First impressions: Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is the most purely fun Nintendo game in a decade
Building off the successes of 2017's Breath Of The Wild, Nintendo has unleashed its most creatively satisfying game in years
Games Features Nintendo
As we race to put our time in on new Zelda game Tears Of The Kingdom, we thought we’d put together a first-impressions review based in our first 20 hours with it. We’ll revisit the game as we get more time with it in the coming weeks.
Here’s the best shot we’ve got, after 20 hours with The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, at explaining why it’s the most fun video game Nintendo has released in at least a decade. And it comes in the form of a question: Y’all ever watch the experts play 2017's The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild?
They were incredible: Physics-defying daredevils, breaking the Switch hit in half using blue-clad hero Link’s robust power set, and the game’s own physics, to do truly stupid, beautiful stuff, like launching themselves halfway across Hyrule with a single dose of time-stopping Stasis. Certainly, their exploits made for fun videos to watch while we, muddling through what we are forced to concede was the exact same game, found ourselves clinging uneasily to the side of a mountain, desperately managing our stamina bars, and trying not to get struck by lightning.
The brilliance of Tears Of The Kingdom, then, is this: It sets out to—and, impossibly, succeeds at—making players like us feel like high-flying demented geniuses like them. And it does it pretty much right from the jump.
With a plot picking up a few years after the end of BOTW, Tears Of The Kingdom wastes no time in stripping Link back down to basics—so that it can build him right back up in its new (aggressively shirtless) image. Clearly noticing how much joy BOTW players got out of the game’s high-flying tutorial area The Great Plateau, Tears’ creators doubled down on both the verticality and the intensity of its own opening areas, sending Link sky-diving, sans parachute, between multiple impossibly floating islands, before handing him the first of the game’s incredibly impressive set of environmental tools: The Ultrahand, a grabbing tool that allows the player to move objects in their environment, and, critically, glue them together with magic glue.
As Tears’ first few hours steadily demonstrate, that attachment ability is far more than just a revenge rip-off of Fortnite’s basic building mechanics: It’s the secret ingredient that allows players to do pretty much anything they can imagine in this space, provided they’ve got the logs, planks, boulders, and an ever-expanding set of electrical “Zonai” devices to pull it off. By hour two, we were already being asked, on a regular basis, to build the sort of stuff you’d normally see only in the bizarre depths of some physics-obsessed indie game: Fanboats, rocket cars, catapults, and more, all simple to build, all clearly expected of players by the game itself. All of this, as filtered through Nintendo’s typical technical brilliance; Breath Of The Wild already had a great physics engine, and Tears more or less hands players the keys to it and invites them to go nuts. That’s our point, really: They took the fun that was always lurking in the world they’d created, and made it so accessible as to become purely irresistible.
Meanwhile, much of the core gameplay of BOTW has been kept intact: A massive world to explore, now supplemented by huge regions in the skies, and deep beneath the earth, for players to explore. (Don’t sleep on the Depths, either: The game tucks some of its most joyful surprises down in those dark, hostile chasms.) There’s still a blessedly minimalist approach to writing, with a story that mostly serves to introduce new abilities or toys and then gets out of the way so you can spend most of your time in blissful, creative solitude. And there’s still a robust combat system that punishes foolish players with broken weapons and brutally hard hits—and encourages the creative with numerous new ways to fight. (The new Fuse tool, which lets you merge your precious, fragile weapons with environmental objects, monster parts, and even other weapons, is the star here; the possibilities begin with “glue a spear to another spear for double reach” and then just get sillier and sillier from there.)
Notably, Hyrule has once again found itself filled with shrines, those bite-sized mini-dungeons that made up so much of Breath Of The Wild’s run-time. But where the BOTW shrines could often feel like they were trying to create, in aggregate, the feeling of running through the more traditional and larger Zelda dungeons that game mostly lacked, the shrines in Tears Of The Kingdom now serve almost solely as mini-tutorials to spark player creativity. Almost all of them focus on a single building technique or object—hot air balloons, massive trampolines, literal high-powered rockets—designed to get you thinking about all the stuff you could build with these things out in the real world. In 20 hours with the game, shrine duty never felt like chores, because we always knew they’d be showing off something cool. (And also, of course, granting us 1/4 of a heart container or stamina upgrade in the process—critical, as Tears Of The Kingdom remains committed to making you feel vulnerable in its early game.)
