This is a spoiler-free review of Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity

Prequels are a double-edged sword when it comes to storytelling. On one hand, writers are able to explore characters that may have only briefly appeared or were simply mentioned in the original work. Elaborating on their relationships and overall personality to help audience members come to understand them better. On the other hand, most viewers will already have an idea of where the story will go and may make the tragedies of our protagonist hit less hard due to viewers knowing the outcome of their quest.

Take Zack Fair from Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII as an example. While not entirely diminished, players understood that Zack wasn’t going to be walking away from the game’s story alive. This led to an anticipation of his death which could cause the cinematic to lose some of its emotional effectiveness. The game we will be discussing today is in a very similar situation with its own unique legend.

Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity is a hack and slash action game developed by Koei Tecmo and published by Nintendo. The title acts as a prequel to The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild as it follows the war against Calamity Ganon that took place a hundred years before the story. Taking control of a wide variety of characters, players will fight to stop the calamity from destroying Hyrule.

Storming the Field

The combat in Age of Calamity is some of the most satisfying and layered in the genre. The signature light and heavy attack combos make a return with different inputs yielding different results. Each character receives a variety of combos that are quite enjoyable to experiment with and discover which attacks work best for each situation. The controls are very smooth with a good sense of weight to each character. Every hit, dodge, flip or run is responsive and creates an environment where players feel completely confident in their abilities to overcome the challenges, they’ll face.

Weapon combat isn’t the only way players will be able to combat enemies as the use of magic rods and the sheikah slate runes will also give players an edge in combat. Every boss enemy has an armor meter that must be depleted first before players can deal full damage to them. However, through the use of these runes or magic rods, players can deplete the armor more quickly. Using the fire rod on an ice Moblin or casting stasis on a spinning guardian are just some of the methods players can make use of these extra mechanics to enhance combat.

This all comes together to create a unique rhythm in fights, where Age of Calamity test players split-second decision making in order to best handle each encounter. Do you send your unit to another area of the map or keep them with you as back up? Should you use your runes now or wait for when the shaikah slate will be more effective? These are the decisions players will need to make in order to ensure success on a mission. The mechanics in Age of Calamity complement each other extremely well, allowing for quick decision-making in any situation.

Link fighting Bokoblins

Crafting Your Army

One of the most important aspects for a hack and slash title to succeed is the variety in its combat. Age of Calamity features a large roster of characters with unique move sets and mechanics to give each fighter their own identity. Revali, the Rito champion, is a bird with the obvious ability to fly. This becomes his central mechanic as players are able to switch between his two different tool kits to make the best use out of his unique abilities. Every character has a personal ability that completely changes how you’ll choose to tackle encounters with them. This plays to one of Age of Calamity’s biggest strengths.

One of the most interesting mechanics from Breath of the Wild brought over to Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity is the multi-weapon system and cooking. Each mission completed rewards the player with weapons or food items that can be used to prepare meals with different effects or to craft weapons with complementary abilities. While not as deep a system as seen in Breath of the Wild, this incentivizes replaying missions to earn better rewards and craft the perfect weapon for your play style. 

All these aspects showcase Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity’s greatest strength; its variety. There are a surprising number of ways to defeat enemies, collect resources, or simply level up your characters that any player can up Age of Calamity and enjoy it at a pace that works for them. 

Urbosa using the rune Stasis

Commanding the Beast

The story mode for Age of Calamity will take place over several missions across the land of Hyrule. These missions are further split into three types; foot field battles, side quest, and divine beast missions. The on-foot side quest works very well as it further permits experimentation and allows the player to better their skills and level up characters they may not use as much in the story. It’s a rather smart feature to include both a training mission for each character that can be included to test out their abilities. 

The divine beasts are, however, not nearly as polished as the rest of the game. Players will take control of one of the four beasts to travel across a linear path, guard a defense point, or simply destroy a large number of monsters. These are the least engaging missions in the game. In stark contrast to the playable characters on foot, the divine beast is clunky to control with wide turns and imprecise movements. Aiming with this beast is near impossible with the gyro aim on as unless you are playing this title in handheld mode, the reticle for shooting at monsters simply doesn’t center. 

Thankfully, motion controls for aiming can be turned off but that doesn’t solve the biggest problem with the divine beast. In a Warriors-style game, most of the time the enjoyment comes from quickly slashing through an army of weak enemies with the occasional boss to test players’ reaction skills. However, the divine beast goes against that design philosophy completely. Slow movement and shoot that doesn’t require any engagement from the player with no difference between monster types with all enemies going down in five or fewer shots. Any of the satisfaction of being a one-person army mowing down a wave of inferiors is directly lessened when playing as a creation designed to do that same thing but, at a far slower pace.

The Divine Beast Vah Ruta

The Day Hyrule was Brought to its Knees

The story of Age of Calamity is an emotional one with various twists and turns as players discover what happened during the war with Calamity Ganon. The most entertaining aspect of the story here is the character interactions one gets to experience. Since all four champions were dead long before Breath of the Wild takes place, fans were left without a chance to see relationships fleshed out. Age of Calamity delivers on this in spades with the introduction of each champion and how they came to join Link and Zelda.

Seeing how Link first came to have a rivalry with Revali or Urbosa giving life advice to Zelda about her slow progress on her sealing abilities are just some of the exceptionally memorable cinematics made all the better by the strong vocal performances. The entire plot centers around the mystery of this new mini guardian that has arrived in the time before the calamity. 

The story around this mini guardian has to be the most heartwarming in the entire game, learning of its relationship to Zelda and reason for coming back to the past serve as some of the most captivating parts of the plot. Another thing this gameplay helps the plot capture fairly well is the feeling of fighting in a large-scale war. Looking across the field and taking in the armies of enemies that one will need to fight their way through in order to survive today’s battle feels quite real due to how well the genre compliments the story the game is telling.

Link and the four champions

Presentation

Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity looks absolutely gorgeous with incredible light and particle effects on all the characters’ attacks. Every shockwave from Link’s sword swings or water geyser from Mipha’s trident is just as beautiful as it is satisfying. The environments are quite detailed with sprawling castles and large forests with many twists and turns in the locations of these grant battles.

However, we now need to get into one of Age of Calamity’s biggest issues, being its frame rate. Now while most games in the Warriors genre suffer from minor to mild frame rate drops, this being the nature of a title with such a large volume of models on screen at a time. However, in every map during combat, performing a special move or simply moving around; there are noticeable frame drops which while affecting gameplay too heavily in single player, is an issue in two-player mode. 

Co-op mode in Age of Calamity is border-line unplayable as the amount of frame freeze or frame stutter leads to missions being an absolute chore to experience. The game clearly needed a little longer iron out these performance-related issues to fully allow players to experience every aspect of this title without issue.

Link fighting back an opponent

Overall, Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity is a fantastic and satisfying hack and slash with plenty of replay value, variety in its roster, and a beautiful story to tie it all together. Sadly, the title doesn’t quite stick the landing when discussing how well the game was optimized for the genre.

Well, that is all for this review, thank you for reading and until next time… 

If you’re interested in more reviews, check out my review of Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory