Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Switch)
Nov. 7th, 2022 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA tiny robot returns from the doomed future to a Hyrule right of the cusp to calamity. Will the small changes to the timeline it makes be enough to prevent Calamity Ganon from creating the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild? You’ll have to smash thousands of monsters in order to find out!
This carries the art style, characters and weapons/items from Breath of the Wild, but the play style is still a Warriors game. You get a lot of variety in special abilities (everyone gets variants of bombs, freeze, time stop, etc. and also elemental wands in addition to their character-specific special abilities), but mostly you just press the attack button a lot. The real advantage of the special abilities is using them to expose large enemies’ weak-point gauges so you can do a weak-point smash. Each character has a special ability and some of them are really distinct (Revali can fly!) but that also means that you’re more likely to find a favorite character and stick to them, because it feels like there are more “technical” characters than the first game or more Warriors games.
The map screen reminds me of the Adventure mode in the first Hyrule Warriors game; you have a big map and you unlock more stages and quests in it as you advance the plot and finish others. (More than half the “quests” on the map involve turning in vendortrash to unlock character boosts and aren’t actual stages. But that’s not so bad, because zipping around clearing a dozen newly-unlocked quests makes you feel accomplished.) There are also stores that sell some of the necessary vendortrash and the usual upgrade shops that let you merge and enhance weapons and upgrade the levels of characters who you haven’t been using.
A big change from other games are the stages done while piloting the four Divine Beasts, building-sized mechs that occasionally have stage requirements like “beat 10,000 enemies” because they can cause massive devastation with their attacks. And the four of them handle differently enough that the stages only feel somewhat repetitive.
Overall: We only played 30-someodd hours of this (and went through several dry spells), compared to the insane 70+ hours of the first game. I suspect that’s a combination of fewer family game nights this year and ARR getting into Breath of the Wild on his own and getting his Zelda fix from that. One could argue that this has a someone more “serious” plot, but the mechanics are similar enough that I wouldn’t put one game above the other; and I appreciated the different modes and more straightforward approach to collectables and upgrades that the first game had more.
This carries the art style, characters and weapons/items from Breath of the Wild, but the play style is still a Warriors game. You get a lot of variety in special abilities (everyone gets variants of bombs, freeze, time stop, etc. and also elemental wands in addition to their character-specific special abilities), but mostly you just press the attack button a lot. The real advantage of the special abilities is using them to expose large enemies’ weak-point gauges so you can do a weak-point smash. Each character has a special ability and some of them are really distinct (Revali can fly!) but that also means that you’re more likely to find a favorite character and stick to them, because it feels like there are more “technical” characters than the first game or more Warriors games.
The map screen reminds me of the Adventure mode in the first Hyrule Warriors game; you have a big map and you unlock more stages and quests in it as you advance the plot and finish others. (More than half the “quests” on the map involve turning in vendortrash to unlock character boosts and aren’t actual stages. But that’s not so bad, because zipping around clearing a dozen newly-unlocked quests makes you feel accomplished.) There are also stores that sell some of the necessary vendortrash and the usual upgrade shops that let you merge and enhance weapons and upgrade the levels of characters who you haven’t been using.
A big change from other games are the stages done while piloting the four Divine Beasts, building-sized mechs that occasionally have stage requirements like “beat 10,000 enemies” because they can cause massive devastation with their attacks. And the four of them handle differently enough that the stages only feel somewhat repetitive.
Overall: We only played 30-someodd hours of this (and went through several dry spells), compared to the insane 70+ hours of the first game. I suspect that’s a combination of fewer family game nights this year and ARR getting into Breath of the Wild on his own and getting his Zelda fix from that. One could argue that this has a someone more “serious” plot, but the mechanics are similar enough that I wouldn’t put one game above the other; and I appreciated the different modes and more straightforward approach to collectables and upgrades that the first game had more.