Meanwhile, each area of the game world has been filled with stuff to do, with a shockingly high hit rate of enjoyability. Sick of shrining? Go follow some sidequest that’ll likely lead you to a new building tool. Poke into a cave for treasures, and then use your Ascend power to pop right back out via the roof. Help this one poor bastard hold up a sign. (God, we love helping that poor bastard hold up his signs.) Or just go hunt down towers to fill out your map—a now-standard bit of video game design that is turned joyfully on its head here; instead of testing your climbing prowess, each lookout tower now hurls Link into the air to snap a picture of the landscape with his anachronistic smartphone, and then lets him glide wherever the hell he wants. Why? Because that’s fun, and Tears Of The Kingdom chooses the fun option every single time, with a consistency and dedication that is absolutely shocking.
Want to build a 100-foot-long bridge so you can ride a horse across a lake? Do it, friend. Want to strap a rocket to a helpless Korok and launch them in the direction of their buddy? Decent odds that it’ll work. Want to beat a monster to death with a giant dick made out of rocks and boulders? Best believe Tears Of The Kingdom has got your back. And none of these things—sans the lithic phalli—are unintended by the developers. It’s clear that the dev team here looked at the toolset of Breath Of The Wild, saw what players were doing with it, and steered into it so hard that they made a Zelda game that’s about building your own monster truck to fight evil ninjas with. And it all works, both practically—you will be shocked by what this game lets you get away with, in terms of video game physics—and spiritually. In their, and your, hands, this version of Link becomes the ultimate improviser, employing cunning and craft to overcome literal mountains and overwhelming odds.
To have all of this come from Nintendo—a studio that has struggled, for decades, with its warring love for, and fear of, the imaginations of its own players—is a genuine, joyful shock. Coming across some little treat—to pick an example out of dozens, finding a set of objects that, you slowly realize, are car wheels, ready to start spinning with a simple smack—and realizing that the game wants nothing more from you than to just play, is completely exhilarating. That it presents this overwhelming playground while also serving wonderfully as a Zelda game, complete with dungeons, massive and cinematic boss fights, and an expanding array of items and abilities, is simply breathtaking.
In a gaming landscape where nearly every open world game can, eventually, be reduced into a simple set of chores on a map, the first 20 hours of Tears Of The Kingdom are a revelation. No game since Elden Ring has sparked our sense of discovery so strongly—and where that game over-awed with scale and mystery, this latest Zelda game does something similar with an energetic sense of play. If the phrase “The WarioWare of Zelda games” makes sense to you, you understand what we’re trying to convey here; if not, then we’ll put it in simpler language: One of the most talented video game design teams on the planet has let their imaginations go with this one, and the results are impeccable. We can’t wait to play more.
30 Comments
The tedium of crafting these amalgamations grates the nerves, and the finicky controls are similarly burdensome. When the bespoke objects get complex with lots of parts, the frame rate dips are nigh unforgivable…….and yet……the game is still such a blast! The amount one needs to use ultrahand to create cool shit forces the player to become more efficient and I’ve never seen this part of a gameplay loop feel so rewarding: how can I do the task in front of me in as few moves as possible? I’m not nearly at 20 hours yet, but the tone of this piece gives me hope that my already diminishing annoyance at the tedium will continue until I get to the flow state I have always gotten to in mainline Zelda games. Now…if only Link wouldn’t INSIST on attaching himself to nearby walls/crates/boards/columns/trees, that would be great….
“sans the lithic phalli” is absolute poetry.
put about 7 hours in the tutorial and just landed in hyrule proper. cannot wait to absolutely become a gremlin over this long weekend.
If BotW changed open world games, TotK will change video games, period. It’s nothing short of jaw-dropping.
