Developer: Omega Force
Available on: Nintendo Switch
When Nintendo announced Omega Force’s Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, a prequel to the renowned The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, my initial reaction was to pretend it doesn’t exist. Breath of the Wild is a very quiet and minimalist game with an emphasis on exploration and survival, whereas Hyrule Warriors is a game in which you slaughter armies of enemies single handedly. The two tones seemed completely incompatible. However, when I learned the developers of the two games were working more closely together, I decided to give it a chance.
After loading the game up for the first time, it quickly dropped me into my first battle where I was charged with defending Hyrule Castle from an assault by monsters. I’ve never played a Dynasty Warrior game prior to this, so I couldn’t help but laugh when I literally killed 100 enemies within the first 20 seconds of mashing the Y button. Link’s slashes were at least 5 times the length of his sword and he was flailing around like a madman. Yet as ridiculous as it was, it was also extremely satisfying.
The graphics in Age of Calamity are identical to the graphics in Breath of the Wild and they also share many of the same sound effects. The soundtrack in the game is excellent. Age of Calamity has a lot of the music from Breath of the Wild, much of which has been remade to be more exhilarating and fit for an action-packed fight.
As the first battle continued, the game periodically introduced new controls and mechanics, including the use of runes, Wizzrobe wands and switching characters. It felt very overwhelming at first. There are 18 playable characters, each of which have 5-7 different button combinations, and each of the runes behave differently with each character. It was difficult to keep up at first. However, after a few of days playing, I had the controls down after which it only took me a few minutes of experimentation to learn (or remember) a character’s move set.
In combat, there are essentially two different types of enemies. There are normal enemies that just stand there and let you kill them in the thousands, like bokoblins and lizalfos, and then there are big enemies that actually put up a fight, like moblins and lynels. Although taking out waves of normal enemies is very satisfying, after some time it simply becomes picking your favorite combo and spamming it over and over.
Where the real game lies is fighting the big enemies. Alongside their HP, each of them has a stun bar. Fighting them typically involves dodging or blocking their attacks until the stun bar appears and then depleting it as much as you can by attacking them until they get back up. Once an enemy’s stun bar is fully depleted, the game allows you to hit it with a crushing move, often finishing it off (unless you’re playing on one of the harder difficulties). There are ways to speed this process up, however, like initiating flurry attacks by dodging their attacks at the last second, countering certain attacks with specific runes, hitting their weak point(s) if they have one, or tapping into your finite supply of Wizzrobe wands and hitting them with a powerful elemental attack. Fights are intense and happen at a very fast pace, especially when you’re fighting more than one of these big enemies at a time. It feels similar to playing as Tracer in Overwatch.
As fun and satisfying as it is though, it tends to become rather stale and repetitive. The roster of enemies isn’t very large, and you’re essentially doing the exact same fights over and over again and listening to the same bits of music as it constantly switches back and forth between the beginning of the normal version of the song and the beginning of the dramatic version of the song. One way that helps out with this is switching to one of the harder difficulties, making the fights more challenging and interesting, but this runs into another problem: sustainability. The vast majority of the time, the only way to heal is by eating apples that you occasionally find by smashing crates. They restore 5 hearts a piece, but they’re rare and there’s no way to effectively grind for them mid-battle (or even buy them in the overworld). Dying brings you back to the last checkpoint, where the game leaves you with the exact same health and resources as when you first reached it. I often found myself in a frustrating dilemma where I badly wanted to heal so I can get past whatever I’m fighting but I knew using all my apples meant I would have to go without them in the next and probably more difficult set of enemies.
There’re also a number of missions where you pilot the Divine Beasts and take out even greater hordes of monsters. There’s nothing particularly interesting about these missions though; you just aim and shoot and eventually it ends.
After completing a mission you’re sent to the overworld map where you get to select your next mission, manage characters and equipment or take care of side stuff while vibing to the music. Like in Breath of the Wild, you’ll be collecting lots of materials, only in this game they’re used to complete a long list of fetch quests that unlock new content or upgrade your characters. You can also use materials to cook meals to give yourself a boost in stats for the duration of a mission, but I found myself not doing this very often.
Alongside the main missions and fetch quests, there’s a large number of side missions. It’s often necessary to do some of them as the main missions alone don’t get you enough XP to get by. However, here it lacks a lot of Breath of the Wild’s charm. In Breath of the Wild, every ridiculous objective in a side mission or shrine was given a justification that fits right in with the game’s humor. Tarrey town requires all citizens’ names rhyme with “Tarrey” because it’s a fun way to search for potential residents to recruit. That desperate guy at Hateno Village wants you to help him collect 100 crickets because the lady he has a crush on said she wanted it in an effort to get rid of him. The game forces you to please the lady outside the Hill Rao shrine by not stepping on any of the flowers in the flower maze because, well, it’s funny. Age of Calamity’s side missions lack this. In an average Age of Calamity side mission, you’re required to defeat all of the enemies in X amount of time because the game told you to.
Finally, there’s the game’s story, the part that I was looking most forward to. Sadly, I was left disappointed in that regard. The problem isn’t necessarily that the writing is bad (although the dialogue certainly could use some work), but rather that at a point in what feels like the middle of the story, it suddenly ends. The game sets up a bunch of interesting arcs and lays the groundwork for a bunch of satisfying scenes and moments to come, but all of it is left hanging. The only characters that really receive adequate attention and development are Zelda and Terrako, a little robot that follows her everywhere. Everyone else, including even Link (who seems to exist only to occasionally dive in front of Zelda and block incoming projectiles in slow motion), is just kinda there.
Summary
In a single sentence, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has fun gameplay but a disappointing story. Its combat is very fun and satisfying and capable of offering difficult challenges, but is also prone to becoming rather stale and repetitive. In regards to the visuals and sounds, it feels like it’s straight out of Breath of the Wild, but it lacks a lot of Breath of the Wild’s charm in the writing, and its plot is borderline incomplete.