"Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity" Review - Like "Breath of the Wild," but better

Available for: Nintendo Switch

Reviewed for: Nintendo Switch

If I'm found brutally stabbed to death after this review is published and there are cheeto dust-covered fingerprints on the murder weapon, please tell the police that the motive was the subtitle I gave this review. Nintendo fanboys are known for their weak constitutions and aversion to cognitive dissonance, after all, so my implication that Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is better than the game it serves as a prequel to (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) is bound to send at least a few of them into a blind flurry of anger so drastic that they might actually leave their parents' basements for the first time for the sole purpose of killing me. But let's put the jokes aside for a second. I've never played a Dynasty Warriors game or any of the spin-off Warriors titles. I've seen clips of the 1-vs-1000 gameplay the series boasts, and it's always looked fun, but I've just never been interested enough to spend money on it. Well, as I prepared to travel (safely, after folks had already been tested) for Thanksgiving, I needed something new for my Switch that could occupy some of the down time inbetween talking with family and getting caught up on my writing, so I decided I'd give Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, a Warriors-style game in the universe of Breath of the Wild, a shot. Suffice it to say I enjoyed it quite a lot! So, let's get to it!

I mentioned in the introduction that Age of Calamity serves as a prequel to Breath of the Wild, but I think a more accurate description would be a prequel/alternative universe. See, the central conceit of Age of Calamity is that during the events of Breath of the Wild, a miniature guardian awoke and traveled back in time to warn Princess Zelda about the exact date that Calamity Gannon was set to return and how they might be able to beat him. From there, Zelda, Link, and a much younger Impa set out to recruit the selected pilots of the four divine beasts to their cause and push back against Calamity Gannon's pawns. If you've played Breath of the Wild, well, you know what happens, so while there are some significant differences to be found in this story (that I won't spoil), nobody is going to be moved to tears over the course of this game. The story and characters definitely take a back seat to gameplay, but if you're already familiar with this world, then it's an interesting extra bit of characterization and insight into what happened before Calamity Gannon's return.

Where Age of Calamity really shines is in its gameplay. What you're doing moment-to-moment isn't exactly varied: you're tasked with killing certain bosses, killing certain amounts of enemies, capturing outposts, or defending locations throughout the whole runtime. But the sheer act of playing this game makes the lack of objective variety almost unnoticeable. On the surface is seems pretty simple: you have a light attack, a heavy attack, a "unique" attack, a meter-based special attack, and a dodge that can reward you with a time slowdown if you use it at exactly the right moment. You can also use the various rune powers from Breath of the Wild and wands with fire, ice, and electric energy. The kicker is that for every one of those things except the dodge and the wands, each member of this game's sizable cast of characters has their own timing and style. Throughout the game's runtime, you have the opportunity to play as Link, Zelda, Impa, the divine beast pilots, a bunch of super spoiler-y characters that appear later on, and a couple special characters that you unlock by completing specific side quests, and every single one of these characters plays uniquely. No two characters use exactly the same weapon types, so obviously the light and heavy attacks are going to look different from character to character, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond having different weapons, every character also has a different string of potential combos. For instance, doing a light-light-heavy combo as Mipha causes her to dash forward in a physical front-facing cone of water, while doing the same combo as Zelda might scatter ice runes across the floor in front of her, ready to be detonated with the "unique" attack button. That's 2 of something like 15 characters, and all of them have different combo styles. The same can be said for the unique attacks, the special attacks, and the rune powers. A unique attack for Mipha is launching up from water mines that her heavy attack lays on the field, while a unique attack for Urbosa would be charging up the electricity that powers her heavy attacks. Similarly, a special attack for Link might be swinging his weapon in a giant circle while a special attack for Urbosa would be enveloping the battlefield in a lightning storm. Finally, the rune attacks all have the same basic premise: the remote bombs blow up, the stasis rune makes time stop for enemies, the magnesis rune throws metal objects at enemies, and the ice rune freezes enemies in water and stops bosses that are charging at you. However, what exact form each of these runes take, once again, depends on the character. For example, when Impa uses the ice rune, she rides the ice block around like she has a Krabby Patty Pizza to deliver, but when Zelda uses it, the resulting ice block acts as a freezing bomb. To go through the sheer variety of attack styles on display here would take pages upon pages, so needless to say, there's plenty of variety in what's actually going on on screen to make up for the fact that you're basically accomplishing the same handful of goals throughout the game. Oh, and if that isn't enough, Link can use several weapon types, and his combos and attacks are different for each type. So, with all of that in mind, let's talk about how gameplay actually works, yeah? There'll be hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of enemies on a battlefield at any given time, and you hack and slash your way through them to get to one of the aforementioned objective types. It's not exactly big brain gameplay, but it never gets old watching hundreds of Bokoblins being knocked into the air every single time I swing my weapon. That's a good 50% of what you'll be doing, with the other 50% being boss fights. Both bosses and minibosses have a large health bar that you can whittle away at, but the best way to handle them is by depleting their circular stamina gauge (I'm sure it's called something else, but I don't know what). Essentially, by performing a perfect dodge, using a special attack, waiting for the boss to finish an attack combo, or using one of your rune powers when the symbol for it appears above the boss, you bring up a circular gauge that looks like a pizza, and once it's visible, you attack the boss/miniboss as much as possible to break up the triangular slices that make up the gauge. This typically involves getting the gauge to become visible somewhere between 2 and 3 times, and once you've depleted it, you can perform a "weak point strike" that outright kills most minibosses and deals significant damage to larger ones. For the really extreme bosses, beating them amounts to going through this process around 3 to 5 times. So to summarize, while the moment-to-moment gameplay is incredibly simple, there's a lot to be unpacked if you rotate between characters. 