It feels to me like the developers said, “Breath of the Wild was a good game. What if there were a completely different way to play it?” The foundation is the same, but I’m both exhilarated and slightly overwhelmed by how differently I have to approach Tears of the Kingdom.
The fact that they took the map and core mechanics from Breath of the Wild and then added caves and an elaborate crafting system makes me wonder if Nintendo is taking ideas directly from my son’s brain.
In a decade? Did you miss out on Super Mario Odyssey?
I really enjoyed it, but there’s a certain portion of the game that just feels tacked on. You don’t even have to deal with it outside of a few quests, but it’s just severely undercooked compared to everything else to the point I kinda regretted even interacting with it as it was mostly a gargantuan waste of time.
I just got to the first major set piece/dungeon. So far I’m not that impressed with it, especially in contrast to Breath of the Wild. In the first few hours its felt like a expansion pack where its the same as before but with more stuff, of questionable value, on top.I am finding building stuff frustrating. The amount of button presses to get anything done is high. This is a weird learning curve for such a crazy sandbox concept. I tried to build a little land cycle which exploded the minute I turned it on.Plot wise this is a turn into the parts of Zelda lore I dislike. I never used the motorcycle from BotW DLC for the same reasons – this magitech isn’t fun. Hookshots and boomerangs are fun. The other part of Zelda lore I dislike is Furryisms and so I was immediately annoyed at the Zonai reveal. Got the first flashback moment and it seems to be now welded into the genetics (literally) of the lore now.The first time I encountered a few Zelda tropes – switches, trapdoors, I had to look it up in a guide as I didn’t recognize them so I didn’t try them. That was frustrating.There have been a few dead ends I’ve got stuck in and had to fast travel out of. I don’t like Zelda with sharp edges like this. It feels wrong.Shrines are more interesting than last time. And I’ve died a shocking amount. So its fine. I’m not in love though.
I am finding building stuff frustrating. The amount of button presses to get anything done is high. Sidenote: I’m a PC gamer nowadays, and my main bugbear with console ports being the norm is not, like 99% of PC gamers, that these ports don’t utilise the full capacity of DirectX 16 path-traced rendering abilities of the Geforce 8090 that needs a Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor to run, liquid helium for cooling, and sounds like Soviet bomber taking off just to run a “perfectly reasonable” 12K resolution at an average of an “acceptable” 240FPS. (I really wish these guys’d fuck right off, to be honest.)It’s the interface. It’s frustrating playing games on a KBM that utilise like 8% of the buttons available to me. I’m talking about the abuse of context-sensitivity , press-or-hold buttons, and limited item slots, because an Xbox controller only has 11 buttons. I just finished Redfall (not as bad as everyone says, I think it was a victim of hype and mangement fuckery and whatever bullshit MS is pulling to try to buy ABK), and lord knows the weapons are painful to manage. Because there’s two distinct enemy types but only three slots, you’re constantly digging through menus to swap stuff out on the fly, and having at least one slot dedicated to the one weapon that can take out vampires.
I’m about 4-5 hours in and having a blast and the crazy thing is, I feel like I haven’t done anything gamewise yet. I just got the ability to glide and unlocked the first tower and I went through a handful of shrines in the process.The thing I’m already liking that I haven’t seen talked about as much is how the NPCs are doing way more now – they’re not just in villages but they’re out actively fighting monsters and hunting for treasure. Really gives the game more life than the first game.And yea – building stuff is cool. Maybe not for everyone but found it to be very intuitive for the most part and its satisfying seeing an invention work. Can’t wait to get the gliders I’ve seen in trailers.
Last night, I found a Korok that wanted to get to his buddy, and next to him was a sled, a fan, and a control stick — everything I’d need to make a car. Unfortunate, then, that his buddy was across a lake.But there was a building materials cache just a little bit up the road. “Hmm,” I thought to myself. “Wood floats. If I glue a plank of wood to the top of the sled, then put the control stick and fan on that, will I make an amphibious car?”Yes. Yes I would. I droke that Korok right to his buddy, then took my amphibi-car over to the nearest stable. Where they weren’t all that impressed by it, but a group of explorers did want to tell me all about their new ethos of exploring while wearing only underpants.Every other game scheduled for this year ought to delay themselves to 2024. Game of the Year has been settled already.
