Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Review - The Final Verdict
527It’s really hard for me to parse my feelings for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. It plays really well, barring issues with late game repetition, and it manages to add a lot of weight and context to the smaller moments across Hyrule on the eve of a great calamity. It looks, sounds, and feels exactly right, and at its best, it is exactly what we were promised, which is a game full of fanservice serving to expand on the story of the Great Calamity.
And yet, almost everything it does well comes with a caveat – it looks great, but suffers from severe slowdown, it plays well, but suffers from repetition later on in the game, it has some excellent contextualization, but it bungles its larger story to a surprising degree.
I never expected Age of Calamity to be the kind of home run that mainline Zelda releases are, but I did expect more from it than it turned out to be. As it is, it’s still a good game, chock full of content, and with a lot to appeal to those who were enamored by Breath of the Wild’s reimagining of Nintendo’s decades old prestige franchise – it just could have been so much more.