Once you complete story levels or side levels, you're rewarded with rupees, experience points, new weapons for certain characters, and the kinds of crafting materials you could find in Breath of the Wild. The experience points should be self explanatory, and the rupees can be spent on additional materials, weapon fusions, and level-ups for characters when you want to save a bit of time. What I really want to talk about, though, is the new weapons you get and the crafting materials. This is where I'm going to explain why I say Age of Calamity is ultimately better than its parent game. See, when you get new weapons, most of the time you'll be using them as a means of improving your favorite weapon for each character. By fusing weapons into your weapon of choice, you increase the damage your weapon does and potentially give it extra perks. You will not be switching to these new weapons when your current weapon breaks, because your weapons don't break in Age of Calamity. This is the first reason that it's the better of the two games: you don't have to deal with the stupid weapon durability crap. Then there's the crafting materials. You'll use these to unlock bonus combos for characters, give characters extra hearts, and cook meals that provide benefits before going into a level. You will not be using them to make things to help you survive harsh weather, because there is no harsh weather in Age of Calamity. This is the second reason that it's the better of the two games: you don't have to deal with the stupid survival elements. The third reason it's the better of the two games can't organically be included into what I've been talking about thus far, so bear with this awkward transition for a moment. You will not be dying in the middle of a river, falling from a cliff, falling from the sky, or slipping down a cliff because it started to rain due to losing all your stamina, because you don't have a stamina meter in Age of Calamity. This is the third reason it's the better of the two games: you don't have to deal with the stupid stamina management system. Now, when I say that Age of Calamity is better, I only half mean that. It does lose something by not being the wonderful open world found in Breath of the Wild. But here's the thing: throughout my time with Age of Calamity, I kept thinking, "boy, I want to go back and play Breath of the Wild again after I'm done with this." Without fail, every time this thought entered my head, I would look at Age of Calamity, remember that if I went back to the parent game I'd have to deal with the stupid weapon durability, the stupid survival elements, and the stupid stamina management system, and no longer want to go back. While Breath of the Wild is certainly the more expansive and innovative of the two titles, Age of Calamity simply has one up on it because it isn't a total pain in the ass to play. The purpose of this review is to talk about how good Age of Calamity is, not to dump all over BOTW (a game that I loved, by the way), but I just think it's a massive positive that so much hassle has been taken out and repurposed in such great ways. 

But in spite of everything I've been saying, Age of Calamity isn't perfect, and given that that's how I chose to open up the technical paragraph we've now arrived at, that should tell you a lot. There aren't a lot of technical issues, but the ones this game has are pretty darn prevalent. For starters, the framerate. I played this game in both docked and handheld mode, and while the framerate was significantly worse while docked, it was still bad in handheld. There are always hundreds upon hundreds of individual enemies on screen, but when there are hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds (which is, say, 45% of the time?), the framerate decides to drop a bit. The same can be said when there's more than one miniboss in the vicinity alongside hundreds of enemies. A game with this much stuff going on every second needed to be optimized for the on-screen chaos, but it simply wasn't. Far worse than the framerate, though, is the camera. When fighting bosses or minibosses, typically you'll need to lock on to them to ensure all your attacks hit (this is optional, but you will miss occasionally if you don't do it). When you lock on, you'd better hope that you don't get backed into a corner or into a wall, because if you do, the camera will kind of float out in front of you, ensuring you can't really see much, and it won't correct itself to show your character again until you're well out of the way of whatever wall or corner you got backed into. When I say wall or corner here, I want to specify that I mean the boundaries of the level map. The vast majority of this game's levels take place outdoors, so a "wall" or "corner" usually means "pile of rocks" or "slight cliff edge." In those levels, this issue is bound to happen at least once, but that's preferable to the levels that take place indoors (where a wall is a wall and a corner is a corner). In such levels, every time you face off against a boss, you're going to be battling with the camera. So that's two technical issues, not exactly the biggest bug list in the world, but on their own they occur frequently enough to really screw things up, and on the occasions in which they both occur at the same time, the whole game experience kind of falls apart until it gets a grip. 

So there you have it, folks. A couple of technical issues are all that stand between Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and perfection. Now, it could always be better, don't get me wrong. They could've put together a gripping story and much more variety in mission objectives. But when a game is this good just as it is, it ought to be judged on what it does, not on what it doesn't have. Whether you're picking up the game for a couple minutes or whether you're settling in for a couple hours, Age of Calamity is fun enough to satisfy in its simplicity!

Let us review:

Technical issues - 0.6

The final score for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is...

9.4/10 - Exceptional

Excellent work, Omega Force, excellent work