It’s amazing that “new Zelda game” has gone from a footnote among dedicated Nintendo enthusiasts to a cultural event. Like, I don’t know if anyone ever expected Microsoft to crowd Nintendo out of the marketplace, but ten years ago I would have never guessed that Zelda would outsell the new Xbox.
It’s not the inevitable result of producing a game so revolutionary that every other game in its genre has been living in its shadow ever since, with a follow-up that has even seasoned game developers going “how did they do that????”, but… it’s sure nice that it worked out that way this time!
Nintendo seems to be the only developer treating gameplay – mechanics, interactivity – as their number one artistic priority. And that’s why I love them them.**Despite buying a Switch and BOTW then selling it three months later.
Elden Ring really took everything I loved about Breath of the Wild and cranked it up to 11. I was actually worried that Tears of the Kingdom wouldn’t live up to that. Especially when I saw so much focus on (ugh) crafting in the trailers. But holy crap they managed to make the part of most modern games that I hate the most super fun and interesting.There are devs out there that get it, I think. The problem is that something like Gotham Knights that is largely seen as a disappointing mess will probably end up pulling in more money than Zelda. The recent backlash against live service type games is hopefully pushing stuff back in the right direction though.
zelda sold 10 million copies in 3 days i don’t think gotham knights is getting anywhere near that no matter how many skins they sell.an underrated thing about nintendo in general is that the same guys who invented this stuff are still there, still working on the games. no other gaming company can say that. and it shows.
(Gonna put my old marketing hat on for a bit.)One of the pieces of (minor) drama to come out of TOTK was the reaction to the Aussie ad of it:And the Hardcore Gamer’s™ – you know the types – reaction was eye-rolling. One reaction I read was “Trust Nintendo Australia to come up with the most sombre ad for a Zelda ever” and “lucky I didn’t see this ad before I got it or I wouldn’t have bought it”. Idiots. The lot of ‘em. But it’s not like Nintendo is worried.That is a genius ad, and, yes, also something on Nintendo could do, because they make games that are open and rewarding, challenging yet accessible, inclusive, and…fun in their own right. Nintendo shows the effect the game has on him. It shows his reactions.
Most daringly of all, it shows something that no other game developer would have the balls to do: it shows him fucking up – twice. Link drowns, and his boat capsizes. That’s the essence of play. As in gameplay. And I think that’s what a lot of games forget.This is what this game can do for you. It shows you enriching your life, the reward that comes from overcoming a challenge – as well as the fact you can take the Switch on the bus and plug it into your TV.
It says…surprisingly little about the the game itself, apart from the crafting and exploration and a bit of the combat.(Nintendo has form in this area: remember those 3Ds ads? How the hell do you advertise the 3D of your console…on a 2D medium? You show people reacting to it!) You’ve got a forty-year-old husband, in a tie and dress pants, coming home from late to his wife (in a nice house, which, um, is probably the most unrealistic thing about it in Aus at the moment) – who is already going to bed – after what is implied to be another mediocre day at work – looking to unwind and seeing a copy of TOTK on the coffee table, and giving it a crack. Maybe his wife left it out for him, maybe she was playing it herself, maybe both. The guys, like me, who were in awe playing Super Mario 64 for an hour in a big box store while my dad waited patiently (the level was Jolly Roger Bay, and we went to the Pizza Hut Buffet across the road after!) in 1997, or who were amazed playing Ocarina Of Time (running around Kokiri Forest, 1998) are now that guy in the ad. We’re the guy in the ad now.
