Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is objectively terrible

warning, if you're thinking about buying Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity I strongly urge you to play the demo first.

I got about half way through the demo for the game and I have to say, this game is objectively terrible. The main things that make a Zelda game what it is just...don't exist...in any form what so ever. Among the things that don't exist are:

1. Open world exploration
2. Dungeons or shrines (as in the BOTW incarnation)
3. Accumulation of...anything really. Past games had you collecting triforce pieces, spirit orbs or whatever. This one is...nothing. Your main goal is to run around and kill stuff.
4. Any lore what so ever having to do with Zelda.

Let me get to an explanation of the game mechanics itself and you'll see what I'm talking about.

The "main area" of the game is...well...the world map. Yeah, you read that right. You are presented with the world map and get to choose between "Side quests" and "missions".

A "Side quest" is nothing more than answering the question "Do you have these materials?" and if so then boom. You get an upgrade such as an extra heart, or attack bonus/stronger weapon, defense or whatever. You literally don't do anything with a side quest except select "supply materials" and you get a dialog box telling you your character has been "leveled up"

A "mission" is, well...think Call of Duty except sword and sorcery. You get to select between all the major characters from the BOTW series but they are so ridiculously overpowered that Link taking on 25-30 bobokins is just...a cake walk. Seriously. You have to probably be confronted with over 100 enemies to even break a sweat, and even then the most efficient way to resolve it is to just button mash. All those "cool moves" you see in the demos? Button mashing. I think the only real challenge I faced was taking down a guardian which was still pretty easy.

Your "mission" is given to you with some sort of objective such as "escort missions" (i.e. make sure Zelda doesn't die), "hack & slash" (i.e. capture an outpost), or something similar. You have small contingent of commandos team of heroes to select from on your mission that you leveled up via the "side missions" that you can swap between, give orders too (kind of like in COD when you can issue orders to NPC team members) to accomplish the objective.

All in all, it is absolutely nothing at all like any Zelda game on the market and I mean that in a very bad way. It's like if Call Of Duty suddenly decided their next release was going to be an RPG. I honestly don't know what the hell Nintendo was thinking but this game is just an embarrassment to the franchise. I pre-ordered it before playing the demo and just cancelled the pre-order and got my money back. It's just...terrible. I can't imagine whose idea it was to take the franchise in this direction but they should be outright fired. What a horrible terrible sequel. It carries the name, but has absolutely nothing at all in common with the previous title except borrowing the characters and duping the fan base into playing a hack-n-slash game that's focused on leveling up ridiculously overpowered characters. The only thing it's missing is loot boxes. Absolutely every single aspect of what draws fans to Zelda games was not just thrown out but they took a hot steaming dump on it. I've legitimately played web based flash games better than this one.

If you were expecting something similar to BOTW, this is not it. Not in any way, shape or form. Keep waiting my friends because you're not getting it with this game. Maybe some 3rd party software developer can make a spin off game that's like it similar to how Wargroove is essentially Advance Wars but 3rd party.

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* This article was originally published here