapon, but needing to take that item out and physically drop it on the ground is unnecessarily awkward in battle.
Link can dodge attacks and, with the right timing, trigger a counter that lets him hack away at an enemy that finds itself off-balance. If he has a shield and a one-handed weapon, he can also parry and send projectile attacks flying back at his attackers. The actual timing for these defensive moves feels uneven and unfairly strict, however. While Link may be faster on his feet than the average Dark Souls or Elden Ring character, his reactions can feel mushy and he doesn’t get the crisp and clear invincibility windows of dodging or hard thwacks of parrying.
Stealth is an option for some encounters, but it’s even less satisfying than dodging and parrying. The game clearly wasn’t built around Link being sneaky outside of keeping his distance and crouching behind objects. Enemies have very wide vision cones and movement patterns that can be difficult to predict, and performing sneak attacks requires very strict distancing so you don’t alert your target when you’re behind them.
Archery feels like the best option for Link most of the time, and aiming using both the right analog stick and motion controls feels very intuitive. Most enemies have big weak spots to target that can cause heavy damage and knock them over, and (unlike with melee weapons) you can fuse any item in your inventory to an arrow you’re about to shoot just by holding up on the direction buttons.
The janky combat might seem like a major complaint, but in play, it’s easy to look past. Once you get past a shaky start where Link is weak and vulnerable and he has a few more heart containers and items in his inventory (and plenty of arrows), fighting feels like less of a chore. Companion abilities also help smooth those rough spots by adding some potent tactical options. Most importantly, none of it gets in the way of the fantastic environmental and puzzle design of the game. There’s simply so much to enjoy outside of mediocre melee combat, and there are enough ways to speed up or get around fights that they seldom feel like slogs.
The Same Hyrule, But So Much Bigger
Tears of the Kingdom is absolutely massive, perhaps twice the size of Breath of the Wild. The map generally covers the same area as the first game, but it adds two new layers. The sky has floating islands to explore, formed when big chunks of the land floated up in the Upheaval. Those chunks have left deep ravines in the land, and by jumping into them you can reach the sprawling underground.
The two new layers aren’t nearly as dense with shrines and caves and towns as the surface, but they still offer plenty to do. The floating islands are riddled with puzzles to solve and items to find, and simply figuring out ways to fly between them is engaging (Ultrahand can be a big help here). The underworld is almost completely dark, but you can permanently light up patches by throwing glowing seeds. You can illuminate larger areas by finding Lightroot beacons that also serve as fast-travel locations, just as shrines do. They aren’t an afterthought, either, as significant parts of the game’s main quest take Link above the clouds and underground.
Hyrule’s surface has also changed because of the Upheaval, and while the locations of landmarks and towns will be familiar, their surroundings might not be. Besides the hole-like ravines that let Link fall into the underground, great canyons have also formed, and the weather has been drastically altered in certain regions because of these and other phenomena (that Link will, of course, have to directly address). It isn’t a whole new Hyrule, but there’s a whole new Hyrule’s worth of places to explore and things to do in it.
Shrines are back in the game. They’re Zonai shrines instead of Sheikah shrines, though, so they feature puzzles in line with Link’s Zonai powers instead of the Sheikah tablet runes from Breath of the Wild. But they’re otherwise the same: dozens of mini-dungeons with puzzles to solve or enemies to defeat, rewarding you with an item of some sort. Get four of the same item and you can trade them in for another heart container or extend your stamina meter. The shrines are all similar looking, but they get quite clever and varied thanks to their use of Zonai devices, and almost every one demonstrates some new way to use those devices or Link’s powers. Each shrine also serves as a fast-travel location Link can teleport to, just like in Breath of the Wild.
Much More to Do
The story and quest structure of Tears of the Kingdom feels very similar to Breath of the Wild, but with more variety and complexity. After the tutorial, Link is directed to investigate four regional phenomena, rehashing the first game’s quests to visit the Gerudo, Gorons, Rito, and Zora and solve their problems. Each society is dealing with a problem from the Upheaval, and fixing these problems involves figuring out the source of each and then exploring a related dungeon.
The dungeons are temples based on elements like wind and lighting, and they’re much more varied in theme and puzzle diversity than the divine beasts in Breath of the Wild, but they aren’t quite classic Zelda dungeons. Each focuses on activating a certain number of mechanisms to open the door to the dungeon’s boss. The room with the door serves as a hub, and each mechanism is located in a different corner of the dungeon. This approach results in dungeons that look unique but are still structured a bit like a handful of shrines clustered together.