These gamers are married, they have jobs, they have ups and downs…they’re grown ups. And that’s the sort of irony I love: more adults are playing the “kiddy” game than running around whatever COD reboot questioning tweens’ sexuality. Especially when I saw so much focus on (ugh) crafting in the trailers. But holy crap they managed to make the part of most modern games that I hate the most super fun and interesting.There are no bad game mechanics – only bad implementations of mechanics. I know what you mean: Bethesda’s foray into crafting bullshit was one of the worst parts of FO4. It was used as cheap filler – hey, look, we threw this in, added another item to the back of the box, shut up, quantitively we’ve provided. Instead of giving you, say, a shotgun, you instead get multiple items that you have to combine into one item before you can get any function from them! Instead of one gameplay mechanic, you get like five for the same outcome! (Find a barrel! Find a receiver! Find a set of sights! Find a stock! Combine them at a dedicated place! That one mechanic is now five!)It’s just “Let’s take X, and divvy it into more parts for more gameplay”. Not better gameplay. More gameplay. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like survival games, because it really just feels cheap and repetitive – it’s shallow depth. Ooh, you need a spear! We could have them make that from a rock and stick! But it would be better if you could find sticks of different lengths! And types! And you have to find the right length! And make sure it’s hardwood, not softwood! And then make sure you find the right rock! And what if we make there be different rocks! And sizes of rocks! And you have to bind it with string! But not twine, which we could also put in the game! Frankly, as an adult, I get enough of that in real life. Do I buy the Mutti tinned tomatoes, Val Verde again, La Gina, or Annalisa? (OK, bad example: the answer is always Mutti.)It didn’t work in FO4 because the outcomes, despite the “millions of combinations”, in practice you get a shotgun that’s…not dissimilar to any other shotgun you find or make. There really was no point.Don’t get me started on the settlement crap, either. TOTK lets you go nuts and fail until you succeed, which gives you so much more agency and thus ownership and engagement over your creations, to the point where you can kinda sorta maybe break the game:It lets you build pointless crap. I guarantee you 90% of the stuff in YT vids of TOTK weren’t ever envisioned by Nintendo (especially the penises). There are no bad mechanics, just bad implementations.Except QTEs, those can fuck off and die forever. The problem is that something like Gotham Knights that is largely seen as a disappointing mess will probably end up pulling in more money than Zelda.Ah, yes. I have a saying from back in my metal scene days: if your band uses more than three genres to describe their music, it’s almost certainly crap. That what GK looks like. An open-world, action-RPG, that’s also online and looter-multiplayer!It’s throwing random trends at the wall and seeing who salutes. I’ve just finished Redfall, and, yes, it’s one of the saddest games ever for that reason. I’m fairly certain it’s a massive cry for help from Harvey Smith and Arkane, given the plot of the game: there’s the bones of a great game in their, but it’s saddle with terrible stuff – the Left 4 Dead multi, the looter-shooter bits, the GAAS bullshit…something Arkane has shown absolutely zero interest in before, and completely antithetical to what they normally make. It’s the same thing: chuck a bunch of “good” genres together in a blender at the behest of management and shareholders with no rhyme or reason, and surely you’ll make millions, right? Right? It’s not a bad open-world shooter – in fact, in some key ways it’s the Arkane game I always wanted. I’d love if Arkane made a Far Cry-type game (one thing I love about Redfall is that, unlike Far Cry, it’s willing to leave the player the hell alone). But far too much was made of it having to be Bethesda’s Fortnite, as well as being, for some damn reason, the Xbox’s saviour.
I just want you to know that I agree with basically everything you said here, from the reactions to that TotK ad right down the specifics about Fallout 4. I imagine that it took a long time to type all that out, and I appreciated reading it.I haven’t played Redfall yet, but I have a friend who’s reaction has basically been “it’s broken as hell but there are parts I like” and has been begging me to play it with him. What’s truly sad is that if there were local co-op, all the 4/10 reviews in the world could not have stopped me and my partner from calling in sick on launch day to play it. But Nintendo is about the only company that recognizes having a friend in real life is still a thing.
