Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity Review

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity occasionally lets you take control of a Divine Beast. It's a moment that should carry some weight for Zelda fans. The Beasts are colossal machines crucial to the events of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and while they're cumbersome to control, the levels in which you play as them effectively communicate their destructive power. If you've played Breath of the Wild, these moments take on a portentous air; the power fantasy of using lasers, bursts of lightning, and volleys of magma to level mountains and rack up thousands of Bokoblin, Moblin, and Lizalfos kills is undercut when you remember how the people who're using them can't fully control them, and that these tools of destruction will turn on their masters when they're needed most and destroy them.

That sense of impending doom is what I came to Age of Calamity for, but that's where it blunders hardest. It constantly encourages you to set aside that feeling of dread, avoid coming to terms with the consequences of its apocalyptic premise, and instead just kill a bunch of baddies and think the Divine Beasts are cool. Doing that is fun for a while, but it couldn't stop me from being enormously let down by that choice.

Age of Calamity's narrative failure is especially frustrating because the disappointing turns it takes to get there seem so clear, and because it does so much right until then. The campaign begins with a small, white Guardian-like robot seeing the Calamity caused by Ganon in Breath of the Wild and traveling back in time to before it ever happened, when Link is still a royal knight and Zelda is working to unlock her potential and stop the Calamity from happening.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

source https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hyrule-warriors-age-of-calamity-review/1900-6417614/?ftag=CAD-01-10abi2f

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