Hyrule Warriors is actually factually my favourite Zelda game, maybe. So even though I ultimately had mixed feelings on Breath of the Wild, I was very keen on Omega Force’s next look at mixing the Dynasty Warriors formula with the Zelda world. Spoilers ahead!

The key feature of this game is its integration with Breath of the Wild. It’s a prequel/alternate retelling with time travel shenanigans, it’s got just characters from BotW (plus a few OCs that fit in seamlessly), it replicates the UI, the look, the audovisual design, it recreates locations, and it makes use of mechanics such as material gathering, cooking, and the magic runes.

Of course it’s still a Warriors game where you bombastically blow away hordes of baddies, engaging with light strategy elements to clear a map. It also expands and refines stuff from the first HW game, with a greater focus on the weak point gauge of strong enemies and more ways to break it, or a more streamlined way of using situational items, things like that. I regret that my unfamiliarity with the greater Warriors series leaves me clueless of how this subseries fits in with the larger trend, but oh well.

Anyway, in Age of Calamity everything revolves around the Sheikah slate-style map screen. Icons (so many icons) pop up there, representing grand story battles, smaller challenges on the scale of the previous game’s Adventure mode squares, or sidequests (where a simple bit of text dialogue will exchange materials for advancement, whether it’s expanding a particular character’s moveset, unlocking a merchant location, etc.) As you progress the sheer volume of blinky lights becomes overwhelming so thankfully there’s a robust and snappy menu system for navigating all the things you can do.

This map system keeps you fairly well immersed in the world, albeit in a different way to BotW’s persistent sim style. Story missions are always accompanied by fully-voiced cutscenes, with the same awkward dubbing of its precursor. Otherwise it’s text boxes that you can never spare the attention for in the heat of battle, and oft-repeated catchphrases in-game (Impa’s “Steel yourself. I am ready.” is burned into my mind forever, I think).

Hewing so closely to BotW is a double-edged sword; it makes this game feel like a vital and authentic companion, but it also exposes weaknesses that I felt for that game as well. For example, too little content repeated too often, stretching thin its novelty (AoC attempts to mitigate this unsuccessfully with elemental variants of strong enemy classes). A huge variety of materials to collect, necessitating grinding. A slight lack of diversity in the roster from being mainly bound to existing characters in an already small cast. Not to mention retreading some story ground.

Now, the story. Some marketing made this out to be a strict prequel, which is always a boring prospect, especially since we knew so much from BotW’s flashbacks already. I was pleased with the meagre handful of new characters (the cute Eggbot, the stock menacing wizard, the younger Impa) and even more when the aforementioned time tomfoolery brought the BotW-era champions back 100 years, blessedly giving more limelight to these characters who seemed like afterthoughts in their own present-time game.

The plot quickly diverged, becoming an alternate universe where the good guys won, uniting and even reconciling with the Yiga clan to face and defeat the Calamity; I love this angle, especially since it also puts Zelda in her proper place as the protagonist of the story throughout the game. And sidenote, the new final form for Ganon here is much better than the incoherent mess that BotW had.

I didn’t 100% this just yet; it seems to have roughly equivalent content to the first HW pre-DLC, but I look forward to playing more when the inevitable updates make characters available that are plainly in the game waiting to be patched into the roster. I had a ton of fun with it, and enjoyed how they’ve evolved the game and tied it in so well with BotW. But does it unseat the original in my heart? I think the appeal of the first game’s mad crossover antics, and its greater variety, keep it on top. But this is still quite good!