You start out as Link, and over time collect more playable fighters, including Zelda, Impa, Daruk, Revali, Mipha, and Urbosa, all rendered with loving fidelity to the original game.
The game opens 100 years before the events in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. From that medley of influences, it plucks out the “canon fodder” and “fantasy” and adds in just a whiff of “thinky,” making for a fun but thin Zelda spin-off. The former is a decades-old franchise about mowing down canon-fodder armies of assailants the latter, a dazzling 2017 fantasy role-playing game with thinky puzzles and boundless opportunities to explore. Out November 20, the hack-and-slash crossover melts Dynasty Warriors’ horde-mashing into Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s world, characters, and aesthetic. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is an uneasy mix of smart and stupid. But since the alley’s janked up, there isn’t much satisfaction to be had by trying. Given enough time, either way, you can knock all the pins down eventually. No, it’s the way it feels: You might line up the kids’ ramp and let gravity do the work for you, or you might hook a well-greased bowling ball with calculated wrist torque. Not just in the way Princess Zelda rolls her magic bomb into a horde of Bokoblins, sending them flying like pins, or in the way Daruk curls into himself and barrels into a huddled cluster of Lizalfos. So much about Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is like bowling in a run-down alley.