Thanks. It wasn’t that hard to write, since those were ideas I’ve had kicking around forever. The AVC comments section is one of the rare places where you can discuss this sort of stuff, because there are people who play games..but it’s not a gaming site. Which means you avoid the worst aspects of gaming culture (which isn’t as clever as it likes to make out…)I haven’t played Redfall yet, but I have a friend who’s reaction has basically been “it’s broken as hell but there are parts I like” and has been begging me to play it with him.I’m a guy who’ll take a great mechanic that’s fun and engaging and gleefully ignore everything else. (This is why I find Mirror’s Edge fantastic – sure, it’s only parkour and that’s it, but by gosh they nailed it.)Redfall nailed a few key things that keep me around.The exploration, as is expected from an Arkane game, is fantastic. I love the thrill of exploring a near-abandoned town. They’re not big maps, but they are deep, or at least deeper than your typical OW game. There’s lots of notes hidden around the map, a few unmarked quests that are satisfying to figure out yourself.There’s lots of hidden secrets, little environmental puzzles, and probably more enterable buildings per square mile than any other OW game.Rather than going for sheer scale like every other OW game (it’s easy making quantity, it’s hard making quality…), they went detailed. And that’s much more interesting.It’s still an Arkane game. Door’s locked on that house? There’s likely another way in. Look for it. Need a good fighting position? Go vertical – jump on that truck, then on that pipe, and climb up to the roof! That area of the map looking boring and empty? Chances are it’s not – there’s going to be something to reward you going out there, even if it’s just some ammo. Where the hell’s that pick up noise coming from? You’ve gotta be able to get to it. What the hell’s that guy talking about in that diary entry you found? Worth investigating.There’s a couple of particular little puzzles I’m still smiling about for figuring out. They were so nicely done, and not lampshaded or signposted.I love that stuff.Harvey Smith worked on Deus Ex, and I’ve replayed that game about a dozen times, at least. It wasn’t until the seventh or so playthrough that I finally got to a certain character’s apartment – and in doing so was rewarded with a great bit of backstory that was organically told.I just hope your friend has a mind to explore like you do, and isn’t someone who just wants to charge through everything.The other thing is that the guns, while somewhat limited (look, this ain’t Borderlands), are fantastic. The shooting feels great. Weighty, meaty, and you’re in control. I especially love the fact they’ve put in a hard-hitting-but-slow-firing DM-style semi-auto, something of a rarity in shooters. There’s a wide variety of sights, and some guns have suppressors that do actually affect the gameplay. It’s fun crawling around the town and popping cultists, even if the AI ain’t the brightest. It’s clearly weighted towards swarming a group of players for that L4D feel with a group of players and creating quick, guaranteed action. I’d suggest, though, you play it on the easiest setting. They AI’s tolerable as such, but getting your arse kicked by something so stupid would get frustrating, especially with the cheats they use – since the goal is to get you swarmed, as soon as they’re aware of an attack they know exactly where you are. I’ve played it as an SP game, putting relatively few points into my character’s (Jacob, the sniper) special skills, because it’s fun enough to play it as such.It’s like a Far Cry game without the annoyances – the unskippable try-hard writing and the incessant belief that you must be subjected to it against your will. And unlike most Far Cries, it lets you find your own fun.There’s some other frustrations (Arkane’s fetish for making pop-up messages taking up A WHOLE THIRD OF YOUR SCREEN FOR NO DAMN REASON IN THE MIDDLE OF COMBAT returns from Deathloop, and the lack of weapon slots is frustrating given the fact that you have two very different types of enemies that require two different types of weapons.)Oh, and James “Rusty Venture” Urbaniak does a voice. Noice. What’s truly sad is that if there were local co-op, all the 4/10 reviews in the world could not have stopped me and my partner from calling in sick on launch day to play it.That’s the thing: I can’t work out why it’s a 4/10 game. It’s not a 10/10, not even a 9, but a 6, at least. In my opinion – given I’m playing through it again – it’s at least a 7.5. I’m playing it via Game Pass; there’s no way in hell I’d pay full price for this (especially after Deathloop).But, then again, here’s the rub: I never really paid attention to any of the hype, which was apparently massive, or at least massive relative to the size of the game. Arkane games were good, but kinda niche – they were never going to be everyone-must-buy, camp-outside-Gamestop, even-non-gaming-press-is-talking-about-it sort of games. Piecing together some of the reactions and op-eds on Redfall post-launch, apparently……it was meant to the thing that saved Xbox. I’m not a console gamer, but apparently things have been going a bit arse over tit with MS’s gaming. Both Halo