Read Time:4 Minute, 29 Second

It has been a month since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was released, and it has been worth the wait. Not only does it fix all the issues with the old game, it adds content. But with these new ideas, problems show up, and that is what is keeping this game from perfection. This review will have only minor spoilers of game mechanics and minor story spoilers.

Pros

New Mechanics

Tears of the Kingdom adds many new mechanics to play around with. To start, the replacement of magnesis, stasis, cryonis, and bombs. This game has ultrahand, ascend, fuse, and rewind. Ultrahand replaces magnesis and allows you to attach items in the world together to create vehicles or solve puzzles, ascend enables you to go through solid objects above you, fuse allows you to fuse things to your weapons to make them stronger or add effects, and rewind lets you rewind objects to previous states. Along with these mechanics are the new devices and arrow fusing, which I will explore later.

New Content

The new content in the game includes 32 more shrines (puzzle areas), 100 more Korok seeds (collectible), 63 more side quests, paraglider customization options, new items, complete enemy redesign, new enemies, and new bosses. The most apparent new content is the Sky Islands, seen in the trailers for the game, and a new area called the depths.

(Sky Islands)

Fuse

Fuse adds a new element to combat in Tears of the Kingdom. Unlike its predecessor, specialized arrows (fire, shock, ice, bomb, etc.) are not around. Instead, the player has to fuse materials to create the desired effect. For example, you can attach a bomb flower to make a bomb arrow. This opens up many opportunities for combat, such as fusing a monster eye to create a homing arrow or fusing a monster part to significantly increase the attack power. You can also fuse items to weapons and shields. Attaching monster horns to weapons significantly increases their attack or adds other effects. For example, adding a mushroom creates a bounce attack, flinging monsters far away, or adding an elemental monster horn allows for elemental attacks. For shields, you can attach a cart to your shield to create a skateboard or attach a bomb or rocket to fly.

(Fuse menu)

Devices

The best addition to the game, devices, add a new layer of gameplay options. For example, instead of attacking head-on, you can create a device to do it for you. Need to go long distances? Make a flying machine or car. Do you want to make a missile, go ahead? Anything is possible. My personal favorite creation is a plane that has 12 lasers on it.

Quality of Life

With all this new content, Nintendo added many quality-of-life features, such as quicker animations to make fights fair, not having to enter your inventory to drop items, fewer menus, better tutorials, the more obvious points of interest, and inventory sorting.

New and Old Enemy Redesigns

Tears of the Kingdom adds a variety of new enemies. For sky island enemies, the aerocuda joins the battle, they are able to kill you while flying, and can pick up enemies to keep you out of reach. Boss Bokoblins now organize bokoblins into formations you must break before taking on. The new replacements for the Guardians for Breath of the Wild are the soldier constructs, a more flexible and manageable version of guardians. While they are easier, they are still dangerous, as they can fuse weapons and come in numbers. Evermeans are walking trees that can come out at any second and cannot be taken down with blunt weapons. Gibdos cannot be damaged with standard weapons, but with elemental weapons, they are easy. Horriblins live in caves and stick to walls. They must be shot off before killing. Like Likes live in caves and must be hit in their weak spot to kill.

Boss Fights

Many new bosses are added to Tears of the Kingdom. Flux Constructs must be dismantled before damaging; Gleeoks are three-headed elemental dragons; the Gloom hands are five hands that will drain your heart if they grab you, so they must be killed by arrows. After that, a Phantom Ganon appears, and you must fight it.

(Gleeok)

Cons

Performance

Some problems with the game are performance issues. As you progress, NPCs will fight for you, heavily impacting your performance. In massive battles, it was not uncommon for the frame rate to drop to what felt like ten to fifteen frames per second. I dismissed all the NPCs when I finished, and the game ran so much better.

New Abilities

The NPCs that fight for you all have abilities. Unfortunately, activating these abilities requires you to go up to each NPC and hit a button twice. This is not very easy in the thick of the fight. Most of the time, I did not use them. Furthermore, abilities feel like downgrades to Breath of the Wild. The new abilities are just far more underwhelming.

Final Thoughts

Tears of the Kingdom is a very well-made game, making Breath of the Wild look like a demo compared to it. What is my personal rating of the game? I give it a 9/10, with -1 point for the performance and new abilities because they are not game-breaking issues.