Testing the Tears of the Kingdom ”Impressions: The Sun

he “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” The next peak of the legendary zelda-Row? We already have a few hours of gameplay before release. here Our impressions!

Nintendo

he “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the WildBest open world game ever? Of course, that’s a big argument. However, the fact is that the latest official installment in the legendary game series has revolutionized the Zelda formula from the ground up and definitely alienated a player. For us, it still is. “Breath of the Wild” is one of the best games of the past decade: similar to what From Software proved last year with “Elden Ring”, those responsible for “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” simply understand how an open world should work Exciting, mysterious, and gigantic without cluttering the map with thousands of question marks and glowing icons.It’s incredibly difficult to strike the right balance between exploration and storytelling, especially for games like this.And Nintendo has mastered that with flying colors with Breath of the Wild.

No wonder that “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” You don’t want to reinvent the wheel again. No, TotK (that’s the acronym of the title) is anything but half-hearted DLC – that would be a pity given its long development time. And no, there are no “unbreakable” weapons (at least not for the first few hours of play): your branches and wooden clubs will break into individual parts after a few hits. But for every element that successfully integrates Breath of the Wild into the Zelda series’ timeless gameplay formula, Nintendo is building a new twist and gimmick in Tears of the Kingdom, that once again feels fresh and exciting. At the review event, we were able to play the first five to six hours of the release version of “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” and we were overwhelmed in every way. On the one hand, because of course TotK uses and develops many of the “Breath of the Wild” elements that we were already excited about in the predecessor. On the one hand, because entirely new gameplay mechanics probably bring life to the most complex, innovative, and exciting open-world sandbox we’ve played in many years.

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From the deepest catacombs to the highest realm of clouds

The TotK staging area is in the air! Image: Nintendo

For spoiler reasons, we don’t want to reveal too much about the story of “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.” Just this much: Zelda and Link end up in the mysterious catacombs below Hyrule Castle, where they not only meet a legendary legend, but also a somewhat creepy “undead” that lifts Hyrule Castle and the entire country into the air. Strange plague. As befits her situation, Zelda is kidnapped or simply “disappears” and Link suddenly finds herself in a mysterious kingdom of heaven: the Master Sword is broken. His arm has been infected with the plague and has been replaced by a contraption. And suddenly this mysterious voice appeared from afar, which is supposed to save our lives. In terms of atmosphere, “Tears of the Kingdom” really pulled us in, despite the lack of voice-over and a silent protagonist, and reminded us of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky” in its best sense, which was also due to the great soundtrack.

Then, Link has to not only gather his strength, but actually gather his strength in the truest sense of the word. His new Shattered Helper Arm has a number of new abilities that we will unlock gradually. And they become real game changers in the first few hours of playing. First, we jump from one puddle to another, because the game is more vertical from the start, and attaching to his three miserable little hearts only deals damage when he falls from a great height, for example when he can dive into a refreshing spot. lake. But after a few typical stamina-bar climbs, our path quickly leads us to one of the first shrines, which also has a new main ability for our hero at the start.

Hook Builder – These skills are learned in the first few hours

This includes, for example, the ability called “SynthesisThanks Synthesis For example, we can fuse two weapons together. This usually not only ensures that weapons are significantly more durable than their “normal form”, but also that they have special abilities. In the shrine, for example, we have to overcome a stone wall. To do this, we fuse a completely ordinary branch with a stone and suddenly we have a kind of stone hammer in our hands, with which we can also “knock down” larger obstacles – evil opponents in any case. In the first big cloud world, we collect three more skills in the first three to four hours of play.

With a “super hand”, a little fumbling and a lot of brains, it’s back to work! Image: Nintendo

with “Ultra Hand“We collect items, such as Zonai devices like ‘fans,’ which we can combine with ‘normal’ items like logs, planks of wood, etc. For example, we built a group of three logs that we had previously ‘smashed’ with an axe. (And there’s nothing really random when it comes to locating certain resources) There’s also a little sail nearby and we not only “build” an impromptu raft, but also put it on the lake, where we can thanks to a gust of wind that’s carried over to the other side.So here, Physics in the game world looks very cool, amazing and sometimes even funny: Once a turbine was connected to a raft, but we wanted to activate it with an ax. We accidentally broke a tree trunk. The remains of the “poor” raft suddenly made a bad turn to the right – and we had to “improvise” a little in The shrine to reach the last point.

“a roof jump” Sometimes it feels like cheating, but above all it is a very useful tool for reaching higher places – the linker can, so to speak, teleport himself up or simply swim through certain ceilings, thus getting to vertical places faster which he is likely to run into mostly. gasped. And last but not least, we come to the end reverse time: With this, for example, some elements and objects move backwards, like gigantic wheels, in which we suddenly reach greater heights. A raft is being pushed down a waterfall – but do you actually want to go up? No problem, get on the raft and turn back time for a moment. The most important characteristic of new skills is the interaction and ultimately also the structure and possibilities that arise from it. While the world of the detailed tutorial doesn’t yet offer the great freedom that awaits you later on the realm of Hyrule, we were simply excited by the variety of options the Sandbox finally gives you in the first few hours. This is often really amazing and impressive.

Small negative points: Difficult controls and game that pushes switching to the limit

The massive game world pushes Switch to the extreme Image: Nintendo

In Hyrule itself, we had two more hours of gameplay. Basically, the game again provides a good mix of story progression and the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the open world at any time because something “exciting” seems to be around the corner. As you can imagine, Link’s many abilities not only comically challenge us, but above all our skills in terms of controls: basically the very complex control of various construction or physics elements is well resolved, but a good part during the game we spent rotating objects and put them in the correct position. It’s still exciting and funny at first, but of course it takes you off the “normal” path of the game. Hopefully Nintendo will strike a balance here and not lose players because they are frustrated with building some rudimentary things and barely getting any further.

The second small negative point has to do with the Nintendo Switch: we’ve often preached that the great hybrid console is now frequently reaching its technical limits in various games. And this is probably more evident in “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” than ever before: because especially when using “Ultrahand” and many physics objects, the frame rate always drops a bit. TotK also provides the great insight into the predecessor, but edge flicker and image artifacts are more noticeable than ever. Don’t get me wrong, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is still a beautiful and visually stunning game. But the desire to be able to experience the incredibly complex game world on significantly more powerful hardware immediately jumped into our heads while playing.