The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (NS) 9.2 Open World RPG

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an extraordinary game that once again, redefines the open-world adventure genre and what’s possible for the rather aging Nintendo Switch hardware. Developed by Nintendo themselves, this game takes players on an jaw-dropping journey through the vast kingdom of Hyrule, now with a much needed verticality, essentially more than doubling the play area.

From the moment you set foot in (or fall down) the game’s expansive world, you are immediately captivated by its breathtaking scale and attention to detail. The game is set in Hyrule again, with the same core map featuring familiar locations, but the world has evolved so much since we’ve last seen it. Both from a gameplay and story standpoint.

Aside from the surface world, we now have the floating sky islands to explore, and a pitch black underground cave network as big as Hyrule itself, all of them holding many secrets for the players to uncover. Aside from the traditional surface world traversal, the sky above and the depths below both have widely differing mechanics in play. For example, The Depths are mostly in pitch black, which will require lighting them up in various ways to see around, although there is a permanent way of lighting areas up.

Just like the open world, the story is openly structured and non-linear, meaning there is no definite way to progress through it. You can go wherever you want in the game world, and do missions at your own volition. The game features an evolving narrative that is well designed around the exploratory gameplay, with various narrative elements beautifully and slowly unravelling itself to the player — in no specific order — as you play the game.

Speaking of openness, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the most open Zelda game to date, and it’s not anymore just an open-world game. It is now effectively an open-world sandbox — As the game features two major additions to the game: The abilities Ultrahand and Fuse that literally change how the game is played. They allow the player to stitch around world objects in various ways — mostly to solve platforming puzzles, traverse the world, or outright channel the player’s inner creativity.

Players can also fuse basically any world element as well to any weapon or shield that you have, or fuse an arrow to any item. Effectively providing a rewarding element that improves upon the predecessor’s weakest link, which is the weapon durability. Now here, the game rewards experimentation, and things breaking up isn’t as frustrating as before, because you can now break and fuse stuff together and constantly try new things.

Considering the game is running on a Nintendo Switch, it simply puts other newest-gen AAA titles to shame when it comes to optimization and polish. Still, It’s unfortunate that there is currently no way to play this masterpiece on higher resolutions and frame rates. On a Switch successor perhaps in a few years?

So far, Tears of the Kingdom has been a blast to play. I won’t spoil it too much as many of the new mechanics and gameplay elements are best left for the players to unravel, especially during the early parts of the game. All I can say is that this game is set to be a timeless masterpiece and a worthy sequel to The Breath of the Wild.

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Originally posted on TapTap.