and Forza have died in the arse and those were meant to be the headline games that carried them over the last year or so.Starfield has been delayed until the end of this year, so that’s, what, another six months Xbox has got nothin’ yuge. I guess Phil Spencer looked around for a game that was in his portfolio, was exclusive, could be a passable AAA game, and was shippable ASAP. That was Redfall.Spencer himself has said the game should not have been released as it is:I also can’t help but think there’s been downward pressure from Bethesda/Zenimax/Microsoft for Arkane to stop doing SP and start doing multi, because, as you alluded to before…why sell a game to one person, when you can sell a game to one person and have them pressure their friends into getting it too? (Not saying your mate’s doing that, but that’s what publishers hope.)It’s a shame, because there’s a fantastic Arkane im-sim, single player game here, but it feels like it’s been nipped and tucked, Jocelyn Wildenstein-style into a looter-shooter MP monster. The game feels like it starts at its second act; perhaps this is an attempt at starting in media res, but mostly it’s just a serious case of “What the hell is going on?” Sure, you pick up some backstory through the game, which is nice, but you can’t help but feel it’s a missed opportunity, gameplay wise. It would’ve been nice to see the start of the calamity, offer a gradual ramping-up of challenge, starting with human enemies, before moving onto the vanilla vamps, then the specials, then the bosses. I get that: because most of the mechanics are geared around multi, you want the mobbing to start as soon as you fire up the game. The enjoyment is meant to come from you screaming at your teammates over a Blue Yeti mic, not from within the game itself.My character, Jacob, has some history with one of the bosses on the island, and it would’ve been great to start there, watch things go south. In fact, all three have connections to the island and the shenanigans going on there. Have a Dragon Age: Origins-style custom start for each, which would create some great replayability. (It’s especially weird since the game is a weird blend of science fiction and fantasy that’s never really reconciled – is it a science-based disaster, or a supernatural one? Both?)Because it’s multiplayer-centric, story has been sidelined and is delivered mostly during mission briefings, which feel both clumsy and aren’t up to Arkane’s usual writing quality. They’re used as an opportunity to awkwardly dump character backstory and exposition, because that’s the only chance they’ve got. I skip them. There’s not much briefing in there, just go see what the mission page in the inventory screen says. Another, more cynical theory around Redfall’s failings are that it’s a victim of MS’s attempt to buy Activision – by launching a half-baked game, doomed to fail, Redmond gets to cry poor and show that it’s not a threat of becoming a monopoly (ha!)There’s also the fact that Redfall was both the first game that had the New Normal higher RRP, and the first game that was developed as a multiplatform one that was then made Xbox exclusive thanks to MS buying them out. So there’s both the ire from consumers who are being forced to pay more, and from the Playstation press who’s eager to see it fail. My chief disappointment is that it’s clearly a good game that feels like it was fettled and fucked-with by suits in order to try to turn it into some sort of whale-milking, stream-on-Twitch-24/7 sensation in order to create ongoing revenue for a gaming division that’s not been hitting its KPIs. Spencer seems to claim in that video above that it was Arkane’s choice to go multi looter-shooter…but Harvey Smith’s entire, nigh on forty years-long career says otherwise. It sounds like to me Spencer’s trying to save face by implying that they gave Arkane their creative head and Arkane…let them down, throwing Arkane under the bus.I still think that there was no doubt some corporate mandate saying “It’s gotta have MP”, even if they were willing to give Arkane a free hand in how they did that.Maybe Redfall is even better than what I’ve experienced in SP, but it’s a moot point: there’s a fantastic im-sim, SP opportunity right here. The credits have a dedicated page to explaining how hard the game was to make with the pandemic – which is fair enough – but I think there’s stuff in here that cannot be explained by COVID. I’ve been playing Harvey Smith’s games for over two decades, and all of them have been pretty much absolute gold. (Invisible War…eh, maybe copper.)I trust Smith as an auteur. (I wouldn’t write so much negative about it – which I’ve done – if I didn’t care. Wanna know how I’d improve, say, COD? No idea, because I don’t really care about it.)Considering how different this is to his prior games, I cannot help but conclude it’s outside interference, not something wrong with Arkane. It’s a shame, because no doubt this is the end of Redfall – a world I’d really like to explore more…as an SP (or, at most, co-op) Arkane im-sim.In short, it’s a good game, with some great gameplay loops, that’s definitely fun. But I wouldn’t pay full price for it – but neither is it the absolute dire-cancer the wags on the internet are making it out to be.