While the structures of the dungeons are similar, each manages to feel more fresh and distinct from the others thanks to companions who join you to explore them. These characters, familiar faces from Breath of the Wild, have distinct abilities that must be used to solve the puzzles in their respective dungeons and activate each mechanism. Riju of the Gerudo, for example, can make lightning strike where Link fires an arrow, while Yonobo of the Goron can charge forward and create an explosion of fire. They almost feel like unique items from dungeons in earlier Zelda games, and they add to the experience with their variety. Completing each dungeon also gives Link access to that companion’s power for the rest of the game, as with the champions’ abilities in Breath of the Wild.
The standard Breath of the Wild main quests aren’t the only major story-based tasks to pursue. Princess Zelda is missing and the search for her includes following legends and rumors of other mysterious temples. There are strange statues in the underground, cryptic geoglyphs across the surface that can only be seen from the air, and more things to look into that feel like they tie in with the main plot.
Then there are the side quests and activities. Not only are shrines back, but so are Koroks (small forest people made of wood). You’ll need to keep your eyes out for hints in the environment that something is amiss to uncover a hidden Korok, or find a stranded Korok and help them reach a nearby companion by devising a contraption that will get them there.
A diligent construction worker can be found all over the map trying to keep his precious sign raised for a little physics mini-puzzle using a nearby cache of wood (each sign has a different shape or some other aspect to it requiring a different structure to keep it steady). A well enthusiast will pay money for every well you explore, and there are several dozen spread across the map. Nearly every stable (you can catch and ride horses as in Breath of the Wild) has its own side quest in which you help a newspaper reporter investigate nearby goings-on. Even without explicit quests to follow, the game is littered with caves, mines, dungeons, and powerful monsters to test your combat skills and wits.
Just like in Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom won’t hold your hand for any of these quests. After the tutorial area, you’ll get a handful of points on the map and general instructions to investigate, and that’s it. You need to pay attention to your surroundings and what characters say to figure out how to make any progress, and the quest log only keeps track of the bare minimum of information. This invitation to simply explore the map and pursue leads at your own pace is refreshing in the face of so many other open-world games like Horizon: Forbidden West that lead you every step of the way.
This scope means you can spend plenty of time in Hyrule. So far I've played Tears of the Kingdom for a solid 40 hours and still haven't seen the credits.
Impressive Visuals
Tears of the Kingdom looks as good and is as technically impressive, if not more so, than Breath of the Wild. It has the same bright, occasionally hazy, almost watercolor art style as the first game, which looks quite sharp both on the OLED Switch and on a TV (I did not test this game on a non-OLED Switch). It often struggles to maintain 30 frames per second and doesn’t seem to render at a full 1080p in docked mode, but that was how Breath of the Wild performed, too. The frame rate never chugs despite not being consistently smooth, and I didn’t see any significant slowdown or drop-off in detail except at long distances.
The size of the world and how everything in it works together is what makes Tears of the Kingdom so impressive. Draw distances are incredibly long, and Link can see the landscape from what seems like a mile away when the weather is clear. The topography of the surface also comes through well from the sky, even with other islands and plenty of clouds between Link and the ground. Through all of this, physics interactions between objects, at least within a reasonable distance to Link, remain consistent and functioning.
Close up, everything from rocks to logs to Zonai mechanisms all affect each other with predictable physics. Far away, you can see the mountains and lakes (and visit them). Even six years after the Switch’s launch, it feels like quite a feat to get this kind of experience out of a fairly tiny tablet.
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a tour de force. It takes everything from the amazing Breath of the Wild and builds upon it in every way, with more places to explore and things to do. Ultrahand and Zonai devices make Link’s arsenal far more complex and stimulating than anything he could do with the Sheikah slab, and the game is absolutely stuffed with invitations to use them. The story and its surrounding quests also feel more interesting.
A game can be a five-star masterpiece without being perfect, and like Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom is an example of this with some awkward defensive timing, a frustrating weapons durability system, and less-than-cutting-edge graphics. But it's also a phenomenal adventure in a densely packed, richly varied, massive world with incredibly engaging physics-based puzzles. There is so much that Tears of the Kingdom does almost perfectly that any complaints almost feel like afterthoughts.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is easily one of the best games on the Switch, as well as one of the best open-world video games, period. That's enough to earn it a full five stars and our Editors' Choice award.
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