My Early Thoughts On… Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

I never played Breath of the Wild, due to various colour blindness issues I have written about before, and let me tell you that missing a Zelda entry because of something as easily customisable as text colours was a real bummer. So imagine my joy when I found out I could experience the world of that game in the style of one of my favourite genres. So as I enjoy some time off work, working through new release movies and games, here are my early thoughts on… Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.

• This is a musou game. Even if you’re the biggest Zelda fan, if you don’t like this style of game (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Warriors Orochi and so on) then you will not enjoy this. Conversely, even if you are not a big Zelda fan, but you do enjoy this style, you’ll get something out of it.

• All of the characters feel important. I’ve unlocked a small handful now and each have unique attacks and combos and abilities for any situation. Obviously Link is the most important, but various others are more useful in particular scenarios, and overall it’s a good cast. I look forward to unlocking more.

• Unsurprisingly, the game runs far better when docked. The framerate is not as bad as I expected, considering even the PS4 and XB1 struggle with musou games. Frankly, I was preparing for the worst. There is the occasional struggle (Urbosa’s ultimate turns the game into a beautiful PowerPoint presentation), but so far, I am pleasantly surprised. While playing handheld is clearly worse off, even that is not a deal breaker.

• I have a lot of colour issues. Maybe it’s just a Nintendo thing, but whatever shade of red they use for the “important words” in character dialogue or scenario instructions is just impossible for me to read. It’s the reason I wasn’t able to play Breath of the Wild, and thankfully the gameplay here is not so conducive to tactics and on-screen hints.

Basically, so far so good. I knew what I was getting into when combining one of my favourite series with one of my favourite genres, and I can’t think of many ways this could go wrong from here.