I’m still getting to grips with crafting; I’m not the most technically minded person and visualising what a working vehicle should look like doesn’t come naturally. The abilities I am really enjoying are Ascend and the fact that you can dive from any height into a pool of water (with a rewarding splash). I know that’s pretty basic as game abilities go, but there’s just something very satisfying about that sense of unencumbered movement.
“In 20 hours with the game, shrine duty never felt like chores, because we always knew they’d be showing off something cool.”I wish I felt the same way. So far the game has mostly felt like a chore to me. The “training” period basically makes you follow a prescribed path and even when deviation is possible, it’s risky. Moving from one area to another requires you to build contraptions, but that also means getting back requires you to build even more contraptions. Said contraptions also seem to disappear once you leave an area.The same goes for weapons. It’s cool that I can make changes to the weapons, but having to craft every time I want something that’s not weak is already tedious. Having to drop crap on the ground just to attach it to a stick also seems like an unnecessary complication (maybe there’s trick I haven’t found). The same goes for the arrows. I really hope I don’t have to manually attach an eyeball or bomb flower every single time. So far it seems like I do.I was really really looking forward to this game and so far it’s been a very disappointing and frustrating experience.
Have you used the teleport function yet? Just like BOTW but you can go to any shrine, not just towers.
Yes. I was thinking mainly of the first sky island, which I found cumbersome to traverse and explorer. You also have to do it mostly without shrine traveling and 100% without the paraglider. I just wanted to leave it, not from excitement, but because I hated being on it.The issue I’ve run into with the shrines is that they seem more difficult than BOTW so far. I had to punt on the first two I encountered in Hyrule because I couldn’t crack one and I couldn’t survive the other. But I’m sticking with it and hopefully I’ll come around eventually. I really do want to enjoy it.
I think it’s pretty janky, but it’s fun. I die in more stupid ways here than I do in Valheim, but at least the corpse run is usually a lot faster. What’s everybody’s favorite fuses so far? Mine is Minecart Hammer… Trusty MH No. 1 was always ready to break some rocks or whatever, and lasted for a really long time.Haven’t gotten the hang of fused shields yet (They so rarely do anything but distract visually) … but of course I had to make a meat shield. It’s meat.
I started playing last weekend and I’m having a blast. Having to drop one item before fusing it with another is a bit tedious, but my only real complaint is I wish I had a way to preserve my vehicles so I didn’t have to build a new one the moment I exit a shrine or fast travel. Failing that, a way to save designs to they could be instantly assembled if I have all the parts. I made the sweetest combination buggy/glider to deliver a crystal to a shrine location and then, poof, it was gone forever.Even in Hyrule possessions are fleeting.
There is a way to do that last thing (saving your creations), but you have to unlock it.
I tried to play Breath of the Wild more than once, and I’m afraid it ain’t my bag. But I love Nintendo, and I hope they can find some way to extend their success with the Switch into the next generation. Maybe this game will prove to be the key.
The exploring and creating is fun, but every single shrine feels like a tutorial. Tutorials are supposed to happen at the beginning of the game and not the entire game.
landscape with his anachronistic smartphone
I think it is supposed to be an anachronistic Switch.